Introduction

In this assignment I will be looking at the top video games sales of games released from 1981 thru 2019. The results are from the 50 most sold video games of the last 38 years.

Question 1: Which developers have developed the most top selling games over the past nearly 40 years?

I started with this question because in the video game industry people usually forget about the actual developer and look at the publisher of the game. The difference being developers are responsible for creating the video game while publishers are responsible for marketing, sales, and PR of it. Publishers are for the most part the ones who fund the ideas and creation of the developers. The point of this question is to see how many top games where made by the same developer.

Question 2: How many of the top selling games were published by the same publisher?

As stated earlier publishers are the ones who fund the developers. I figure that it is more likely one single publisher will have more top games sold under their name than a developer will have developed. A publisher has many developers working for them at a time so it would only make sense to see less publishers, but those publishers having more top games to their names.

Question 3: What were the sales made by publishers for these top selling games?

From my earlier questions it seemed I was right, there were fewer publishers, but each publisher had more top titles to their name than any one developer did. Because of this I got curious and wanted to see how much money each publisher made off the games they published, just how much money did the developers earn the publishers?

Question 4: Which Platforms have the most top games?

I wanted to move on from the publishers and developers and look at consoles that had the most games published to them. Most games are released on multiple consoles so I know the multi-platfrom category will have the most top games, but I want to see what individul platform had the best selling exclusive games.

I was a bit shocked to see that must nintendo systems had the top exclusive games, but the again nintendo has exclusive titles like Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, and a few others that help their platforms.

Question 5: Which Platforms have the most sales?

From my previous question I was once again intrested in the sales of games per console. I figure again games released on multiple platforms will have the highest sales, but will the nintendo systems like the nintendo DS and Wii have high sales just because they had more excluse top selling games?

From above it can be seen that indeed, the consoles that had the most exclusive top selling games also netted the most sales outside of multi-platform sales.

Conlclusion

Video games have been a hobby of mine for ages, I wanted to dive a bit into the industry and look at the sales figures of the top selling games of all time. Going in I had my own hypotheses and I set out to find the answer. Being in to video game culture as I am, most of my hypotheses above were correct. Publishers have more top selling games than individual developers and games released on multiple platforms net more sales. I did however learn that nintendo exclusives can gain their own spots only being released on one system, making me wonder why nintendo doesn’t sell licenses to their characters and net their company even more money. That question is for a different time though, I hope you enjoyed my assigenment.