Alexander Fishkov, Ph.D. student Computer Science
Using the data from the Entertainment Software Association, we provide a breakdown of the U.S. video game market by most popular genres. The data consists of proportions of units sold in the year 2018. By far the most popular are action games, which are responsible for more than one-fourth of the whole market. This genre emphasizes physical challenges, including hand-eye coordination and reaction time. It also has many sub-genres, including multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games like Dota 2 and League of Legends. The second most popular type of video games were shooters; this genre takes approximately one-fifth of the U.S. market. Shooter games require spatial awareness, good reflexes and are often played in teams using multiplayer environments. This additionally requires good communication and teamwork skills from the players.
Next, we move to the specific video games that were most popular around the world. We split console games and PC games into separate groups since these platforms have a largely different pool of games available. We used the data from VGChartz.
The most popular console games consist almost entirely of Nintendo games. First place (by a pretty large margin) belongs to Wii Sports: More than 82 million copies of this game sold. It is less of a surprise if we note that it primarily came in a bundle with the Nintendo Wii console. The console itself was quite successful, hence the large sales figures. In second place, we have Super Mario Bros. This game came out in 1985 for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It became one of the oldest, most iconic and influential games of all time. Super Mario Bros. and characters became a core property of Nintendo, spawning many sequels and related games from the company.
As more than two-thirds of the list of best selling games are by Nintendo, we’ll highlight these next few games made by other companies. Tetris is a popular tile-matching puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Soviet Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. It was later released for many platforms worldwide. Kinect Adventures is a game for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 which featured the use of the innovative Kinect motion camera controller.
About Alexander Fishkov
Alexander Fishkov, Ph.D. student Computer Science
Alexander is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science. He currently holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Applied Math. He has experience working for industry major companies performing research in the fields of machine learning, data mining and natural language processing. In his free time, Alexander enjoys hiking, Nordic skiing and traveling.
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