Super Video Game Analysis

Both member of our group like games.
We enjoy novel games with astonishing effects, but also appreciate classical ones that never fade in time. Feiran’s practicum is at Ubisoft, a lead game publisher, and after doing the practicum in a video game company’s marketing department, we see a real potential in the market.
Thus, we decided to do some analysis on the video game industry. We want to know what are the important factors that decide how many copies of a game will be sold, and we also want to see if there are any temporal trend in game genres, platforms, users as well as producers and publishers who made the game. It will be fun for gamers to know more about the industry, and what’s more, it might be useful for industry players to see some interesting trends that they have not considered about.

Overview of the gaming market

We first take an overview of the whole gaming market. Specifically, we are trying to visualize the total sales of games released after 1980 on each major gaming markets: North America, EUrope, JaPan and Other market.

One obvious trend we obeserve is that the Japan market had stopped growing after year 1995. We think that reflects a saturated state of the Japan market, as Japan has been a fast growing market in the 1980s, and quickly become stable since year 1995. In contrast, the North America market was 10 times larger than it was in 1995. Same for European market.

Then, we also breakdown the sales of games by their genre. The graph below shows the total sales of games released in each year by genre, and gives us a general understanding of how sales of different genres evolved in gaming history.

Before 1995, platform game was the most popular genre among all video games. In a platform game, the player controls a character to jump between suspended platforms and avoid obstacles. Famous examples include Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mega Man.
However, from 1995, other genres’ sales has increased, perhaps because there is nearly no new mechanics or innovation in platform games during those years. For example, it’s hard for platform games to transit to 3D. After 2005, Action and sport were the 2 dominant genres. Misc and shooting were also very popular.

To further understand how game market evolved in the history, we can also look at games with different ratings.

This graph shows the percentage of total sales for game released in a certain year by their ESRB rating. Old games released prior year 2000 doesn't have a rating collected, thus we only consider relatively new games.
The labels have following meanings:

• NoR: missing rating information
• M: Mature 17+
• T: Teen
• E10+: Everyone 10+
• E: Everyone

Take a look at individual games

With a brief understanding of the game market, we might be interested in which game were the best-selling ones over the years.

This graph shows information about the Top 100 best selling games. Specifically, the critics' scores are on the y-axis, the copies sold is represented as the area of each bubble, and the color shows the genre of the game.
As the dataset only contains games with at least 10,000 copies sold, this graph also reflects the bias of the data collected. When old games were released, the whole video game market was less mature, thus harder for a game to sell 10,000 copies than it is now. Thus, the data we collected will have less old games.
From this plot, we can see that for games before 2005, if they sell well, then they are more likely to have a higher critic score. However, after 2005, there were some ‘low critic score games’ that sell a lot. We find that that these games are all party games. Our best guess is that the major game critics were more of so called ‘hardcore’ gamers, and they didn’t find the party games comparable to other great games like ‘Grand Theft Auto’, ‘Super Mario Bros.’ and ‘Final Fantasy VII’. Ordinary players on the other hand, tend to enjoy lite, casual games, and these players contributed a lot to the sales of a game.
Another interesting fact we noticed is that Wii Sports is the best-selling game for all time. The main reason may be that the game was included as a pack-in game with Wii console in all territories except Japan and South Korea. The bundle was a success because Wii Sports also added value to the package instead of just a “given-away” for buying the console.

Platform war never ends

Looking at other games in the graph, we found there are a lot of other Wii games appear. Does the console(s) a game published on affects its sales a lot? Let’s do some analysis on different consoles.

This graph reflects the number of games released in each year by platform series. We define platform series as follows:

• Nintendo: NES, SNES, N64, GC, Wii, WiiU, GB, GBA, DS, 3DS
• Sony: PS, PS2, PS3, PS4, PSP, PSV
• Microsoft: Xbox, Xbox360, XboxOne
• Other: GEN, SCD, DC, GG, 2600, 3DO, NG, PCFX, TG16, SAT, WS, PC

We created the following multigraph to further compare different platform series.

From the top left graph, we can see Nintendo, Sony and MS have a slightly different focus on genres of games. For example, there are more Misc games on Nintendo consoles compare to other consoles. Also, MS consoles have a larger proportion of sports, action and shooter games.
From the top right graph, we can see that Nintendo consoles have more “E”(everyone) games, and Sony and MS consoles have more “T”(teenager) and “M” games.
From the bottom left graph, we can see an interesting fact: Microsoft consoles have nearly 0 sales in Japan. Also, not surprisingly, Nintendo is the most popular console brand in Japan and North America, while Europe likes Sony consoles better.
And from the bottom right graph, one obvious trend is that the number of games released on Nintendo platforms was largely decreased after the year 2011, due to the unsuccessful release of the Wii U console.

With that, we now have a better understanding of the historical trend of the gaming market.