Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare generates 4 times more buzz than last year's Ghosts

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the new futuristic combat title from Activision Blizzard, has generated four times more buzz on social media than last year’s Call of Duty: Ghosts. That bodes well, as Activision is hoping to generate another hit to add to the $10 billion video game franchise, according to global social media agency We Are Social.

Some of the popularity may be due to rising use of social media. But Advanced Warfare (check out our review here) has twice as much social buzz as Electronic Arts’ Titanfall, a big shooter hit from earlier this year. It has 3.5 times more buzz than EA’s FIFA 15, and four times as much as Activision’s Destiny.

The prelaunch sentiment was 77 percent positive for Advanced Warfare, compared to 60 percent for Ghosts. That means that when people talk about Advanced Warfare on Twitter (for example), they are speaking positively about the game. That also suggests that Advanced Warfare will outsell Ghosts, but analysts at market research firm Cowen & Co. are worried that Call of Duty has peaked because their preorder data, dubbed the “Ordometer,” suggests low preorders compared to last year.

Microsoft’s Xbox was mentioned in association with Call of Duty more than Sony’s PlayStation. The game is available since yesterday on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. Worldwide conversations indicated a strong preference for the Xbox platform (the official Call of Duty partner) dominating the conversations with a 59 percent of share of voice, followed by PlayStation (33 percent) and PC (7 percent). This is in contrast to Ghosts, where PlayStation mentions were slightly higher compared to its major rival Xbox, with 46 percent and 43 percent share of voice respectively.

We Are Social found that Advanced Warfare generated 187,127 mentions across Twitter, blogs and forums (global, English language) in just one day before its Nov. 2 launch. That compared to 45,224 mentions for the 2013 edition of Ghosts in the same time frame.

The survey also found that when comparing Advanced Warfare to other top game releases in 2014, it has more than double the prerelease buzz of its nearest competitor, Titanfall (90,761 global mentions), 3.5 times more than FIFA 15 (53,547), and over four times as many mentions as Destiny (43,001).

While the majority of prerelease conversations around the Advanced Warfare launch were positive,14 percent of mentions were negative, mainly generated from players who feared disappointment of this game after Ghosts failed to impress them.

Overall, 3 percent of interested players mentioned their social life was over, since they would be playing in the following weeks. Some said they would take a day off from work.

Gamers talked about maps the most, with the “Riot” prison map standing out with 65 percent of mentions.