Video Games, Genres, And Their Sales.
1 - Introduction
As someone who has lived in 4 different states throughout my life, it has always been difficult to keep up with my friends from all over the United States. One of my best escapes from this has been gaming, specifically video games. Being able to call my friends online and play a game while we chat about life has been a true blessing for my life, and is what got me into the scene as a whole.
Today, I want to look into the medium as a whole, specifically the sales data of some of the most popular games. I want to look at sales in different parts of the world in relationship to the games genre and when it released.
Finding My Data
The first place I looked to find my data was Kaggle, a website I have used many times before to find datasets on almost everything. After some searching, I was able to find this dataset, which I will be using in my analysis:
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/zahidmughal2343/video-games-sale/data
This dataset contains everything I need for my analysis, including:
“Name” : The game’s name
“Platform”, “Publisher”, “Year” : The platform, publisher and year it released
“Genre” : The game’s genre
“NA_Sales”, “EU_Sales”, “JP_Sales”, “Other_Sales” : Sales in North America, Europe, Japan, and all other miscellaneous locations.
While this data does not contain most big modern games, we can still view what games it does have and extrapolate trends
2 - Analyzing The Data
To begin our analysis, I wanted to take a quick look at the top-contending games that we’re working with in this data set. Here is a graph of the top 20 games (in sales) that we have available to us:
We see many heavy-hitters up here, like the Mario games, Pokemon, GTA-5, etc, but we can see a huge gap in the second-most sold game, Super Mario Bros., against the most-sold game, Wii Sports. While this is a very large gap, we must remember that Wii Sports was one of the biggest game crazes there was, and it was even sold with the Wii console itself as a first game for people to try.
However, this graph does not tell the full story! The dataset is broken up by platform, meaning that games on multiple platforms have their total sales split up into many rows. Before we start analyzing the dataset as a whole, let’s look again at the top 20 games, this time making sure to combine all games’ platforms so that we get the complete value.
Again, we can see Wii Sports on the top, but many other Triple-A games have made their way up onto the graph, the primary franchise being Call of Duty, a juggernaut in the First Person Shooter space. Call of Duty is one of the largest gaming franchises there is, thus makes sense that it was able to climb up into the top 20 once we combined each game’s platforms, as Call of Duty is designed to fit on many different platforms.
After viewing the most-sold games, I wanted to look at how each platform stacked up against each other. Whicaming consoles have the most sales? Which ones are more obscure? Using the data, I was able to graph:
We can see our traditional heavy-hitters here, the Playstations, the Xboxes, the array of Nintendo consoles, but we also see many surprising results. The Sega Genesis (GEN), for how much people in the gaming space tend to talk about it, is quite low in their sales compared to almost every other non-obscure platform.
Alongside the platform, I wanted to also view total sales vs the year & genre, with graphs below
When looking at release date, this data initially surprised me with skewed bell curve-like graph. Games have only gotten larger as a medium since the 2010s, why is there such a large drop-off? After viewing the data again, it’s easy to see that although the data we’re working with was updated fairly recently, it does not take into account many modern games. This is most likely due to the inaccessibility of this modern data that companies like to keep private.
We can also see that action games dominate the market with almost 1000 million sales! This makes sense, as most games tend to fall into the action category. Shooter games, fighting games, even sports/role-playing/platforming games tend to fall into this category as well. It’s surprising to see how few sales adventure and strategy games have compared to others, but in the gaming market as a whole, those games tend to be more rare - even if they tend to be as exceptional as most other games are.
3 - Finding A Supplementary Source
After seeing how large the action game scene is, I wanted to look more into it in the modern setting. My new goal was to find the the largest modern action games and what their reviews were. This wouldn’t be possible with my current data set, so I looked around for an API I could use to find this information, which I found here:
Game Brain is an up-to-date gaming API that allows me to grab data based on the type of game, reviews, popularity, etc.
I used this API to grab the 30 most highly-rated action games, and graphed the top 20 due to some outliers and missing data:
We can see that many of these games have incredible reviews, however, this is no surprise as it was the metric in which we filtered through the API. The main draw is the number of ratings. These are very large games and have many, many reviews to their name. The sheer number of reviews shows how large the action game scene is, with thousands and thousands of reviews to all of the games here. It is also fun to see many of the games I known about and have played be in this list, like Deep Rock Galactic, Inscrpytion, and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator!
4 - Conclusion
Overall, it was very interesting to to analyze game sales based on a game’s genre and release date. While the data set I used was not completely up to date, it still provided very valuable information of the sales of games, their platforms, and their release dates. In the future, I would love to scour the internet for more up-to-date resources on games sales to look at this again. I especially would love to look into the proportion of sales relative to the new modern consoles that have been coming out in the last few years. I have always enjoyed being able to look more in detail into the things I truly enjoy, and it was both very fun and interesting to look at the medium that I have grown up with throughout my entire life.
