Historical Video Game Sales
I have been a fan of video and computer games for most of my life. With all that time in gaming I thought it was time to turn some hunches into facts, wrong or right. I can find some of it online, but with a dataset I can ask the questions I want answers for. I stumbled on a dataset on Kaggle for historical sales of video games between 1977 and 2017, which I decided to use for this analysis.
NOTE: The analysis was based on number of games sold, not consoles and not the revenue from sold games.
Task
I set out to see the changes over time to answer the following questions:
- What have been the most popular genres over time?
- When was the hey day for each genre, if there every was one…
- What have been the most popular platforms by manufacturer throughout the years of gaming?
- How has PC compared to consoles?
- Are there any patterns to see between genres and console popularity? Changes over time genre, when was the “hey day” of a certain genre.
Dataset
Video Game Sales on Kaggle. Population data from the UN-database.
The data I used was from 1977 when Atari release their first games until 2015. However Atari as well as Sega, was filitered out for some of the analysises.
Conclusions
Genres
When looking at genres over time you can see that it differs a lot over time. But as we come closer to today it becomes clear that Action and Shooters stand out. Looking back at the 90s Platformers were very popular, whereas Education and Simulation never really got their spot in the limelight. One of my surprises was that Role-playing was as strong as it was.
Popular platforms
When looking at the most popular platforms and manufacturers I wanted to find out if Microsoft ever produced the most popular console (selling the most games for a console). They were not, but the race was very close in the 2010. You can also see the constant fight between Sony and Nintendo throughout the years.
I was also very surprised by how little games were sold to PC. I think this might’ve changed with digital sales and cheaper games available for PC gamers. But the starting price of getting in to gaming on a PC is still much steeper than most consoles.
Genre and platform
When comparing consoles and genre popularity it was pretty rough to check over time and visualizing it in a good way. So, I decided to sum it up instead, to see a total of games per genre sold on each manufacturer platform.
How does handheld consoles hold up?
This was a bit of an extra that I decided to investigate. From the first Game Boy in 1989 to all the following versions of Game Boy as well as the introduction of Playstation Portable and Playstation Vita… Was there any real fight between handheld and stationary consoles? Turns out it was close back in 2005, right after Nintendo DS launch. Which after looking at this dataset seem to have a lot of weird games…
What region buys the most games?
This was another extra I looked at. It was mostly for fun and should not be taken too seriously since the regions are a bit lose and not properly defined over time, which is why it’s just a total amount and not split by population.
Data cleaning, processing and manipulation
Ooohh boy was this a lot of work to make it into what I wanted. One of the main issues I had was the number of games in the Misc category. As well as a lot of games missing release year.
Misc genre issues
The Misc genre had 1739 titles. Which is 10% of the entire dataset. Many of the games are part of large genres of games, that I believe should not be bunched together as a single category. Which is why I manually went through the titles. Focusing on games with more than 300 000 sales. There was a total of 553 titles in Misc with more than 300k sales. By manually going through the data, I got it down to only 9 titles categorized as Misc, and those last 9 are actual Misc games.
But I wasn’t satisfied, so I went through the remaining ~1200 games categorized as Misc and checked for some of the common themes from the previous fix. This reduced the number of Misc games to 929 entries.
From this process I also created three new genres: Music, Party and Collection. In hindsight the Collection games could’ve stayed as Misc, since the number sales from them were rather insignificant.
Music
There was no category for this major genre with dance, rhythm, and guitar/band games. I’ve also included different type of dance games in here.
Party
Large category including games like Mario party and Rabbids. Also including all party games in the style of quizzes, digital board games etc.
Collections
Games from a single franchise such as Sonic or where the collection is small, 2–3 games, and the games are in the same genre, the genre has instead been assigned to the genre of the games. Rather than as a collection.
Biggest waste of time
Apart from the huge manual input work to correct years and to “correct” genres. I also decided to map out sales across the globe based on year and population. It went fine but doing that provided no good-looking results. There are simply too many purchases in (North) America, which is a nice insight… but it doesn’t make for good visualization.
Sample queries
Since there was no manufacturer listed but just console versions not tied to their manufacturer, I had to bring all of them together, as well as created a handheld category for Game Boy(s) etc.
UPDATE `case-study-376212.vgsales.vgsales`
SET manufacturer = "Nintendo"
WHERE Platform ='DS' OR Platform ='3DS' OR Platform='GB' OR Platform='GBA' OR Platform='SNES' OR Platform='NES' OR Platform='N64 OR Platform='GC' OR Platform='Wii' OR Platform="WiiU"
UPDATE `case-study-376212.vgsales.vgsales`
SET handheld = TRUE
WHERE Platform ='3DS' OR Platform ='DS' OR Platform ='GB' OR Platform ='GBA' OR Platform ='PSV' OR Platform='SG' OR Platform ='PSP'
UPDATE `case-study-376212.vgsales.vgsales`
SET handheld = FALSE
WHERE handheld IS NULL
UPDATE `case-study-376212.vgsales.vgsales`
SET manufacturer = "Sega"
WHERE Platform ='DC' OR Platform='GEN' OR Platform='SAT' OR Platform="SCD"Games sold per year and manufacturer
SELECT
Year,
manufacturer,
SUM(Global_Sales) AS Global_Sales
FROM `case-study-376212.vgsales.vgsales`
GROUP BY
manufacturer,
Year
ORDER BY Year ASCLargest regions over time including manufacturer
SELECT
Year,
manufacturer,
sum(NA_Sales) AS NA_Sales,
sum(EU_Sales) AS EU_Sales,
sum(JP_Sales) AS JP_Sales,
sum(Other_Sales) AS Other_Sales,
sum(Global_Sales) AS Global_Sales
FROM `case-study-376212.vgsales.vgsales`
GROUP BY
Year,
manufacturer
ORDER BY
Year ASC