Today we present on Edge a new weekly analysis of internet buzz relating to videogames.

Every Thursday, the Edge Games Index, produced in association with Brandwatch, will rate games according to the volume of positive and negative buzz they're inspiring on the web.

We’ll present the chart of the UK’s top ten sellers alongside a more topical list that we hope will give insight into the opinion behind the sales data. We start with a comparison of the big music games that are on the market at the moment.

Each chart allows you to rank the list by the overall quantity of buzz about each title, by the quantity of positive or negative buzz, and by the percentage of positive or negative buzz.

The data is compiled by brand intelligence specialist Brandwatch. Its proprietary web crawler reads pages all over the web and sends them to a matching engine that uses artificial intelligence to work only with the data that’s relevant. If you’re interested in Apple computers, you don’t want data relating to the fruit.

Using natural language processing, a ‘topic extractor’ which pulls out trends from that data, identifying common topics about a brand, and the locations, people or organisations which get mentioned in relation to it. The system also uses a ‘sentiment classifier’ to establish whether the chat likes or dislikes the subject matter.

The data is then held in a constantly updated database called the Brandwatch Index. For the purposes of the charts you’ll see here, that data has been frozen at the time we created them, so we’ll be building an archive of public opinion as time goes on.

To explain the numbers you’ll see on the charts, the number alongside the volume of responses represents the absolute number of mentions the game in question has had, while the ‘last week’ column represents the game’s position seven days ago.

On to this week's charts >>