With the Montreal International Game Summit coming up (November 18th and 19th) we thought we’d make available our recent mini study of Electronic Arts’s Army of Two. This Third Person Shooter is unique in that it was designed from the beginning as a two person cooperative game (co-op). In September we performed an analysis of the blogosphere on Ao2, building our data set from January 1st to September 1st, 2008. There were 406 blog posts in total.

Army of Two

As you can see from the Lexical Map, there are four main areas of importance. The upper part of the map, contained within the region of the dashed lines, indicates lots of activity related to trading and second hand sales. While all popular titles will see this kind activity, Ao2 was unusual in that many players specifically cited the length of mission play (just ten hours on average) and MSRP ($59.99) as reasons to buy second hand, trade, or even rent.

Although players found limited overall game re-playability, there was significant discussion related XBox Live – people wrote about replaying to gain Achievement Points. This is represented by the coloured group on the left of the map. Its no coincidence that it is next to the region associated with trading and second hand sales, as those discussions are clearly related.

In an interesting note, Michael Capps talked about this very issue (loss of first hand sales due to the second hand market) in a recent interview in gamesindustry.biz, specifically with respect to Gears of War. Gears of War was another game that was frequently mentioned along with Army of Two, not just in “want to have” lists, but also in trading and the second hand market.

Interestingly, there was also a discussion about several of EA’s licenses and movie production – this can be seen in the third area of the map on the right hand side. Here we can see conversations around Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space, and Need for Speed, which were all associated with Army of Two. Just a few weeks after we had completed the mini study, EA and Universal announced a partnership to produce an Ao2 movie.

The final region on the map is activity related to trades and second hand sales – not of games, but hardware. Army of Two was frequently sold alongside hardware, for example people looking to upgrade their systems.

Aside from these issues, the title was very well recieved by those who wanted to have a two player co-op experience, and there were many examples of gamers buying the game to play with a younger sibling or other family member. Gamers particularly enjoyed the special co-op moves, and the ability to “pimp” out their weapons with various customizations.