Sony wins the war of E3 media coverage

New research from ICO Partners has indicated that Sony and the PS4 were clear winners in the war for column inches during the all-important week of E3.

In a post on the consultancy's blog, Thomas Bidaux breaks down the various angles of media coverage for the games and platforms during the LA show. The results are interesting and, at times, very stark - although Bidaux admits that his methods aren't watertight.

"The tool I am using is far from perfect," Bidaux writes. "It gets hits on false-positives, some terms are impossible to get hits on and it is somewhat dependent on how clever I am when I create the monitoring criteria for a specific game if the name is quite generic. The tool is also dependent on the alerts I have entered. There are some prominent games that can be absent, I try to add them as I go but I know I always miss some. As I am expanding that list now, do not take the stats as an 'end all' proof that X game is totally ignored by the media."

Nonetheless, some of the coverage discrepancies are startling, as you'll see above. Sony's PS4, for example, gets 16,135 articles during E3 week, according to Bidaux's calculations, whilst the Xbox One clocks up just 11,433. Nintendo as a whole scored 7,759 pieces, with 6,271 directly relating to Wii or Wii U.

In terms of individual games, there are familiar and fairly predictable names at the high-end of the exposure chart, although, as Bidaux mentions, AC: Unity may happily have lost some its less favourable headlines. As you can see from that graph, Nintendo's titles are a big draw individually, even though their host platforms might not see the same benefits. Both of the highest scoring games during the platform holder conferences were multiplatform, in the shape of Unity and Far Cry, which another testament to the continual improvement and popularity of Ubisoft's offerings, but could also be a clue as to the diminishing relevance of platform exclusive AAA.