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Diving into The Division: Breaking down Pre-release hype

by | Mar 8, 2016 | Analysis, Social Media, Video Games

Today saw the release of the latest Tom Clancy game for PS4, Xbox, and Microsoft Windows—The Division. And while the game’s release has already caused a multitude of problems for creator UbiSoft, we’ve put our media monitoring and analysis software to work measuring the pre-release hype on social media leading up to the game’s release.

We analyzed all Twitter content using the hashtag #TheDivision from March 5 to 12:00amET on March 7 just before the game’s release today, in order to provide some perspective on the Twittersphere.
division twitter charts

Note: Handles directly associated with the game such as @Xbox and @UbiSoft were omitted from the above charts.

GameSpot’s Twitter handle @gamespot was the top influencer by followers at 1,876,095, and almost cracked the top five by retweets with 431. It acknowledged delay in providing a review in its Twitter feed — Ubisoft purposefully withheld the game’s release to reviewers until the release date  — but reaffirmed its commitment to “marathon the game” once it was released at midnight.

Most of the top five influencers by retweets, such as @PoufyGB and @GoofballWebb, held contests for either copies of The Division or gaming packages that required either follows or retweets:

However, amongst the top five influencers (by retweets) that did not include contests or giveaways, top influencers included @Arekkz (independent gaming channel) and @DivisionBlog (Games Intel’s blog for the game):

Microsoft certainly did its part in promoting the game as several of the top influencers, including @gamespot and @TPAIN, tweeted about an invitation-only midnight release party for The Division in New York City (the game’s main setting):

Other top influencers focused on the midnight release aspect, with the word “midnight” getting more than 1k mentions alone:


So while the reviews might not be out yet for this latest title from UbiSoft, hype for the game is especially high today.

Donald Den

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