How Long Video Games Take To Make – About This Study

Video games take longer to make than they used to, but if you ask how long that is you’ll get wildly varying answers. Many will point to how many years there are between releases in major franchises, but that’s not a good way to gauge development time; a developer might not start on a sequel right way, there might be multiple teams working on the same series, an engine might or might not be reused, or an individual game might just have more or less content than the one before it. The actual answer requires a bit more work.

There’s a whole section where I look into how true this may be.

To get a better look at how long it really takes to make a video game I have gathered data on the development time of 1,283 games, released from 1979 to 2024. I’ve only included data for games where I can be reasonably sure I’m not off by more than 2 months, so statements like “started development after [other game]” was considered too vague, but something like “started development immediately after [other game] released” was concrete enough to be included.

This is a study specifically of commercially released games, so no student projects or freeware is included. Without market pressures or budgets it doesn’t make sense to compare these to games that do. I also have not included non-licensed games for defunct consoles, even if they are commercial products.

Arcade games were not included, as I considered them to be a different kind of market with different commercial realities. Looking back I wish I had included them though, since I ended up including mobile games. No remasters, remakes, ports, or compilations were included. These are not wholly original products, it doesn’t make sense to compare them to games that are. I had to make some judgement calls when it came to ports, since sometimes a game will release on one system, and then another system days to years later. I generally considered games to not be ports if subsequent releases on additional platforms were within three months of the first. I also did not include any games that were significantly rebooted mid-development or stopped development at some point and then restarted. It’s impossible to say how long development really takes with nebulous cases like this, so games like Duke Nukem Forever aren’t part of the study.

As much as I would have loved to include every game ever made in this project, this kind of information only comes out for a minority of games. I checked on over 10,500 games, and was surprised at how some of the biggest, most important, and most successful games of all time have little information about their development. Even some games with an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to their development only have the year work was started.

I also think it’s worth reflecting on what kind of games have this information available. Most of this information comes from promotional interviews with developers to promote a game, and occasionally retrospectives well after release. A lot of unpopular games with no hype or fanbase behind them don’t get this kind of press. Indie studios also love doing any kind of interviews, while developers at bigger studios may not be allowed to give interviews or may not even know when exactly a game began.

Video Game Development Time By Year

Let’s start with a look at everything lumped together: PC games, home console games, handheld console games, and mobile games. These numbers are all rounded to the nearest day, the major gridlines represent a year, and the minor gridlines represent a quarter year. Some of these early years only have a small amount of data. Heiankyo Alien is the only game from 1979 that I could find information on.

To get into how this data was gathered and processed a bit more I found the following on Heiankyo Alien’s Wikipedia page: “Development lasted for roughly three months.” I checked the source, which is a translation of an interview from the book 超アーケード 単行本 by shumplations, where Mitsutoshi Tabata says development took “About 3 months.” With such a short time frame we can be reasonably sure it was maybe a few weeks more or less than that, well within my maximum two month window of uncertainty. Heiankyo Alien’s exact release date is unknown, but that’s not important for finding the development time, so I entered “07/01/1979” as the release date and “04/01/1979” as the start date in my spreadsheet and had it calculate the number of days in between. Months can be 28, 29, 30, or 31 days long, so the choice of July does make a tiny difference, but this is as close as I can get it.

1980 only has three games to represent it, and Adventure’s two year development heavily influences it, making it an outlier. John Madden Football and Super Mario Bros. 3’s exceptionally long development times for the era make 1988 stick out as well. Overall there is a pretty steady increase but things kick into another gear starting in 2014 as more PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games start to come out.

 

Computer game releases generally follow the same trends as the overall picture. The dip in 2010 is still very noticeable. I see there’s a number of early indie titles such as Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV there, but that’s true of 2011 as well. There’s a big jump in 2019 here, too.

 

Mobile games take less time to develop overall, but the progress is less steady, probably due to having less data. This graph only goes to 2022 and some years only have a few games where I was able to find information.

The first few years up to 2013 are remarkably low, games took about as long to make as console and PC games did in the 90s. Mobile games made fast strides and seem to have tripled their development time in 12 years.

 

Video Game Development Time By Generation

I think it makes more sense to look at non-PC games in terms of generations, since their hardware jumps in discrete steps every five to seven years. I’m going with Wikipedia’s definitions here so for reference the NES was third generation, the PlayStation was fifth, the Wii, DS and Xbox 360 were seventh, the Switch and PlayStation 4 were eighth, and we’re currently in the ninth.

Unsurprisingly we see gradual increases in each generation, but I am a bit surprised by the jump between seventh and eighth. The seventh was the start of the high definition era, games generally had voice acting and many had online features, while eighth generation games seem very similar in production value. The ninth is about as large of a step up of development time, yet the difference between games from the previous generation seems even smaller.

I think a lot of people would say third generation games took maybe a few months to make, but among the 21 games I found data for the average was comfortably over a year. Metal Slader Glory apparently took four years and didn’t even leave Japan.

 

We can also compare how long handheld games take to make compared to their television-connected brethren and the first thing that may stand out is fourth generation handheld games. This is entirely due to one huge outlier: Pokémon Red and Green took over five and a half years, enough to skew the results. As a matter of fact Pokémon took longer to make than any other game up to until that point (among the games in this study) and there was no game with more time in development until 2009’s Final Fantasy XIII.

Overall though we see handhelds taking 50-60% as long to make, up until the eighth generation. The eighth generation a bit different because it has the Switch, which I am counting as both a home console and a handheld, as well as the 3DS and PlayStation Vita. Without including the Switch at all the handheld average is 882, or 74% of the home console average, which is still a notable increase from before.

The ninth generation only has handhelds in the sense that some games released on both the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S and also the Switch, and are thus both eighth and ninth generation games.

 

Comparing Console Development Times

All of the systems in the following charts are in chronological order of first release. If a system isn’t included it’s because I had no or very little data for it.

I included two generations here because there isn’t enough data for the Sega Master System and SG-1000 to compare to the NES.

Again we can see how much the original Pokémon games skewed the averages, but the Game Boy still isn’t far behind other systems.

 

It’s a bit surprising that the N64 had the longest development times here, with cartridges that had less room for time consuming graphics and FMVs.

Sega continues to have lower development times and I don’t know why. Sega itself does tend to make arcadey, highly replayable but short games, but there are many non-Sega games for their systems too.

 

It makes sense for Dreamcast games to take less time than it’s competitors, as it came out so much earlier than them and had weaker hardware.

The PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox’s development times only vary by 77 days.

