The lights are on
In the early '90s, platformers like Super Mario Bros. were all the rage, but by the end of the decade that style of game had declined in favor of military/sci-fi shooters. Gaming tastes are constantly in flux. Let's take a look had how they've evolved over the last several decades.
Reddit user NcikVGG recently datamined 24,000 games released since 1975 and compiled a couple charts that display how much gaming tastes have changed over the generations. Check out these two figures which chart the percentage of video game genres released each year. It's interesting to note how little space the FPS genre actually takes up, even though it owns a large mindshare within our industry. It's likely that shooters make up a larger portion of the games that people actually buy, since some of the most popular franchises on the market are shooters, but overall shooters don't make up as large a part of the market as you might think.
Some things seem obvious, such as the decline of arcade and text based adventures. But it's interesting to see how puzzle games have ballooned since the popular spread of smartphones. It also seems odd that sports games have declined over the last five years, and that racing games seemed so popular in the '70s. I also thought it was interesting that RPGs have remained relatively strong; in spite of the decline in JRPGs, many western RPGs have released to fill that gap.
Check out a chart that measures the number of games releases for different systems over the last four decades.
What do you think of these stats? What has been your most popular system/genre?
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Eh....I play a lot of stuff. I think my SNES was or Playstations 2 would be my most popular. Now a days I kinda try to balance my collections out.
Most popular genre for me over my collection would probably be some form of action or fighting. Lots of ups and downs over time, obviously. Mid to late 90s the genre I would have the most for would have easily been between Fighting and RPGs.
Looks like the Psone beat out all of its competition by quite a bit. Probably because of such quality titles such as Overblood, Tail of the Sun, and Cyberia.
I just...urhg. Why is this printed so weird? I can read bugger all of this thing.
My favorite genre is jrpg, also I like tactical-rpg, action, adventure...
In systems the most I played are the GBA,NDS and Wii.
I will actually play any kind of genre.. but my favorites have to be JRPG, RPG,and Action/Adventure.
ADVENTURE!!!!!
Too bad platformers don't take up a larger chunk.
Interesting read. Its cool to see which genres have increased in popularity recently.
if you don't understand the graph...it's a 3D pie chart... short of, the y axis is percentage and x is time the bigger the balloon the higher percent, like with arcade being almost 100% in 1975 and and later decreasing to roughly 5 percent by 1985
Not gonna lie, I'm having a hard time distinguishing between the colors.
I like RPGs and what I suppose would be called platformers.
Sports and FPS..