TOP SALES BY GENRE
Next, I chose to look at the top 100 games by decade and see the distribution of different genres to determine if any are rising in popularity and if any have fallen off entirely over time.
Breaking it down by genre:
1) Action games have seen a consistent rise in popularity over time.
2) Adventure games are potentially poorly defined, as they are almost nonexistent despite my knowledge that Action/Adventure being an extremely popular combination of genres in gaming.
3) Fighting games had a massive spike in popularity in the 90s, but otherwise remain a niche.
4) Miscellaneous is another poorly defined genre by nature, so it is a bit difficult to ascertain anything about it due to the wide variety of games that fall under its umbrella.
5) Quite the opposite of Action, platformers have seen a steady decline in popularity over time.
6) Puzzle games were very successful in the 1980s, but seem to have fallen off entirely from high popularity.
7) Racing seems to be struggling to maintain its success in the 2010s, but held a comfortable middle spot in prior decades.
8) Role-playing games have also seen a consistent rise, although like racing they are lagging behind a bit in modern trends.
9) Shooter games have the largest increase between the 2000s and 2010s, and are just behind action games as the most popular genre today.
10) Simulation seems to be in a niche similar to fighting games, where there was a slight spike in the 2000s but otherwise relatively underperforming.
11) Sports games all but disappeared in the 1990s, but made a massive rebound and are almost back to their heights from the 1980s.
12) Strategy is tied with Adventure as the least popular genre, at least from this perspective, and besides a small boost in the 1990s does not seem to have ever been a huge genre among consumers.
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It is clear that the dominant genre tends to change over time, but the two most popular genres in the 2010s are accounting for 49 of the top 100 games, which is the single highest proportion of any decade. Moving forward, it is hard to say if this trend will continue or if we will observe more comebacks from genres that have fallen down the ladder.
Now knowing these trends in top sales, I chose to examine the average sales for an entire genre in the same time periods. This paints a different picture than the top sales, as it includes every entry in the data and it will reveal if the genres that are very present in top sales are performing well in every case, or if there are potentially some outliers in that top sales data.
I established earlier that the Adventure genre may be poorly defined in the data set, and while it appears to be slightly more consistent in later decades, only one game from the 80s had the genre, and it sold 4.38 million copies. I decided from this that less weight should be applied to this genre when making comparisons because of this discrepancy. Aside from that, most of the trends shown in this data align with the shape of their counterparts in the previous graph.
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However, what is interesting here is looking at the 2010s numbers, every single genre included in the list still has an average sales value of at least 1 million. The top sales figures in the 2010s show the most polarized industry out of the 4 decades, but this instead reveals that many genres are still able to thrive.
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This data suggests that it is not completely necessary to follow the examples set by most popular games in order to have success. To see which genres might have opportunities for a comeback, I want to look at the percentage of games occupied by each genre since 2000 and find where underrepresentation might lend itself to new developments.
From 2000-2015, Action, Sports, and Shooter games make up 50% of all the games included in the list. Their respective average sales figures are 1.4, 1.4, and 2.3 million. Shooter games have the highest average sales of any genre in this time period, but the other two are more in the middle of the pack. If more Action games are being made than anything else, but their average sales are not outstanding in the data, then it stands to reason the genre is diluted by games that do not perform as well as the rest.
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Going back to the idea of underrepresentation, a genre like Puzzle only accounts for 2% of the games but has a combined average sales figure of 1.2 million in this 15 year period. This is not far off of the same figure for Action, which seems to suggest that Puzzle game developers have been able to carve out a niche within the industry that still grants them success.
For another perspective, consider this chart showing the comparison between the year 2000 and 2015 in terms of their genre dispersion. Somewhere in the early 21st century, genres like Action and Shooter become the front-runners, we already established that, but interestingly most of the smaller genres were already small by the turn of the century. So perhaps the question to ask is not "Why did Puzzle games stop being popular," but rather "Why did Shooter games start being popular?" The data available for this project is not nearly sufficient enough to answer that question, but it would help explain why these underserved genres are still selling relatively well. They are not failing because they aren't popular, it could be just that more developers want to capitalize on what is MOST popular.
CONCLUSIONS FROM GENRE ANALYSIS
Over time, the most popular genre in gaming shifted considerably. Right around the turn of the century, some genres saw a significant decline in popularity while others rose to tremendous heights. However, none of them disappeared entirely, and all of them are represented by at least some successful titles even in the most modern data. There is still a disparity in the amount of games available per genre, where some have a disproportionately high amount of titles compared to their average sales numbers.
The problem with this dilution, though, is it might make it more difficult for new developers who might have interesting ideas to break into the market. With dozens of Shooter games being released within a few years, it is imaginable that some with innovative concepts might go unnoticed compared to bigger releases. I believe that if a developer thinks they have a brilliant idea for a new game, they could be much better off servicing a genre that is far less populated by other games. The gross sales numbers may be lower overall with a smaller audience, but with less competition in the genre they will have a higher chance of selling well relatively.
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That being said, recalling what I learned analyzing the data by region, certain advantages might be gained just by targeting a specific region with a game. Alternatively, entering a publishing deal with a name like Nintendo that boasts high sales in every region could also result in greater exposure for one of these "under the radar" titles. Depending on a developer's goals, there are multiple angles to consider approaching their release from, and I think that a clear vision should not be abandoned for the sake of overall industry popularity.