Presented by A Life Well Played
Nothing too surprising when we look at the number of new titles released month by month. You can see the summer slump of July holding the least amount of new titles with only 76 titles, and October seeing the most with 188. Game data is gathered from a variety of locations including Steam Early Access and Nintento Eshop. Mobile games from the App Store are not tracked, unless they were popular enough to have their sales reported. All data is for the US region only.
When we break releases down by consoles (Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii), the trend slightly changes. December becomes the month with with fewest titles, and March becomes the second highest month. Wii releases were so few for 2012, I considered not even including it. But on the other hand, I thought it was interesting to see just how few games came out. Diminishing sales of the Wii console and the imminent release of the Wii-U most likely lead to the small amount of games released for 2012.
Even though the Wii saw few titles for 2012, Nintendo still remains tied with Sony America as the 3rd largest publisher in the world across platforms. What's most overlooked however, is just how big of a publisher Micrsofot is. Between the Xbox 360, Windows 8, and Windows mobile games, they published over 50 titles alone.
This generation of consoles kicked off in 2005 with the release of the Xbox 350. While the Playstation 3 started out slow because of it's price tag, by 2009 it caught up to the 360. Both remain to have steady sales well into 2013. The Wii, on the other hand, peaked in 2008 with a whopping 24.18 million units sold, only to fall year after year thereafter. Despite it's decline, the Wii still had a total of 98.6 million units sold overall, compared to the Xbox 360's 74.8 million, and Playstation 3's 73.8 million in the same span of time.
While Nintendo's home consoles arent doing as well as well as the PS3 or 360, they make up for it in hand held sales. Even though analaysts were unsure of the fate of hand helds, and wheather they would be replaced by smart phones, the 3DS shows there is still room coming in 14.41 million units sold world wide. That's almost 2 million more than the Playstation 3 at 12.73 million.
When we break down sales by region, something intresting shows up. A different console sold the best in each region. In the US, The Xbox 360 clearly sold the best at 6.32 million. When we look at Europe however, the PS3 is the winner with 5.42 million. Meanwhile in Japan the 3DS takes the lead with 5.49 million units.
Similar to the last chart, but now we break down sales for each console for each region. For example, despite the Vita coming out in Japan months before the US, it still sold better in the US regions. Not surprisingly, the Xbox 360 continues to dominaite in the US, while being almost non-existant in Japan. Another trend also becomes clear. Not only the 360, but all consoles are a lot lower in Japan compared to other regions across the board. One possible expanation could be the rise of mobile gaming becomes more prevalent in the region.
One thing to keep in mind when looking at the following charts, is that games can have more then one theme and genre assigned to them. It's a little hard to come up with exact numbers, therefore percentages of games released for that console are used instead. For example, a game can have fantasy elements, yet still be a anime game. A game could be militaristic, but also have SciFi elements to it as well. Likewise, genres can overlap. A game like Diablo III can be considered both an Action and RPG game. Another thing to note is Wii games are not included. Instead, since the PC saw an overall larger reelase of games compared to the Wii there were more numbers to work with, and the data doesnt appear as skewed as it would with the Wii.
Popular themes of 2012 is mostly what you would expect. The majority of games released on PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 were fantasy and sci-fi. The Playstation had a surprising amount of anime themed games. Xbox 360 lead in military titles.
Nothing too surprising with the genres for 2012. The amount of shooters on all platforms were nearly identical. The PC continues to be the platform of choice for sim games for obvious reasons, while sports and fighting games continue to ship mostly to consoles. The only real surprise to me was the amount of RPGS that came out on PC compared to consoles.