Using unsupervised AI to analyze tweets from the top Battle Royale games
Getting insights on what gamers are talking about
Disclaimer: This article is based on intents discovered by an unsupervised algorithm. There was no human supervision that biased the results. However, the takeaways may be biased for the sake of sharing a practical (and fun) view.
As Marc Andressen and Bobby Kotick -CEO of Activision Blizzard- recently discussed in the a16z podcast, gaming is becoming mainstream. Since the PUBG launch in 2017, the Battle Royale genre has been growing at a lighting speed. It was followed by the record-breaking Fortnite Battle Royale launch, hitting 10 million downloads in their first two weeks. When no one was expecting it to happen again, Apex Legends launched in 2019 to crush the Fortnite mark with 25 million downloads in its first week. The genre war itself seems to be a Battle Royale game.
We decided to take one week of conversation from Twitter to analyze what people was talking about. What do they like about the new Apex Legends game? What should Fortnite do to go back to the top? Is PUBG still relevant on consoles?. These are some of the questions we had before uploading the dataset to our unsupervised AI platform.
The following insights contain screenshots of the intent clusters discovered, as well as specific examples of documents that were automatically tagged. The top left tag from the documents are manually-created tags that helped organize the findings across the conversation.
Apex Legends
Insight 1: The biggest concern is centered around bugs and crashes
The development team behind is already focusing their communication on that topic, as they shared a recent update. In the first weeks they hit 25M players and there is a lot of noise around the issues.
Insight 2: Users are requesting for the Solo & Duo modes
The game launched only with three-players squad mode. People is actively requesting a Solo and Duo modes, as they are tired of playing “with randoms”. That usually means they play with a teammate, but the third slot is filled up with another player they don’t know. It also happens that solo players are forced to people with others in the same team. It’s worth noting that PUBG and Fortnite have these modes already available.
Fortnite
Insight 1: Complains that the shop items didn’t change
The game changes the items shop in a period manner, but that time it didn’t happen. People was confused about it and some of them got the opportunity to compare it with the recent Apex Legends success.
Insight 2: The community-requested soccer skins are back
As they recently announced on twitter, they are adding back some skins that people were requesting:
The community is also requesting to bring back the double pump (using two shotguns):
PUBG
Insight 1: There is a lot of engagement around PUBG mobile
The biggest cluster in the PUBG conversation is about PUBG Mobile, probably because they recently launched a Zombie Mode update for their mobile game.
Insight 2: Apex Legends seems to be compared more with PUBG than with Fortnite
Fortnite can be classified more like a casual game than PUBG, as we can see with their last-year launch of their creative mode. This may be the reason why there is a stronger pattern of PUBG users moving to Apex Legends, given that Apex shares more similarities with PUBG than with Fortnite.
How we did this
The first step was getting the data we wanted to analyze. We downloaded 20k tweets for each game using the Twitter API and the following query:
fortnitegame OR PlayApex OR pubgOnce we had the dataset ready, we created a project in Lang.ai. Creating the project was as simple as uploading the dataset file and then waiting for the intent induction process to finish. In less than an hour, the results were ready to be reviewed.
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