 

The DS and PSP are another clear example of how hardware capability generally correlates with development times, while the Wii shows the same thing in the home console space.

The PlayStation 3 was notoriously difficult to develop for with its unique architecture, so I’m actually surprised its average isn’t higher.

 

Please note the the y-axis now goes to 4.25 years instead of 3.

It’s quite interesting to see the 3DS above the Vita here, and not by a small margin.

The Switch ties with the Xbox One and is very close to the PlayStation 4. The majority of the Switch games I had data for were not exclusives, they also released on Xbox or PlayStation.

 

Here in the present generation there is little difference between the development time of a PlayStation 5 game and an Xbox Series X/S game.

The average development time of a console game has crept up to about four years.

 

How Long It Takes To Develop AAA Games And Other Games That Take A Long Time To Make

Here’s the overall average by year again, if you want to compare. Keep in mind the y-axis is different.

No one knows how to define a AAA game, but I gave it my best shot. Final Fantasy VII is sometimes called the first AAA game, so I started with 1997 and chose games that were very “full featured” for their time period, from a major developer, probably cost a lot more than average to make, received press coverage, and sold well. These are all nebulous ideas, but I did my best to choose games that I think most people would agree were AAA and ended up with 238 games.

I also chose the five games that took the longest to develop from each year, which are quite often not AAA games. These games tend take about twice as long as the average game.

Those AAA games tend to take a bit longer than average, but not by an outstanding amount, rarely more than 25% longer, and they don’t even beat the overall average in some years. Remember this is a rough estimate, no two people will have perfect agreement on what a AAA game even is.

I’m not sure why 2024 seems to be so much lower than recent years so far. I only included games that had released as of mid June (because you can’t count on a release date) so maybe games that take longer to develop tend to release in the latter half of the year.

Going back to Jason Schreier’s comment: there were seven years between the launch of the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Let’s assume the same will be true for the PlayStation 6, and it releases exactly seven years after the PS5 on November 12, 2027. That’s a development time of 1,775 days from the day he posted the tweet, assuming they’d be a launch title. Compared to 2023’s development times that would be 260 days longer than the typical AAA game, and 445 days shorter than the very longest games.

It’s hard to predict how much longer game development will take for the next generation compared to this one. The average PS5 game took about 20% longer to make than the average PS4 game, while AAA games took roughly 40% longer in the ninth generation compared to the eighth. Jason’s prediction would only require about a 15% increase in AAA development time. I didn’t specifically track this, but I think it’s reasonable to assume games that release within the first few months of a system launch have shorter development times than the majority of releases on a system. With all this in mind I think we can pretty safely say that some big-name games that will eventually be PS6 releases were indeed starting development in early 2023 and that Jason was on the mark here.

 

What Month Games Begin Development

This is a bit off the topic at hand, but I realized I could also use my data to see what time of year games tend to begin development.

There were quite a few sources that described development as starting “early” or “late” into a year, which I decided to interpret as March 13th and October 19th, or 20% and 80% through the year. Some of these are going to be a bit earlier or later in reality, so I have marked them off in red here and you can imagine the adjacent months getting some portion of that amount.

The only reason I can think of September being the least common and October and November being the opposite is the fact that so many games come out near the end of the year. Developers may finish a game in September that will be on store shelves in October or November, and start on their next game immediately afterwards.

I did a whole project on video game release dates, including a section on months, check it out and see just how popular October and November are for releases.

 

Sources

I put these on a separate page, but also special thanks to Time and Date’s Days Calculator for saving me from a lot of mental math.

Overview

Trophies were first added to PlayStation 3 games in 2008 as an achievement system. Overcoming various challenges in a game will reward bronze, silver, and gold trophies, and many games also reward a special platinum trophy for collecting all of these.

When I start a new PlayStation game I usually go to PSNProfiles and look for a platinum trophy guide to decide if I want to try to add another to my collection. These are not just walkthroughs, each game has a difficulty score, an estimated time to get the platinum, and many individual trophies have labels to inform players about potential hiccups, such as online play being required, or there being something that you can permanently miss in a playthrough. I’ve always liked looking at these guides, even for games I have no interest in playing, just to see how hard it is, or what kind of challenges are involved. As a statistics nerd I wanted to chart that information.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope International has an infamously lengthy platinum.

For this project I gathered data from 3,145 guides on PSNProfiles, and not just games with platinum trophies. Games without platinum trophies tend to be digital-only, shorter, and smaller in scope. Studying them can offer more insight into game difficulty and length so I wanted to include them too. There are some other websites with trophy guides but I stuck with PSNProfiles for this information since it had everything I needed on one page and I think it has more trophy guides than anywhere else. This project looks at:

  • Release Date: This is the date the game first released in any region, for any system.
  • System: Games can count for multiple systems from among the PS3, PS4, PS5, PSV, PSVR, and PSVR2.
  • Difficulty: Every guide on PSNProfiles has a difficulty rating from 1-10. Guide writers tend to listen to feedback and change difficulty ratings if people don’t agree with them, and as you’ll see later these seem to be distributed pretty reasonably.
  • Hours: How long the guide writer thinks it will take to collect all the trophies. Users on PSNProfiles often give feedback about this.
  • Online Required: The bane of many trophy collectors are trophies that require playing online. Servers can quickly become ghost towns for any game without a huge audience, or be taken offline completely. I did not include games where you obtain trophies either online or by playing local co-op.
  • Missables Included: Missables are trophies that have to be collected before progressing past a certain point in a game or else they are unavailable until playing through a game again, or a previous save file is loaded. Trophy hunters have to keep a careful eye on these.
  • Platinum Acquisition Rate: What percent of users on PSNProfiles who have played the game have obtained the platinum trophy. These are much larger than the overall platinum acquisition rate of all players, since people who use PSNProfiles love to collect trophies. I decided to use this metric since the overall platinum rates are so often less than 1%, these larger numbers give us more room to compare.

 

Distribution of Difficulty Scores

Here we can see the distribution of difficulty scores on PSNProfiles has a nice ramp up and then ramp down in frequency, with the hardest games being the rarest. The shorter, simpler games without platinum trophies are more weighed toward lower difficulties.

 

Difficulty by Year and System

It’s often observed that games got a lot easier starting with the 7th generation (the one with the PlayStation 3), unfortunately we don’t have the PlayStation 2 to compare with, but game difficulty does seem to have dropped over time. I’m not sure why 2023 had a sudden increase. I didn’t expect virtual reality games to be markedly more difficult, though the numbers are a bit less reliable with fewer games overall.

