Historical Sales of Video Games

This dashboard compiles a historical record of video game sales worldwide, allowing information to be segmented by year, region, genre, platform, and publisher. The dashboard features filters at the top, next to the title; a card to present the totals of the selected criteria; a ring chart showing total sales by region, a vertical bar chart with yearly results from 1980 to 2017 for each region; two horizontal bar charts for viewing results by region, platform, and genre; and a table detailing each sold game.

Key Findings:

Video game sales experienced a boost starting in 1996, when sales records (199 million) more than doubled from the previous year (88 million). From this point, video game sales saw a steady increase until 2008, after which they began to decline, reaching 1989 levels in 2016 (approximately 70 million) and nearly vanishing in 2017 (only 5 million copies sold).

Regarding regions, the United States has seen the highest sales, followed by Japan until 1998, when Europe permanently surpassed it. The platforms of PlayStation 2, X360, PlayStation 3, Wii, DS, and PS, by a considerable margin, have the highest sales, each reporting more than double the sales of the next (GBA). The total for these six platforms is 5.606 billion, equivalent to 66% of the 8.815 billion total for the entire sample.

The best-selling games in history are: Wii Sports from 2006 (82 million copies), Super Mario Bros from 1985 (40 million), Mario Kart Wii from 2008 (35 million), Wii Sports Resort from 2009 (33 million), Pokémon from 1996 (31 million), and Tetris from 1989 (30 million).

Access the dashboard here.