The Console War: An Online Perspective

Abstract – The front runners of the generation’s consoles are the following: Playstation 4 from Sony,
Xbox One from Microsoft and the Nintendo Switch from Nintendo. This short study aims to validate
the current market share of the console race including the new member the Google Stadia and
compare how polarizing their online functionality has been from the time of its launch. This is done
through the collection of public tweets collected from Twitter.

I. Introduction
Gaming has peaked its mainstream popularity in the most recent of years. This current
generation of consoles has proven to be one of the most popular even when compared to
the previous years, and this piqued the question that led to this discussion of the current
console wars: “Have the different consoles provide sufficient value for their actual price
specifically through the online functionality?” The Nintendo Switch has recently started to
monetize their online subscription – a model that was started by Xbox360 a generation ago.
This study aims to compare how well received these subscriptions were through seeing how
vocal their communities has been in terms of online. The other side of this is to compare the
relative percentage of the tweets actually made and the available tweets to validate on how
much the online functionality has been talked about with respect to the actual discussion of
the console as a whole. An analysis of the popularity of the consoles on twitter will be
confirmed with the consoles current market shares, as well as an analysis of how vocal the
communities were regarding online play.

II. Methodology
A Python virtual environment was set up in the researcher’s set-up – and this included the
installation of relevant libraries (tweepy, pandas, matplotlib). Using Adil Moujahid’s tutorial,
the code was tested on the note editor, Sublime Text 3. The .py file was then run in the
virtual environment. The keywords selected that was used to mine the tweets were [‘ps4’,
‘xbox one’, ‘nintendo switch’, ‘stadia’, ‘xbone’, ‘nsw’]. These are all popular conventions of
each respective console that is almost always used in gaming forums such as GamesRadar,
Kotaku and the like. This is mined and saved into a .txt file until it reached around 100
megabytes. All the relevant data was used in the pandas data frame and was plot into
respective bar lines using matplotlib. A filter, with the keywords [‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘online’] was
then used to sift through the tweets in order to find tweets regarding the reception of the
console’s online functionality in the most layman of terms which was also plotted using
matplotlib. Finally, a statistical test was used to see if the reception of the items were
statistically significant.
III. Results

The language of all the collected tweets are as follows:

The countries of the tweets (if it can be determined) that were mine are as follows, but the
ones that cannot be determined is denoted by the bar that is labelled in boxes below:
This was the distribution of the how much the keywords or console named was mention
below:

And this table follows the actual monthly market trend of the game consoles on normal
times which is seen below (1).

Using a randomly selected data point in the monthly market share trend, a chi-square test
was conducted to see if the data-set is statistically relevant. However, the google stadia
tweets cannot be accounted for since it is a fairly new console and as such the 253 tweets is
subtracted from the total sample. The p-value of the chi square is 0.7269 which is greater
than .05 which shows that the data set is not representative of the actual market share since
the PS4 got 7196 tweets, while the Nintendo Switch got 3451, and the Xbox One got 998
tweets with 62%, 30%, and 8% of the tweets respectively. However, the visualization should
be sufficient to show who is clearly dominating the console war.
 The tweets regarding online reception is as follows:

The PS4 got 195 tweets, the Xbox One got 11 tweets, the Nintendo Switch got 966 tweets
while the stadia only got 5 tweets. This may come from the fact that the first two have
launched way earlier and have improved upon its online, and this might explain why there is
not much discourse regarding the topic anymore. However, the switch garnering around
74% of the tweets is concerning meaning that it is the most problematic of the three.
Theoretically, the first three should have similar number of tweets to show equal reception
(again stadia is negligible for being fairly new).

IV. Conclusion
1. The Sony Playstation 4 is the currently leading the console race with the highest market
share, but also it is the most discussed console on the twitter platform.
2. There is a correlation between market share and the number of tweets made as more
owners are more likely to talk about their consoles, but an additional feature such as
online sharing can also empower users to be more active in the platform.
3. Nintendo should has had arguably the most polarizing internet subscription-based
service ever since they have started to charge their users for internet.
4. Google Stadia at the time of writing this paper has no general public opinion and has
had generally no complaints of its online functionality since it is a new console (1 day
old).
V. References
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/440108/switch-vs-ps4-vs-xbox-one-global-lifetime-
salesjuly-2019/

http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2014/07/twitter-analytics/

https://packaging.python.org/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtual-environments/