TOP SALES BY REGION
To begin, I first took a look at the top 25 games in each region to see if any genres or publishers have had outstanding success in a particular region.
One trend that will apply to all of the data in this section is that Nintendo seems to be the dominant player in the industry. Here in North America, their oldest game in this subset is from 1984 and has the second highest sales in the region, while their most recent is from 2009. This wide range of performance is very impressive and shows that Nintendo has maintained longevity throughout their competition with other publishers.
As for genres, Platform and Shooter are very far above the rest while Simulation lags behind, but the rest are all relatively even, and 9 out of the 12 distinct genres found in the data appear in these top 25 North American games, which indicates a diverse set of interests among consumers.
The most surprising aspect of this list to me is that only two games in Europe's top 25 were released before 2001. Because the data extends to the mid 1980s, this tells me that the market has grown fairly recently. Nintendo once again shows extreme dominance over other publishers, but the genre dispersion is quite different from North America. It is more balanced overall despite including the same 9 genres as North America. However it does seem that Puzzle games perform drastically worse here, and in general the numbers are much lower than the previous charts outside of Sports, which could mean Sports games are proportionately more popular in EU than NA.
The only publishers appearing in the Japanese top 25 are based in Japan, so it is apparent that these companies have a strong hold on their home market. What is most notable to me here is that the Role-Playing genre appears 11 times in the 25 games and accounts for nearly 50 million unit sales, while it only appeared in the NA and EU data 2 and 3 times respectively. Evidently, the Japanese market has a strong interest towards Role-Playing games, and genres such as Shooter and Sports have little or no presence compared to other regions in top sales.
While there are more publishers that have been able to earn a top 25 spot here, Nintendo is still by far the most dominant. In terms of genre, Sports and Racing are by far the most popular, and other genres that proved popular in the main regions like Action and Platform are not as successful. These numbers are also the lowest overall, which indicates that there is significant opportunity to expand to new consumers in these regions, possibly by honing in on their genre preferences.
CONCLUSIONS FROM REGIONALÂ TOP SALES ANALYSIS
As far as publishers are concerned, Nintendo has had considerably more success than any other worldwide, so a developer seeking to have their game published by this company might have access to a wider audience.
The genre dispersion across all regions is very diverse, especially in North America and Europe, but the Japanese market clearly has a preference towards Role-Playing games. Any developer looking to release a Role-Playing game could consider extra marketing in that region to maximize their success.
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North America boasts the largest numbers overall, which shows that there is a larger consumer base there than in any other region. This is somewhat surprising as Europe's population is nearly 200 million greater than North America, but the data seems to support this idea of a broader market.