I had to exclude a few no platinum trophy years and PSVR2 due there not being a sufficient sample size.

There are games from 2007, before trophies were implemented, because a few games patched in support for trophies after release.

 

Hours to Acquire All Trophies by Year and System

It’s easier to see in the system chart, but the time required to get a platinum trophy has gone down a bit over time. For games without a platinum it’s a bit less clear. Despite being more difficult on average, VR games take a lot less time.

There weren’t a lot of guides for 2019 games without a platinum trophy, meaning Siralim 3’s 600 hours to acquire all trophies severely altered the average.

 

Hours to Acquire All Trophies by Difficulty

Getting a platinum trophy takes longer the harder a game is, which is exactly what you would expect if the difficulties ratings were pretty accurate. Getting all of the trophies in no-platinum games is a bit less consistent, 4-difficulty games seeing a big jump, and then the 9s and 10s being much more time intensive than 8s.

 

Platinum Trophy Acquisition Rates by Hours Required and Difficulty

These two graphs show us exactly what we would expect: the harder or longer a game is, the fewer people will get the platinum trophy. The maximum number of hours you can enter on a PSNProfiles trophy guide is 999, and there are a few games that can potentially take longer than that. Take a look at the Notable Games section for more on them.

 

Platinum Trophy Acquisition Rates by System

This is another showcase of how games have gotten easier over time, with platinum trophies being more than twice as common among PlayStation 5 games than PlayStation 3. There wasn’t a lot of information for PlayStation VR2 games, so this could change over time, but it’s interesting that they seem to have harder platinum trophies than the original PlayStation VR.

 

How Online Requirements and Missables Factor Into Trophies

This might be a lot to take in, but the more saturated colors indicate games without a platinum trophy, while the paler colors are those with a platinum. Blue is for online games, red is for games with missable trophies.

Games without platinum trophies tend to require online services less often, as well as feature missables less often. The overall trend seems to be fewer of either kind of trophy over time.

 

Online play requirements become more common the harder a game is, with an especially large jump between 9 and 10. Missables, however, seem to have very little correlation with difficulty, bouncing up and down.

 

Here we see that the games with the hardest and rarest platinum trophies (towards the left), are much more likely to have some kind of online component. Winning hundreds of matches online can be a grueling task that not many want to go through. Missables on the other hand seem to become a bit rarer as platinum trophy rates go down, and I’m not sure why.

 

Notable Games

It’s always fun to look at the outliers with a study like this. These three games take more than the maximum 999 hours a guide can display:

  • Diablo II: Resurrected – There is a trophy for reaching level 99 with a hardcore character, meaning you can’t die once. This is one of the most ridiculous trophies I’ve ever seen, it will take hundreds of hours of carefully grinding the same one or two bosses to get this, and you’ll have to hope you never lose your character due to lag. You’ll need a team of selfless people readying bosses for you to make this more plausible.
  • Final Fantasy XIV – This MMORPG platinum requires players to beat each of the four expansions, do the raids on savage difficulty, complete lot of hunts and FATEs, collect Triple Triad cards, craft many items, and gather many materials.
  • Fortnite – This is actually for non-battle royale part of the game, the “Save the World” mode. The platinum involves lots of grind, including saving thousands of survivors, buildings thousands of structures, and killing thousands of monsters.

Four games with guides in this study had impossible platinum trophies. PSNProfiles generally removes people that use cheating devices to get these, so you still may see some people with these online:

  • Backfirewall – There is a bugged trophy for beating a certain score in a dance competition. This game is less than a year old so there is some hope it can be fixed.
  • Boundless – There are actually three bugged trophies preventing anyone from getting the platinum. One requires collecting more journals than there are to collect, another requires visiting some kinds of worlds that haven’t been added to the game, and another requires completing more feats than exist in the game. The developer was supposedly working on fixing the trophies three years ago.
  • Dragon Fin Soup – This partly crowdfunded game was supposed to receive a major update, but the developer went silent four years ago without releasing it. The trophies involve collecting pets, crafting items, and catching fish.
  • Gonner 2 – Three years after release it’s unknown what is required to get a “nice combo”. It could be bugged or it could be very obscure.

Seven games without a platinum trophy will likely take over 300 hours to nab every trophy: Deadman’s Cross (300), Warframe (300), Destiny of Spirits (350), Let It Die (350), APB Reloaded (400), Planetside 2 (500), and Siralim (600).

The game with the highest platinum trophy rate was Quick Mafs, with 99.24%. The games with platinum rates at or below 0.1% are:

  • NBA 2k16 (0.02%, PS4 version)
  • The Finals (0.03%, a very new game as of this writing)
  • NBA 2k14 (0.04%)
  • Badland (0.07%)
  • Crypt of the NecroDancer (0.08%)
  • Fight Night Round 4 (0.09%)
  • NBA 2K15 (0.1%)

The game with a difficulty of 1 with the lowest platinum rate is Fight Night Round 4 (0.09%). It’s also listed as taking 10 hours, which seems a bit suspect. Neko Atsume has a difficulty of 1 and is supposed to take 200 hours, yet the platinum rate is 34.19%.

The fastest 10-difficulty games to complete are apparently Atari Flashback Classics Volume 2 and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 at 20 hours, while on the other side of the scale Crypt of the NecroDancer is expected to take 900 hours. The 10-difficulty game with the highest platinum rate is Fall Guys at 7.89% (It was 8.05% when I recorded all this information). Fall Guys actually has two distinct trophy sets, this is the one with the current launcher.

Sources

PSNProfiles and its guides for most of the game related information.

Wikipedia for release dates.

Jump right in:

1985-1989 | 1990-1994 | 1995-1999 | 2000-2004 | 2005-2009 | 2010-2014 | 2015-2019 | 2020-2024

Introduction

Shigeru Miyamoto is arguably the most accomplished and influential video game maker in the world, having created some of the most recognized characters and some of the best selling game franchises such as Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong. He has worked at Nintendo for his entire career spanning more than 40 years. In that time he has continuously been designing, producing, and directing game development, granting him a perspective few others have been able to achieve.

But this isn’t a biography, it’s a chronological collection of interviews, appearances, writings, and other records of Shigeru Miyamoto’s words, with my own summary of each.

I have done all of this for two reasons. First, to create a nicely organized and helpful record of the words of an influential figure that has had a huge impact on the world of interactive entertainment. This is in some ways a history of Nintendo and how they make games as well as a big chunk of video game history. Second, to create an entertaining and easy to skim through history of Nintendo through the eyes of its most famous creator as he talks about his career and the creation of many of his most important works. A way to relive the history of the changing landscape of gaming while revisiting what it was like to follow the latest news updates on games you were looking forward to.

