| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Rank | Overall sales rank (1 = highest global sales) |
| Name | Video game title |
| Platform | Console or platform (e.g. PS4, X360, Wii) |
| Year | Release year |
| Genre | Game genre |
| Publisher | Publishing company |
| NA_Sales | North America sales (millions of units) |
| EU_Sales | Europe sales (millions of units) |
| JP_Sales | Japan sales (millions of units) |
| Other_Sales | Sales in other regions (millions of units) |
| Global_Sales | Total worldwide sales (millions of units) |
Video Game Sales
What Factors Correlate with a Video Game’s Sales
Over the past couple of decades, video games have become a large segment of the entertainment industry, bringing in a great deal of revenue. Video games were always my favorite form of entertainment as a kid and I believe that it helped shape the generations of kids who grew up with them. Like any medium of entertainment, video games quality can be interpreted subjectively and it is because of this reason that review sites like Metacritic post both critic and user reviews of video games (for the purpose of this data we will only be using user reviews and no critic reviews). We are going to be looking at sales data within north america for both high and low revenue video games and looking at their Metacritc review data. Our analysis will describe the sales distribution between these games, compare user score distributions, and analyze whether high selling titles receive better user ratings. It is also important to mention that we will only be using games that came out during or after 2001 as that was the year that metacritic started to report reviews for games. We will also analyze various different factors of the video game sales data to help find a trend for the North American sales.
The Video Game Sales Data
Here is a data dictionary for the Video Games sales table.
| Game | NA Sales (M) | Group |
|---|---|---|
| Wii Sports | 41.49 | Top |
| Mario Kart Wii | 15.85 | Top |
| Wii Sports Resort | 15.75 | Top |
| Kinect Adventures! | 14.97 | Top |
| New Super Mario Bros. Wii | 14.59 | Top |
| World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King | 0.01 | Bottom |
| World Soccer Winning Eleven 9 (JP & Others sales) | 0.01 | Bottom |
| One Piece: Pirate Warriors | 0.01 | Bottom |
| Empire: Total War | 0.01 | Bottom |
| Colin McRae Rally 04 | 0.01 | Bottom |
| Assassin’s Creed | 0.01 | Bottom |
| Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 | 0.01 | Bottom |
The data above shows the top 5 and bottom 7 games when it came to north american sales. We included an additional 2 low sale games as some of them didn’t have any reviews on Metacritic and we had to get some that did have reviews on Metacritic. We will be using these video games when looking at the correlation between user reviews and north american sales.
This data shows that the majority of video games within the data set aren’t able to surpass 1 million sales. this is important to understand as the top games that are able to surpass this are considered outliers in their ability to obtain these many sales.
This boxplot shows the sales numbers by genre, looking at the chart we can see that shooters have the highest consistent north american sales by the millions. This shows that some genre’s have a greater propensity for higher sales numbers, showing a correlation between some genres and north american sales.
This graph demonstrates the total amount of North american sales by the console it was released on. the graph displays them by the 10 most profitable consoles within the database. The results of this graph show that games released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2 would statistically have the most North American revenue. this can be seen as a direct statistical correlation between games on these consoles and higher north american revenue.
This shows the average north american sales by year. by looking at this we can notice that some years tend to have significantly more sales than others. This shows a slow stagnation in the video game until it had a comeback during the lead up to covid. This also shows a correlation between average sales numbers being higher in some years more than others.
Metacritic Analysis
Figure 1 shows that the Top‐selling cohort has a slightly higher median Metacritic user score (8.0) than the Bottom‐selling cohort (7.8). Although I anticipated higher ratings for the best‐sellers, the small gap suggests that North American sales volume is not a strong proxy for player satisfaction. Both groups feature high‐end outliers (scores of 10.0), but only the Bottom cohort exhibits extreme low‐end ratings—down to 0.0—indicating that poorer‐selling titles face more polarized community reception.
Individual game analysis
I think it is also important to analyse some of these titles by themselves and look at there individual review scores. it is also very useful to look at them by year as it can show a shift in opinion over the years.
While Wii sports has the highest revenue among the games, it appears it had more mixed reviews during it’s first couple of years and later improved especially past 2020. I believe the reason for this is that games like Wii sports gained a surge of popularity during Covid, yet its popularity in ratings didn’t come till after the majority of its sales during launch. this points to little correlation between review and sales. Next we will go over the game with the least sales within the north american market and see how its popularity changed over time.
for this data we are seeing an even spread of reviews during the first couple years after launch until all popularity died down for the game. This all appears to change during covid and after covid as the game surges with an extreme amount of reviews as well as the highest percentage of favorable views the game ever had. This is despite the games low sales numbers on the data set for this game, giving more evidence to the idea that sales have a low correlation with perception of quality for the reviewers.
Conclusion
Overall there where various different factors that had some noticeable correlation to the North American video game sales; whether they be the genre of the video game, the console the game originally came out on, or the year of release all had a noticeable correlation. Another one of these would be the review scores on metacrtic, however the differences between the sample of high revenue games and low revenue games seemed very negligible, making it seem like reviews don’t actually affect the financial performance of a game. That was a very surprising conclusion to come by that they don’t actually affect the performance that much. Those were my conclusions after researching the North american sales revenue of video games.