It’s been 8 years since Microsoft released their Xbox 360 console to the world. Technology, games and even gamers have changed a lot in those years. That’s why on Tuesday the company unveiled their next generation gaming console, the Xbox One to the world. But this is not just a mere gaming console. The latest edition of Xbox looks to be your all-in-one entertainment console.
Microsoft gave the world their first peak at the new Xbox One console at a large event earlier this week and the gaming community went nuts talking about it through social channels. While the company promised more details about the Xbox One at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (commonly known as E3) next month, they still gave people enough information to get them all excited this week.
So what about the new Xbox One are people talking about? I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, to see.
It’s been less than two full days since that Xbox One was revealed to the world, but it’s already been mentioned in over 2 million social media conversations. I found “Xbox One” or “#XboxReveal”, the hashtag people were using for the event, mentioned in 18,216 blog posts, 24,791 online news articles, 65,869 forum postings and 1,914,33 tweets in this short time.
On top of those mentions across social media, I also found that a whopping 106,259 videos have also hit the web and have been tagged to have something to do with the Xbox One in that same amount of time.
Gamers all around the world watched the event and immediately took to social channels to talk about what they saw and what they thought of the new console. A look at the country distribution across all social channels shows that there’s a gamer in almost every corner of the world. The most talk about the Xbox One was coming out of the United States (38.7%), but we also saw people talking about it in the United Kingdom (12.7%), Germany (4.9%), Canada (3.4%), France (3.2%) and many more places.
The heat map below shows us where people were tweeting about the new Xbox from, and we can see that no corner of the world doesn’t have at least a few gamers that were eager to talk about this next generation console.
While people around the world were talking, there was a bit of gender divide between who was actually talking about the Xbox One. There’s no question that video games were once seen as a “boy thing”, but there has been a significant rise in the amount of women that love to play video games. However, when I looked into who was talking through social media about the new Xbox it was men that dominated the conversation. Males accounted for 89% of the Xbox One conversations while women only made up the other 11%.
So what did people have to say upon getting a first look at the Xbox One? The first thing I noticed was all the comparisons to it’s predecessor, the “Xbox” “360″. Of course, people also immediately took to also comparing the new console to it’s rival that was also revealed earlier this year, the “PS4″. As well, you can never have a conversation about a new gaming console without talking about the “games” that you’ll be able to play on it. The word “game” also came up a lot as people were talking about the portability of games between consoles, which it looks like Xbox is trying to stop (as in making it harder for people to buy used games). Finally, there is going to be a lot of integration on this new console with Xbox’s “Kinect” wich is a motion and voice capture device that allows people to interact with games and other console operations without the use of a controller.
While the portability of games between consoles may have had some people up in arms, the general overall sense of sentiment around the Xbox One’s reveal seems to be mostly positive. 48% of all conversations I found were positive, while only 12% were negative. This gives the conversations about the Xbox One an overall favourable rating of 88%.
Will the Xbox One stay so favourable? We’ll have to wait until later in the year when the console becomes available to purchase (probably just in time for the holidays) to find out what people really think about it.
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