There are currently over 750 entries, including those that have not been translated to English.

 

Overview of Year Pages

1985-1989

Major Releases: Super Mario Bros., Famicom Disk System, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, Super Mario Bros. 3, Game Boy

Overview: This first page is the smallest, with the earliest entry being a conversation between Shigeru Miyamoto and The Tower of Druaga’s Masanobu Endo. There’s also a conversation with Dragon Quest’s Yuji Horii. Most of his interviews at this point are with Japanese technology and gaming magazines.

Some topics that will come up again and again in the future are covered here, such as how Mario was designed and the story of how he came to join Nintendo and start making games. Comparing movies and games is already underway.

Mr. Miyamoto already has a big reputation and has apparently been called a genius at this point.

 

1990-1994

Major Releases: Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Mario World, F-Zero, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Mario Kart, Star Fox, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Donkey Kong Country

Overview: Much of this material had to be translated by fans many years after the fact, and Nintendo Power starts to take an interest in interviewing Mr. Miyamoto. There are some strategy guides, a CD’s liner notes, and we get our first videos here, all taking place at Nintendo’s offices, I think. There is the beginning of some curiosity about games from non-gaming media.

Many interviewers are already asking him about game design and how Nintendo makes games.

There’s a lot of love for The Legend of Zelda series and there are already many questions about his process and motivations in making them.

He has some interest in the Super NES CD-ROM here, but he’s not sold on every game needing to be a CD-ROM.

He says he’s not famous and isn’t recognized in the street, but that he does get letters asking for photos.

 

1995-1999

Major Releases: Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario RPG, Nintendo 64, Super Mario 64, Wave Race 64, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, 1080° Snowboarding, Game Boy Color, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Smash Bros.

Overview: Nintendo Power starts speaking of Mr. Miyamoto in reverent tones and interviews him many times in this period but he seems to stay in Japan other than during E3. This is the beginning of many E3 appearances whether on stage or off, doing interviews and Q & A sessions. There are almost 3 times as many entries during this period than the previous one.

There’s quite a few interviews about the Nintendo 64 and its capabilities, and he seems quite excited to be using polygons. Getting used to the analog stick is a frequent topic and he brings up the 4 controller ports quite often. At one point he says he is working on 10 Nintendo 64 games. After talking up the potential of the 64DD being able to write data it is abandoned quickly and many games he mentions never come out.

It wasn’t brand new but there’s a lot of questions about the Super FX chip in 1995 and 1996.

He talks positively about the Tamagotchi and how such a simple low tech thing can prove to be very popular.

There are several interviews about Super Mario RPG and later about Paper Mario, some of the only role-playing games he ever worked on. Several months after Final Fantasy VII’s release he says that the role-playing game market will shrink.

He’s not interested in making movies but he’s compared to Steven Spielberg several times.

When asked about online gaming his responses vary quite a bit. Sometimes they are something interesting he’d like to explore, sometimes they are too expensive and difficult for consumers, and sometimes they are mere trends that he’s not interested in chasing.

Several times he talks about how much of the N64’s power a game uses, Super Mario 64 being 40-60%, Star Fox 64 at 70-80%, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time at 90%.

What dominates the latter half of this period is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game that was likely more hyped than any other in history at the time. He laments that it took 50 people to make the game, a team size too big.

 

2000-2004

Major Releases: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Paper Mario, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Ages, Game Boy Advance, GameCube, Luigi’s Mansion, Pikmin, Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, F-Zero GX, DS

Overview: By this point most of Mr. Miyamoto’s interviews are with non-Japanese media, many Western magazines and various now-defunct websites interview him during this time.

The 64DD is released and there’s a lot of questions about the games coming out for it, many of which end up cancelled, including Earthbound 64/Mother 3.

There is a lot of GameCube promotion, he says it’s well balanced, easy to develop for, and that developers can do anything they can dream of with it. He’s not totally enthusiastic about moving to DVDs for games, but talks a lot about how Nintendo is making sure loading times are kept low. There’s talk of easily moving the GameCube from room to room thanks to its handle. He says he is working on 30 titles at once.

Mr. Miyamoto is repeatedly asked about online games on the GameCube and he repeatedly says that not enough people have broadband and that such games are too expensive before changing the topic to “communication games” like Animal Crossing and touting Game Boy Advance and GameCube connectivity. At one point he explicitly says he’s not interested in making online games. This view somewhat softens later to explanations that online games are exclusive to too small a group.

Mr. Miyamoto mentions Mario being more mature in Super Mario Sunshine which gets some attention, but this amounts to Mario’s look changing to be a bit less childish. He later says he regrets how hard and unfriendly Sunshine was to new players.

The biggest controversy by far is The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’s cel shaded graphics. There are many snide questions about them and his answer is usually to say that it will feel natural once you’re playing it. This ties in with Grand Theft Auto III’s release and huge success as many question why Nintendo isn’t making more mature games and Mr. Miyamoto responds that Nintendo does not make violent games while emphasizing that their games are for everyone, not just children.

It’s during this time that he explicitly states that he doesn’t like role-playing games because it’s not fun to be so bound, and that anyone can be good at them.

Promotion for the DS begins and the most common selling point seems to be how easy it to use because of the touch screen.

 

2005-2009

Major Releases: Nintendogs, Mario Kart DS, Wii, Wii Sports, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Super Mario Galaxy, Wii Fit, Wii Music, New Super Mario Bros. Wii

Overview: Nintendo begins moving towards a more casual audience as the DS becomes a hit and the Wii also launches to strong sales. Mr. Miyamoto talks quite a bit about how much his wife, who doesn’t like playing games, loves Nintendogs. More mainstream press starts to want to interview Mr. Miyamoto and talk about the DS and Wii. This era sees the start of Iwata Asks.

2005 brings the 20th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. and there is an interview once again diving into the history of its creation, but overall there is not much made of it.

As he talks about the Wii and the Wii Remote he reiterates many times that game controllers have had too many buttons and it was too confusing. This led to the gaming industry only appealing to a core audience. He starts talking about gaming’s poor reputation and how fewer people are playing games because they’re too complicated. The stereotypical image of a gamer is brought up several times, which he wants the Wii to change. Several times he mentions idea of watching someone play the Wii and wanting to join in, and the Wii being a living room device.

Many interviewers ask Mr. Miyamoto about the Wii’s relatively poor graphics and he says that not everyone has a high definition television and that it is expensive to make such games.

