There are some people who earn a pretty good living by analyzing the video game industry. Then there are just average Joes who spend countless hours crunching the numbers and creating infographics just for the heck of it. Often it’s the latter that manages to really impress us.
Case in point — Reddit user NcikVGG, who combed through a huge database of 24,000 video games and charted out exactly how gaming tastes have changed over the years. The charts go back to 1975 and provide a fascinating look at how the industry has evolved.
Among the observations that can be gleamed are that platform games had their heyday in the early 1990s and have been tapering off ever since. Filling that void until the early 2000s was partly role-playing games (RPGs), but those have also declined in the most recent years.
And, notably thanks to the rise in casual gaming platforms like smartphones and tablets, the genres that have seen the biggest increases in the last few years are exactly what you would expect — puzzle games and “action” games.
Perhaps the neatest part of the chart is the “arcade” game genre, which of course accounted for the majority of games back in 1975 but has shrunk to just a fraction of the industry. Since 2005, though, there has been a comeback, most likely because of things like the Wii’s Virtual Console and the re-release of arcade games on mobile platforms.
Of course, the chart takes into account the number of games. If it were revenue or some other metric, it would be a very different chart. This is perhaps a better look at the industry as a whole, though. It is like a snapshot of the entire lifetime of the industry.
