Spiketrap: Players Prefer The Last of Us Part II and Animal Crossing: New Horizons for The Game Awards

The Game Awards are held tonight as a huge online event that has outgrown the term “the Oscars of games.” But if you don’t want to wait to find out who the public favors, you can check with the Spiketrap conversational intelligence platform.

Spiketrap measures audience sentiment using artificial intelligence techniques, digging into the largest social media platforms to find out what people do and do not prefer. And this year, the company applied its AI to study player favorites.

The Game Awards drew more than 50 million viewers in 2019, and this year it should easily beat that as it has expanded distribution.

This year, Spiketrap believes that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the favorite for Game of the Year, as audience participation with that game reached 44.5 million messages during the year, while The Last of Us Part II was it was favored by about 10.8 million messages in comparison. However, when it comes to sentiment, Ghost of Tsushima ranks high, as does Hades. But the likely winner would likely be the one who generated the most engagement, as opposed to the sentiment leaders.

Above: Spiketrap’s data on engagement and sentiment around the games nominated for top honors at The Game Awards.

Image Credit: Spiketrap

Others in the rankings include Final Fantasy VII: Remake (10.5 million), Doom Eternal (5.1 million), Ghost of Tsushima (4.6 million), and Hades (727,000). These results are important not only for people’s choice voting, but also in the final results because the audience votes are 10% of the final score.

In other categories, Raji: An Ancient Epic scored the best audience sentiment with a score of 92, the highest of all the games analyzed for the study. Spiketrap analyzes the context in which the games are mentioned, whether favorable or not, or by focusing on a particular aspect of the game.

The Last of Us Part II is also favored by awards such as Best Game Direction, Best Art Direction, Best Narrative, Best Audio Design, and Best Soundtrack and Music.

Celebrities invited to The Game Awards will include Brie Larson, Christopher Nolan, Eddie Vedder, Gal Gadot, Jacksepticeye, John David Washington, Josef Fares, Keanu Reeves, Nolan North, Reggie Fils-Aime, Stephen Smith, Tom Holland and Troy Baker. Starts at 4 PM Pacific Time.

The Game Awards will be broadcast live from Hollywood, California, with special segments from around the world.

The Game Awards will be streamed live on more than 45 digital video networks, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and globally on more than 30 digital networks in countries such as China and India. Meanwhile, The Game Awards this morning announced its list of 50 diverse “future class” leaders who are leading the future of gaming.