 

2010-2014

Major Releases: Super Mario Galaxy 2, 3DS, Steel Diver, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, Star Fox 64 3D, Super Mario 3D Land, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Wii U, New Super Mario Bros. U, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, Pikmin 3, Super Mario 3D World

Overview: There are more than 180 entries here, making it the largest page. As gaming magazines wane, more and more outlets want to talk to Mr. Miyamoto and make videos with him, and Nintendo starts making use of social media and making more promotional videos with its developers. The first Nintendo Directs happen during this time and Mr. Miyamoto eventually makes appearances in them, including doing some comedic skits.

As Mr. Miyamoto becomes more of a spokesman and executive he becomes less involved with making games, acting as producer on fewer titles. At one point he says that he spends more time on ideas than content. The 3DS and the Wii U launch during this period and both have rocky beginnings, but he does a lot of promotion for them.

The big topic in this era is Mr. Miyamoto’s retirement. During a Wired interview he says that he tells everyone he is going to retire to get them used to the idea of him not being around. This causes enough worry that Nintendo’s stock price goes down and they quickly issue a statement saying that Mr. Miyamoto is not in fact retiring.

Super Mario Bros.’ 25th anniversary receives a lot more fanfare than the 20th, with multiple interviews and videos, while The Legend of Zelda’s 25th anniversary sees the release of The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia, for which he writes the foreward.

Many of these interviews promote the 3DS and its stereoscopic 3D. Being able to accurately judge where you’re going to land when jumping in 3D is something that’s brought up many times.

The Wii U’s promotion centers on the living room experience and providing a way to access entertainment, something that was brought up with the Wii, but not as often. Much is made about being to play the Wii U even when someone else is using the living room television, and about using the GamePad as a remote. As time goes on he admits that Nintendo took a long time to design the Wii U and that they have had issues setting up the development environment, so game releases have been slow.

Miiverse launches and he uses it to announce the beginning and ending of the Year of Luigi. There are also several posts about Pikmin 3 and its Secret Memos.

There’s quite a few Pikmin 3 interviews that took a while to get translated by fans, or were never translated at all. Meanwhile there’s a lot more promotion for Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre than you would expect.

He now describes a typical game as taking 50-60 people to make.

 

2015-2019

Major Releases: Super Mario Maker, Star Fox Zero, Star Fox Guard, Super Mario Run, Super Nintendo World, Switch, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, Super Mario Odyssey

Overview: Mr. Miyamoto continues to be less heavily involved in game development, but he still has over 80 appearances in these 5 years. Nintendo is making Treehouse at E3 videos where they interview developers. More nontraditional outlets, such as popular YouTubers, interview Mr. Miyamoto. A common theme is supporting younger developers at Nintendo.

He says he could never be a film director, and later says that Nintendo might look into making movies. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was announced in 2018, but Mr. Miyamoto only talks very briefly about it.

The Super Mario Bros. 30th anniversary event coincides with the release of Super Mario Maker and there are many retrospective looks at the series alongside promotion of the new game and discussion of how to design Mario levels.

There are quite a few Star Fox Zero and Star Fox Guard interviews, especially in March 2016, including a Nintendo Direct where he talks about it. He goes into detail about how intuitive the controls are and how Star Fox Zero is an authentic action game. He later has to explain why the games are delayed.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild starts to get promoted heavily. Mr. Miyamoto talks about how many little details come together to create a realistic world and how much freedom the player has, like the original game. He once again has to explain why the game is delayed.

Before Breath of the Wild comes out Super Mario Run is released in late 2016 with comparatively little advance notice, a game he hopes reaches the broadest possible audience due to its simplicity. He emphasizes that there are no microtransactions so that parents will feel safe letting their children play. He shares his thoughts about Nintendo making mobile games and Pokémon Go’s success.

The NES Classic Edition also releases in late 2016 and there are more retrospective interviews about some of the games he worked on.

Super Nintendo World is announced in late 2016, though we won’t hear more about it for a while.

He describes the Switch as a combination of different play styles that Nintendo has used, but overall he doesn’t do a lot of interviews about it.

Although he was only a “supervisor” on Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle he is interviewed about it several times. He was careful about letting Ubisoft use the Mario IP, but seems quite pleased with the game.

 

2020-2024

Major Releases: Super Nintendo World, Super Mario 3D All-Stars, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Pikmin 4

Overview: Mr. Miyamoto is rarely interviewed to promote specific games by this time, and the big E3 roundtable Q & As are a thing of the past, though he does have two big non-game projects to talk about. During this time he serves as an ambassador for Nintendo more than he talks about the specifics of game design.

Super Mario Bros.’ 35th anniversary is celebrated with more retrospective interviews and the release of Super Mario 3D All-Stars, though he seems to have barely been involved with its promotion.

Mr. Miyamoto does a tour of Super Nintendo World and there are many interviews about it as more locations open.

There are several Nintendo Directs, and eventually interviews, discussing The Super Mario Bros. Movie. After decades of hearing it he says he doesn’t like being called the Steven Spielberg of gaming.

Pikmin 4 releases and Mr. Miyamoto makes his first appearance in a Ask the Developer interview.

Charles Martinet is replaced as the voice of Mario and Mr. Miyamoto talks about his new role as Mario Ambassador.

Two more movies are announced, the sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie and a The Legend of Zelda movie.

 

More About the Archive and its Entries

I have not included anything that someone has said about Mr. Miyamoto, or their recollections of something they heard him say. This would not only make this archive unmanageable, but such recollections are less reliable than a recorded interview. Minor appearances where Mr. Miyamoto does not speak are usually not included, but may be if they are deemed important.

Final names for games and systems are always used, even if they are referred to by code names in the interview. I also use the full name of a game, series, or peripheral at least once before shortening it. North American English names are used when possible, though not when a very specific thing like the Famicom Disk System and not the Nintendo Entertainment System is being talked about.

I generally use the earliest recorded archive of a web page possible. A surprising amount of these have additional photographs that have disappeared from the article over time.

Mr. Miyamoto uses the term “network game” or “network play” a lot and I have changed most of these to “online”. I don’t know if this is a translation quirk or somewhat old-fashioned word usage on his part, but it does consistently seem to be how he refers to online features.

Abbreviations are generally avoided to make things easier to read for those not familiar with various gaming jargon.

This archive will be updated periodically as more is found and Mr. Miyamoto continues to give new interviews, but don’t expect up to the minute reporting.

