The Highest-Selling First-Person Shooter Game and Series in the World
Since I was a kid, I’ve always enjoyed playing video games with my friends. My friends and I loved to play games like Fifa, Rocket League, Fortnite, and most of all, Call of Duty. For two decades, Call of Duty has been one of the world’s most popular video game franchises. It’s been a huge part of the lives of many first-person shooter game lovers, including myself. But with other first-person shooter games like Battlefield, Apex Legends, and Halo blowing up in recent decades, gamers have been constantly debating the same question: What is the number 1 FPS game/series of all time?
At the end of the day, the answers to this question will forever be subjective; every gamer’s answers to this question may be different due to their unique experiences playing video games. However, using data on global video game sales, I’m going to attempt to answer these two research questions from a fact-based, “objective” perspective.
By finding an answer to this research question, we could not only inform the massive fanbases of the answer from a purely fact-based, data-analytical perspective, but we can also potentially assist the developers of less popular franchises in understanding why they aren’t the leader of their industry. By analyzing the differences in sales metrics of different series and games, we can help first-person shooter developers set their sights and standards to the best of the best. By comparing their less-bought games to more popular games of the same genre, this group of stakeholders could gather countless insights on how to improve their games to reach — and even surpass — their competition. Another group of stakeholders that would be interested in my findings are investors and shareholders. Investors in game development companies would be interested in the financial performance and profitability of popular and unpopular video games. My findings could very much influence their investment decisions. Lastly, one major group of stakeholders in my findings is retailers and distributors of video games. Whether these companies are selling online or physical copies, they would benefit greatly from knowing which games are in high demand and which ones aren’t. Just like with investors, and the video game developers themselves, these findings could very much influence their decisions to achieve greater financial success.
To determine which first-person shooter game and series is the best of all time, I will be utilizing and manipulating the public Video Game Sales dataset on Kaggle. This entire dataset includes 16,600 records, each representing a video game and various attributes related to that game, such as its genre, ranking, platform, release date, developer, and of course, number of sales. It also includes global sales with a breakdown by location: Europe, North America, Japan, and Other. In order to clean and organize the data, I first dropped all the duplicate rows using the Name column, since I noticed there are some duplicate rows (multiple rows for one game). Then, I filtered the data frame to include only the games in the ‘Shooter’ genre since the other genres are not relevant to my research question. To further remove unnecessary data, I dropped the columns of sales by location (EU_Sales, NA_Sales, JP_Sales, and Other_Sales), since we are only interested in global sales. This could be noted as a potential step in future research: to research further how the sales rankings vary based on location. For now, we will set that idea aside and just find the global, overall sales rankings, since those findings bring a lot more meaning to the context of the problem and value to the stakeholders. Lastly, I dropped the Platform column because the first platform that the games came out on doesn’t matter in the context of this problem. With all these organizational changes made, the final data frame we are left with has the columns: ID, Rank, Name, Year, Genre, Publisher, and Global_Sales. With these columns left, we have appropriately extracted only the necessary and important data for the context of our research questions.
After utilizing Python’s matplotlib, numpy, and pandas packages to rearrange and visualize the data, I finished with some very insightful visuals. Before I get into the findings, I’m going to restate the research question so that we know exactly how to interpret the visuals and findings I am about to present.
Research question: Based on global video game sales, what is the number 1 FPS game/series of all time?
Below are two visualizations that give us the insight we need to answer our research question.
This bar graph displays the top 10 highest-selling first-person shooter games, according to our data. From this, we can gather two large observations and takeaways in relation to our research question. Firstly, Nintendo’s Duck Hunt is clear to be the highest-selling game in its genre, almost doubling the game in second place. Secondly, if you take a closer look, you’ll see that 6 out of the 10 games (and 5 out of the top 6) belong to the Call of Duty video game franchise. These two observations leave us with a very interesting conclusion: when it comes down to global sales, the single most popular first-person shooter game in the world is Duck Hunt, but the highest-selling first-person shooter game series is Call of Duty. To take an even deeper look into this, I present my second visualization.
This pie chart displays the five highest-selling publishers for first-person shooter games. As we can see, Activision leads the five, with Microsoft Game Studios in second, Electronic Arts in third, and Nintendo in fourth. This builds on our insights from the first visual, which is that Activision’s Call of Duty is, in fact, the most popular FPS series in the world, despite Nintendo’s Duck Hunt being the highest-selling single game in the genre. With this, we can conclude our investigation of our research question. Based on global sales alone, we know that the number one first-person shooter game in the world is Duck Hunt, and the number one series is Call of Duty.
An important limitation to note: This data was last updated eight years ago, meaning that our findings might still be somewhat accurate to this day but will not account for any video game sales within the first eight years. An argument can be made that this data being not fully up-to-date can reduce its validity, to which I respond with two thoughts. Firstly, even with some new FPS games emerging and bolstering the ranks over the last eight years, the highest sold games of all time from eight years ago will still be very high on the list. Secondly, the previously listed stakeholders could still gain a lot of this data; identifying which games were the most successful even eight years ago, will allow game developers to identify successful elements in those games, investors to have an idea of which developers succeed the most, and the gaming community to understand fact-based answers to their long debated question of which FPS game is the best.
