In the world of social media, one game machine reigns supreme—and its identity will probably surprise even the most dialed-in joypad jockey.
Beginning with Atari vs. Mattel vs. Coleco, the last few decades have been rife with all-out wars between game-console makers. The end result of this tight business competition has been an incredibly rapid advancement of hardware capabilities—and intense peer pressure.
More than ever, there’s plenty of prideful passion and trash talking between console owners on message boards, in Facebook and Twitter threads, and at game conventions.
Just how proud are they? Well, the Movoto Real Estate Blog took data culled from Facebook and put together a national map of gamers’ preferences based on the “Likes” of the current crop of consoles: the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo’s Wii U. Check it out for yourself…
Despite the fact that Sony has sold more PS4s than Microsoft has sold Xbox Ones, MS seems to be winning on the social front, with 22 states racking up a larger fan count in the Xbox One’s favor, compared to the PS4’s 19. (Nine states couldn’t generate a majority in either’s favor—perhaps a result of Facebook’s methodology of rounding-off the audience estimates.)
What’s really interesting is that Xbox One, with a few exceptions, seems more popular on each of the coasts, while PS4 has created a strong following in the heartland. It’s clear Xbox One has a solid fan base in bigger states, such as California, New York, and Texas.
In other words, if this was a presidential election, Wolf Blitzer would probably be calling for Sony to concede, but thankfully that’s not how a good ol’ ‘Merkin console war goes.
Oh, and unfortunately for Nintendo, Wii U couldn’t put any states in its win column, logging less than half of either of its rivals’ fan counts in nearly every state. Again, if this was a presidential election, it’d be the Libertarian or Green Party candidate. (Cue the losing horns from “The Price is Right”.)
While we were crunching numbers, we threw data from the U.S. Census’ American Community Survey for 2008-2012 into the blender to compare Facebook fans to state populations.
Nevada has the No. 1 fan base of any state, hitting 1.94 percent with approximately 54,000 Likes out of its nearly 2.8 million residents. Perhaps a large number of Silver State residents—no doubt after dropping money at the local casino, feasting on a big buffet, and catching a show—spend their spare time on Facebook carousing the game pages. Hey, we’re not judging.
Meanwhile, Mississippi isn’t as Xbox One-centric, with 30,000—an even 1 percent of its nearly three million population—taking the time to click Like on Facebook. Perhaps with the nickname of the Magnolia State, residents are more into botany.
On the PlayStation 4 side of things, it’s a similar story. Nevada tops the list with 1.86 percent of its residents showing an affinity for Sony’s system on Facebook, while Mississippi lags behind the other 49 with only a 1 percent like-titude for PS4.
Okay, maybe the Magnolia State moniker means that they’re more into Paul Thomas Anderson films…which they may not know they can probably watch on a PS4 or an Xbox One. Or perhaps they just don’t like Facebook. At this rate, Mississippians may either be luddites or trend setters. We’ll let you make that call.
http://www.movoto.com/blog/opinions/video-game-consoles-map/
Check the link for a detailed interactive map.
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