How Entries are Formatted

The publication and the title, when applicable, are on top in big blue letters. If the article is a publication reporting on another publication’s article or if the entry has not been translated it will also appear here in parenthesis.

Publication Date: This is when the entry was published, not necessarily when it took place. Magazines are listed as the month that appears on the cover, but these are often a few weeks ahead of when they actually start to go on sale. Sometimes only a year is known.

Subject(s): The major topics, including games and systems being talked about.

Format: The most common format will be a transcribed interview, where every word of an interview has been written down. Video and radio interviews are just listed as “Interview”. Q & As involve a group of people taking turns asking questions. There are also presentations, which are speeches and often include game play footage. Demonstrations involve someone playing the game in real time. There are a few essays, which refers to written works even if they are very short. There are some social media posts from Miiverse and X.

People: This field lists the people involved, including interviewers, translators, and other people people being interviewed. It generally does not include people who weren’t there when Mr. Miyamoto was being interviewed. Some interviews also include quotes from people providing further context on a story, they are not included. Sometimes it seems as though an interviewer will get to ask several people a few questions over e-mail, and those answers are mixed together in an article. In those cases only the interviewer and Mr. Miyamoto are included in this field.

Link: A link to the source in English. I always try to get the original whenever possible rather than reports about it, but it’s not always possible.

Archive Link: A link to an archived version. Many sites change how their URLs are formatted or just go offline over the years, so it’s important to keep a more permanent version.

Japanese Link: The original source in Japanese, whenever possible. Occasionally this is a language other than Japanese.

Japanese Archive Link: An archive of the original source in whatever language.

Scans: If the entry is about a magazine interview I will provide scans whenever possible.

Translator: I want to make sure the people who do the hard work of translation are explicitly credited here whenever possible. This field only applies to non-official sources, or fan translations.

Notes: Pertinent context or other information often goes here, such as what event an interview took place at.

Summary: It’s important to note that these summaries only include Mr. Miyamoto’s statements, I have not included others who are part of the interview or event and sometimes I have reworded things a bit to include enough of the question to provide context. Please do not quote from the summaries as if they are direct quotes from Mr. Miyamoto, refer to the original source.

For summaries I have tried to be concise while keeping interesting details. Always check the source if something sounds odd or doesn’t make sense.

“He” in the summary will almost always always refer to Shigeru Miyamoto, and I have tried to make it very obvious when it isn’t. “They” generally refers to Nintendo or the team Mr. Miyamoto was working with.

I generally skip over statements about not being to answer a question, thanking someone, hoping that players enjoy a game, or descriptions of how the controls work.

 

How You Can Help

If you find an interview, video, social media post, book passage or whatever else where Mr. Miyamoto speaks or writes that is not covered in the archive please contact me on twitter or e-mail me at thespritecell@gmail.com. Also feel free to contact me if you see a typo or if you spot some kind of formatting issue.

There are also still several untranslated interviews in Japanese, French, Spanish, and more, easily findable by text searching for “untranslated”. If you have the knowledge necessary consider translating one of these.

 

1985-1989 | 1990-1994 | 1995-1999 | 2000-2004 | 2005-2009 | 2010-2014 | 2015-2019 | 2020-2024

Introduction

When making my 25 Years of Games mega-project I needed a good source that had genres for thousands of games. After looking around a bit I decided MobyGames was as good as I was going to find, despite some issues I had with it. It kept nagging at me though, was there really nothing better out there than MobyGames’ 10 (at the time) genre system? The idea that we can fit all the varied video games out there into a handful of nice genres that communicate meaningful and useful information continued to intrigue me.

In the years since I have found myself poking around other sites, checking out how they handle genres. I have also started and abandoned a few projects where I compare how a handful of games are categorized by genre amongst several sources. I wasn’t sure what exactly this was going to be when I started it, and it has become much larger than I ever envisioned it could be.

For this project I have scoured how a large number of sources handle video game genres. Video game databases, review outlets, academic papers, digital stores, video game award shows, I wanted to sample everything I could. Not just what genres they use, but also basic information about the source for context, which inclusions and exclusions stand out, how the information is presented, other genre-adjacent information, and my thoughts on their genre system. I will mostly be discussing the shortcomings and oddities of each approach, fully recognizing that there is no perfect way to sort games that accurately and fully describes them and that many of these sources are not setting out to do so. Please don’t take any of my criticisms as mean-spirited, I’m sure genres are not the top priority for any of these sources. It’s just not useful or interesting to comment on the basic things they all get right, after all.

All genre names will be capitalized, even lists straight from the source, so it will always be clear when I am talking about a genre versus a concept, like sports. When I use the phrase “video game” I am including computer, mobile, and other electronic games. I will be using Spore (2008) as an example when possible because it is a difficult game to categorize, with several different types of gameplay.

Wikis and Game Databases

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has several ways of breaking video games down into genres and is difficult to get a handle on. As it is being edited by thousands of people around the world with constantly changing ideas it is also in constant flux, making small adjustments constantly, and there is no definitive source of video game genres to draw from. There is no exact way to know how many games have pages on Wikipedia, but I have seen estimates between 27,600 and 39,000.

List of Video Game Genres

The list of video game genres has 12 genres, subdivided into 76 subgenres and is not very consistent with the rest of Wikipedia, but is very inclusive of small genres. The full list of genres:

