By: Gray Ashford, Xavier Harvey, Wyatt Saling, Nick Ungermann

Main Article

According to a survey conducted by the Entertainment Software Association in 2015, more than 150 million Americans play video games. It can be a social activity, with friends or family, but it can just as easily be done alone. You can play them on your TV, computer, or even on-the-go. It’s undeniably become a pillar of our culture and media. With the recent introduction of E-Sports and Virtual Reality consoles, it’s safe to assume that we will only see the industry continue to develop and grow in the spotlight.

What was once a fairly niche or underwhelming hobby has become a sensation. In this same survey, it was revealed that four in five American households have some kind of device that can play video games. That means a higher percentage of Americans own a video game device than a dish washer. Twenty years ago that would have been basically unheard of.

So we’re seeing a rapid growth of industry. New graphics, new consoles, new companies—we’re seeing more every year. Along with this, we’re seeing a boom of diverse job opportunities in a variety of applications. But when we compare the average video games sold before 2000 versus those sold after 2000, we see that the numbers are stronger from before 2000. But that doesn’t necessarily mean modern video game sales are on the decline. There’s simply been less time for video games after 2000 rather than before, which cannot help but stack the numbers.

It’s true, that video games boomed even prior to the 1990s, but that was also when we saw the infamous North American video game crash of 1983. This crash very nearly killed the industry in the cradle, forcing many companies into bankruptcy. The main cause: saturation of the market. This point was something of a blessing in disguise for the video game industry, as it caused companies to reevaluate the quality of the games they were putting out and shift perspective away from what they think will be profitable and toward what will be genuinely entertaining to consumers. Regardless, it is a commonly held opinion that the “Golden Age of Video Games” has come and passed.

In 2015, VICE wrote an article that argues we are at a new cusp of transition for the video game market. As stated earlier, society is at a point of functionally full acceptance of video games as a medium and even an art form. The internet has made it possible for independent developers to finally have a meaningful voice in the market as well, so we’re seeing less and less of a monopoly on the market from big-name companies. All clues indicate that we are poised for a new Golden Age of Video Games.

For college students who are looking to carve a place in the industry, this is great news. This college-age demographic have grown up alongside the video game market. Our childhoods were the same era. As such, many college students have a fairly extensive knowledge about games, even if they don’t realize. It doesn’t take any amount of academic training to decide what makes a video game fun or successful.

Between the years of 1990 and 2000 the video game industry saw tremendous growth, both in genre and video games released during a single year. This was due both in part to the growing popularity of video games, and the number of consoles available.

During the year 1990 the Platform game was king. This was due in part to the popularity of the genre leading up to this year, as the video game technology was mostly build for the side-by-side scrolling style of game such as Mario, Sonic, and Mega Man. Given this, it is unsurprising to see that the video game with the top sales at the time was Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System or SNES for short, which was released in 1990 in Japan and a year later in the United States. The SNES was the beginning of the next generation of gaming consoles, which would rapidly expand the market between 1990 and 2000. Prior to 1990, gaming was limited to the Nintendo Entertainment System console, or NES, and the Sega Genesis console. These consoles, although revolutionary at the time, limited what games could be created.

By 2000 the Platform game has lost considerable ground. Prior to 2000 the PlayStation, Sega Dreamcast, and Nintendo 64 were all released. In 2000 the PlayStation 2 was released, putting a final nail in the coffin for Platform games. The most popular game in this year was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, which led the pack for the Sports genre at three million dollars. Although Super Mario World in 1990 alone made twelve million dollars in North American Sales, there were only two games in that year released under the Platform genre, compared to the eighty-plus games under the Sports genre released in 2000. The total amount of games released in 2000 was three-hundred and forty-nine, compared to the measly sixteen in 1990. Sales were more widely dispersed given the amount of games and genres now in play, making a single game less likely to gross as much sales, and giving more strength to the genres that released a greater amount of video games to the public.

Supplementary Materials

Write your extra materials here i.e. extra info for people who want to know more, but including in the main article would unnecessarily bloat things.

This block of code loaded in the data in the correct format to be edited for a better analysis. The action of mutating created the data that will be analyzed for the hypothesis question.

## # A tibble: 2 × 2
##     base2000      mean
##        <chr>     <dbl>
## 1  year<2000 0.4112310
## 2 year>=2000 0.2448838

This is the mean for the base2000 frame based on NA_Sales. This blatantly shows discrediting of the hypothesis even before the test.

base2000	sample_size	mean	sd	minimum	lower_quartile	median	upper_quartile	max
year<2000	1974	0.8386474	2.106332	0.01	0.11	0.30	0.81	40.24
year>=2000	14624	0.4967827	1.460147	0.01	0.06	0.16	0.44	82.74

This is the code that seperates the thebase2000data into quantiles. That provides the oppertunity to visually interpet the data and percieve the fesability of the hypothesis.

With this code a bar graph is plotted of the previous information. It is condensed to 3 in order to compensate for the large number of outliers.

The graph made via this code represents the mean distribution from 0.

This code shows where the p value plotted on the graph would have to fall in order to be feasible within the hypothesis.

## [1] 1

The p value is numerically estblished with this code.

This code performs the bootstrap of the data for the hypothesis test.

This code graphs the bootsrap which comes out almost identical to the previous histogram.

## # A tibble: 1 × 2
##        lower      upper
##        <dbl>      <dbl>
## 1 -0.4394624 -0.2527697

Conlusion

It can be concluded that the question that we have posed is false. Is the average number of video games sold after 2000 greater than the average number of video games sold before 2000? Through the hypothesis test we were able to numerically and graphically show that reallity is the inverse of our question. This conclusion was reached when the data range base2000 gave a value of 0.41 for year<2000 and 0.24 for year>=2000. When bootstrpped the given means respectively are 0.43 and 0.25. With this information we were able concretely conclude that more video games were sold before 2000 than 2000 and after.