Game Industry Sales Data
by The Acagamic
Popular Data Sources
After blogging about the Top 50 game developers, I got more interested in the revenue of the game industry. I have been searching for good game industry sales data for a while, since the NPD group figures are not easy to come by and studies related to revenue usually cost quite a bit (e.g. game developer research). Everyone knows about about favorite industry sources like VG Chartz, Metacritic, and GameStats. The latter two are more concerned with rating data while the first is definitely interesting for people interested in sales figures. However, some other really cool and helpful sites turned up when I started looking for game sales increase over the last decade in the US, which by the way looks like the following:
Game Industry Revenue
Great Game Industry Sales Data Resources
- Garaph is a website tool for generating sales data graphs for software and hardware sales of the game industry, however I could not find what source they use for their data.
- Chartget accumulates cool game industry charts from all sorts of resources (e.g. Famitsu, Gfk, Japan Gamecharts). My favorites are Capcom’s Resident Evil series sales (did not know the second part sold that well), insights about the Super Mario Bros. series, how much EA earns per platform and handhelds, or console market share in Japan or generally how bad the PSP is really doing. It is full of great looking graphics, check it out.
- The Video Game Sales Wiki is nice project, which can be edited and improved by everyone, at least for the recent years, it provides a lot of hard numbers behind video game sales.
If you know of other handy game-related statistics sites, please write a comment. 
Even if you could establish a correlation, it does not imply causation (meaning your event with similar numerical progression is likely unrelated to the first event, the sales in this case). Without an explanatory theoretical model, I would suggest to not even imply a correlation. This means if you do not have an explanation to why two things could causally be connected, you are better off pursuing a different argument.
Interesting when compared to shooting rampage statistics. The list from this page does not contain all rampages and is incomplete therefore the comparison is not accurate, however, it clearly shows that around 1995, there was a significant increase in rampages and the trend has continued through 2012. 1949 – 1 ramage, 1966-1, 1984-1, 1991-1, 1995-1, 1996-1, 97-2, 98-2, 99-2, and so on…
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Hi Lou, the NPD sales Figures are from the Video Game Sales Wiki. The video game sales wiki provides even more great data on console sales, unit sales, etc. – Let me know if that was what you were looking for.
Not sure if you will see this but I’m working on a gaming related project and was hoping to find out where you got the raw data for the chart above. We need it for some presentations we are trying to put together. Thanks!
Hey Josh, very nice to see where the data originates. I hope you keep up the good work and your database. However, it would be really nice if your site could feature more “one click” examples, where one can just click to some sample sales graphs links instead of sending out an SQL query.
Hey, I know this is an old article, but I just ran across it searching for things related to my sites. I’m the guy who runs Garaph. For the most part the data there is straight from weekly web updates of the Japanese sales trackers, which I then put in my database. http://www.m-create.com/ranking/ and http://www.famitsu.com/game/rank/top30/ for instance. When looking at the weekly view for older data there are links at the bottom for the source of the weekly Famitsu data since they don’t just overwrite the same pages each week. However, sometimes they get rid of old ones so plenty of those links are broken.
Coinciding with this article, Gamasutra published a piece of writing called “NPD: Behind the Numbers, December 2008“. Quite interesting round-up of 2008 and also featuring lots of graphs. To quote it: “While the industry may not break $25 billion in annual sales for 2009, given current economic conditions, it seems quite likely that it will do so by the end of 2010.”
Sounds like an exciting future.