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  • 1 Action
    • 1.1 Platform games
    • 1.2 Shooter games
    • 1.3 Fighting games
    • 1.4 Beat ’em up games
    • 1.5 Stealth game
    • 1.6 Survival games
    • 1.7 Rhythm games
    • 1.8 Battle Royale games
  • 2 Action-Adventure
    • 2.1 Survival Horror
    • 2.2 Metroidvania
  • 3 Adventure
    • 3.1 Text Adventures
    • 3.2 Graphic Adventures
    • 3.3 Visual Novels
    • 3.4 Interactive Movie
    • 3.5 Real-Time 3D Adventures
  • 4 Puzzle
    • 4.1 Breakout Clone game
    • 4.2 Logical game
      • 4.2.1 Physics game
      • 4.2.2 Coding game
    • 4.3 Trial-and-Error / Exploration
    • 4.4 Hidden Object game
    • 4.5 Reveal the Picture game
    • 4.6 Tile-Matching game
    • 4.7 Traditional Puzzle game
    • 4.8 Puzzle-Platform game
  • 5 Role-Playing
    • 5.1 Action RPG
    • 5.2 MMORPG
    • 5.3 Roguelikes
    • 5.4 Tactical RPG
    • 5.5 Sandbox RPG
    • 5.6 First-Person Party-Based RPG
    • 5.7 JRPG
    • 5.8 Monster Tamer
  • 6 Simulation
    • 6.1 Construction and Management Simulation
    • 6.2 Life Simulation
    • 6.3 Vehicle Simulation
  • 7 Strategy
    • 7.1 4X game
    • 7.2 Artillery game
    • 7.3 Auto Battler (Auto chess)
    • 7.4 Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA)
    • 7.5 Real-Time Strategy (RTS)
    • 7.6 Real-Time Tactics (RTT)
    • 7.7 Tower Defense
    • 7.8 Turn-Based Strategy (TBS)
    • 7.9 Turn-Based Tactics (TBT)
    • 7.10 Wargame
    • 7.11 Grand Strategy Wargame
  • 8 Sports
    • 8.1 Racing
    • 8.2 Sports game
    • 8.3 Competitive
    • 8.4 Sports-Based Fighting
  • 9 MMO
  • 10 Other Notable Genres
    • 10.1 Board Game or Card Game
    • 10.2 Casino game
    • 10.3 Casual games
    • 10.4 Digital Collectible Card game
    • 10.5 Gacha game
    • 10.6 Horror game
    • 10.7 Idle game
    • 10.8 Logic game
    • 10.9 Party game
    • 10.10 Photography game
    • 10.11 Programming game
    • 10.12 Social deduction game
    • 10.13 Trivia game
    • 10.14 Typing game
  • 11 Video Game Genres by Purpose
    • 11.1 Advergame
    • 11.2 Art game
    • 11.3 Casual game
    • 11.4 Christian game
    • 11.5 Educational game
    • 11.6 Esports
    • 11.7 Exergame
    • 11.8 Personalized game
    • 11.9 Serious game
  • 12 Sandbox / Open World games
    • 12.1 Sandbox
    • 12.2 Creative
    • 12.3 Open World

Unlike many of the  other sources we’ll be looking at it does not shy away from relatively new genres or ones that seem to have sprouted from fan discussions, such as Metroidvania, Monster Tamer,  Roguelike, or Auto Battler. In fact, Auto Battler/Auto Chess is likely the newest video game genre, the page for it was made in 2020. Wikipedia is also the only resource I found that uses it as a genre.

MMO seems like a strange choice for a top level genre, as all massively multiplayer games are also some other genre, but has been made in a way that many people can it play online. MMORPG also exists under Role-Playing.

The Other Notable Genres is a kludgy way to fit miscellaneous things together, and many would fit under Strategy, Simulation, or Action.

Video Game Genres by Purpose contains subgenres relating to why people play games for reasons other than pure entertainment, such as Educational, Esports, and Advergame. This is a valid way to categorize games, but does it belong on this list? Genre to me is first and foremost a way to describe gameplay. There are many ways to categorize games, they don’t all have to be genres.

Interestingly, there are separate top level genres for Action, Adventure, and Action-Adventure. The Adventure genre has been used for a long time, but the definition is one of the more variable. Here on Wikipedia it is defined as games that don’t rely on reflexes or action. Myst is the given example but it seems to me like chess would technically fit this particular definition as well. Action-Adventure has the subgenres Metroidvania and Survival Horror and is defined as combing action and adventure elements and often utilizing puzzles, exploration, and tools. This definition can cover a huge number of games.

Five years ago the list looked a bit different. MMO was under Other Notable Genres, the Puzzle genre does not exist, but Idle Games does. There is a “Cultural differences” section under Role-Playing explaining the difference between Japanese and Western made RPGs, but the current list has JRPG as a distinct subgenre. Whether JRPGs are an actual subgenre has been a contentious issue on this list for years.

There is also a video game subsection on the general list of genres that seems to be updated less often and has its own thing going on. In short it only includes 6 genres, “Action” and “Adventure and Action-Adventure” exist under the top level Action genre, Puzzle is put under “Other”, there’s no Sports or Racing, and overall seems neglected.

Template: Video Game Genre

There is also a template of video game genres, used on the bottom of individual genre pages. While it has some similarities to the list of genres, it is essentially a completely different way to divide up genres. There are 11 top level genres, including an “Other”, and a related concepts section which has some things that are called genres in other places on Wikipedia. There are even some third level genres in parenthesis, which I have instead rendered with additional indentation:

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  • Action
    • Beat ’em Up
      • Hack and Slash
    • Fighting
      • Platform
    • Maze
      • Pac-Man Clone
    • Platform
      • Endless Runner
    • Shooter
      • First-Person
      • Third-Person
      • Light Gun
      • Shoot ’em Up
      • Arena
      • Hero
      • Tactical
    • Survival
      • Battle Royale
  • Action-Adventure
    • Grand Theft Auto Clone
    • Immersive Sim
    • Metroidvania
    • Stealth
  • Adventure
    • Graphic Adventure
    • Escape the Room
    • Interactive Fiction
    • Interactive Film
    • Visual Novel
  • Horror
    • Survival Horror
  • MMO
    • MMOFPS
    • MMORPG
    • MMORTS
    • MUD
    • MOBA
    • MMOTBS
  • Role-Playing
    • Action Role-Playing
      • Soulslike
    • Dungeon Crawl
    • Roguelike
    • Tactial Role-Playing
  • Simulation
    • Construction and Management
      • Business
      • City-Building
      • Theme Park
      • Government
    • Falling Sand
    • Life Simulation
      • Dating Sim
      • Virtual Pet
      • God
      • Social Simulation
  • Strategy
    • 4X
    • Auto Battler
    • Multiplayer online battle arena
    • Real-Time Strategy
      • Time Management
    • Real-Time Tactics
    • Tower Defense
    • Turn-Based Strategy
    • Turn-Based Tactics
      • Artillery
    • Wargame
      • Grand Strategy Wargame
  • Sports
    • American Football
    • Association Football
    • Australian Rules Football
    • Baseball
    • Basketball
    • Cricket
    • Fighting
      • Professional Wrestling
      • Sumo
    • Fishing
    • Golf
    • Ice Hockey
    • Racing
      • Kart Racing
      • Sim Racing
    • Rugby Union
    • Snowboarding
    • Volleyball
  • Vehicle Simulation
    • Flight Simulator
      • Amateur
      • Combat
      • Space
      • Lunar Lander
    • Driving Simulator
    • Submarine Simulator
    • Train Simulator
    • Vehicular Combat
  • Other Genres
    • Deck-Building
      • Roguelike Deck-Building
    • Digital Tabletop
      • Digital Collectible Card
    • Erotic
      • Eroge
    • Exergame
    • Horror
    • Incremental
    • Music
      • Rhythm
    • Non-Game
    • Party
    • Programming
    • Puzzle
      • Hidden Object
      • Sokoban
      • Tile-Matching
    • Typing
    • Chess
      • Shogi
    • Alternate Reality
    • Quiz
  • Related Concepts
    • AAA Game
    • Advertising
      • Advergame
    • Arcade Game
      • Snake
    • Art Game
    • Audio Game
    • Casual Game
    • Christian Game
    • Crossover Game
    • Educational Game
    • FMV
    • Gamification
    • Indie Game
    • Multiplayer Video Game
    • Nonlinear Gameplay
      • Open World
      • Sandbox Game
    • Nonviolent Video Game
    • Online Game
      • Browser Game
      • Online Gambling
      • Social-Network Game
    • Pervasive Game
    • Serious Game
    • Toys-To-Life
    • Twitch Gameplay
    • Virtual Reality Game
    • Video Game Clone
    • Cooperative Video Game

With over 100 genres this genre breakdown feels a bit like people remembering games that don’t exactly fit anywhere else and making them a genre. Sand Falling? Lunar Lander? MMORTS? It raises an interesting point about how exhaustive a full list of video game genres should be. Even if there have technically been a dozen games over several decades that could be lumped together, does it make sense to do so? And what makes a game important enough to call similar games “clones”?

Almost all of these do actually have Wikipedia pages with examples listed, no matter how obscure. The more obscure genre concepts are rarely ever mentioned on the individual game pages they supposedly apply to. For example, Super Metroid is described as Action-Adventure in its infobox, despite being one of the foundational examples of Metroidvanias. It does have the Metroidvania category, though.

Puzzle being relegated to Other seems very odd to me. It sure has more subgenres than Horror, which is more of a theme anyway.

Even though Amateur Flight Simulators are distinct enough from regular Flight Simulators to be their own genre, Japanese Role-Playing Games are apparently not distinct enough.

Genre Pages

While Wikipedia’s list of genres is a noble attempt at creating a comprehensive guide it is not reflective of how Wikipedia actually categorizes individual game pages. Category: Video game genres contains the 103 pages (while there are 105 pages in this category, two are not pages about a specific genre) categorized as being pages about a video game genre. Several genres that are not on the list of genres are notable enough to have their own Wikipedia page such as Masocore, Roguelike Deck-Building Game, Soulslike, and Kart Racing. On the other hand, some genres from the list do not have their own page, such as Text Adventure and Breakout Clone Game.

Full list of genres with Wikipedia pages that are categorized as such:

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4X, Action game, Action Role-Playing game, Action-Adventure game, Adventure game, Alternate Reality game, Arena Shooter, Art game, Artillery game, Auto Battler, Battle Royale game, Beat ’em Up, Bishōjo game, Browser game, Business Simulation game, Casual game, Christian video game, City-Building game, Collectible Card game, Combat Flight Simulation game, Computer Wargame, Construction and Management Simulation, Dating Sim, Digital Tabletop game, Dungeon Crawl, Endless Runner, Eroge, Escape the Room, Falling-Sand game, Fighting game, First-Person Shooter, Girls’ video games, God game, Government Simulation game, Grand Strategy Wargame, Grand Theft Auto Clone, Hack and Slash, Hero Shooter, Horror game, Hyper-Casual game, Immersive Sim, Incremental game, Interactive Film, Kaizo, Kart Racing game, Life Simulation game, Light Gun Shooter, Masocore, Massively Multiplayer Online First-Person Shooter game, Massively Multiplayer Online game, Massively Multiplayer Online Real-Time Strategy game, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing game, Metroidvania, MUD, Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, Multiverse (video games), Music video game, Non-Game, Nonviolent video game, Olympics in video games, Otome game, Photography game, Platform Fighter, Platform game, Programming game, Psychological Drama, Psychological Horror, Hidden Object game, Puzzle video game, Racing game, Real-Time Strategy, Real-Time Tactics, Rhythm game, Roguelike, Roguelike Deck-Building game, Role-Playing video game, Sandbox game, Shoot ’em Up, Shooter game, Sim Racing, Simulation video game, Social Network game, Social Simulation game, Soulslike, Space Flight Simulation game, Sports video game, Stealth game, Strategy video game, Survival game, Survival horror, Tactical Role-Playing game, Tactical Shooter, Third-Person Shooter, Time Management game, Tower Defense, Turn-Based Strategy, Turn-Based Tactics, Typing game, Vehicle Simulation game, List of vehicular combat games, Vertically Scrolling video game, Virtual Pet, Visual Novel

Categories

There is not just a category for video game genre pages, but also a category for genres applied to individual game pages, which is all a bit of a confusing mess. Category: Video Games by Genre is a “container category” with 48 top level genres, with many having more nested within. For example, the Health Video Games category contains the Fitness Games category, which contains the Four-Panel Dance Video Games category, which contains the Dance Dance Revolution Video Games category.

How it works is Wikipedia pages for games have infoboxes with a genre field. Any genres entered there are added as categories. There are also other genre categories added manually. These categories are usually subcategories of a larger category. While infoboxes on Wikipedia’s game pages usually link to pages that are categorized as game genres, this is not always the case. Dreams has the “Game creation system” genre, the page of which is contained within the Video game engines and Video game development software categories. You can see all of the categories at the bottom of any page on Wikipedia.

The full list of top level categories of genres:

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Action video games, Action-Adventure games, Adventure games, Art games, Battle Royale games, Beat ’em Ups, Black Comedy video games, Cinematic Platform games, Construction and Management Simulation games, Digital Tabletop games, Dress-Up video games, Educational video games, Eroge, Fighting games, Hack and Slash games, Health video games, Horror video games, Immersive Sims, Incremental games, Interactive Movie video games, Metroidvania games, Music video games, Mystery video games, Neo-Noir video games, Non-Games, Nonviolent video games, Open-World video games, Party video games, Pinball video games, Platform games, Psychological Horror games, Puzzle video games, Puzzle-Platform games, Quiz video games, Racing video games, Roguelike video games, Role-Playing video games, Shooter video games, Simulation video games, Social Deduction video games, Soulslike video games, Sports video games, Stealth video games, Strategy video games, Survival video games, Tactical Role-Playing video games, Typing video games, Video Games Based on Musicians

While many of the top level categories here correspond to widely recognized, broad genres, others just don’t fit within anything else, like Neo-Noir Video Games, Video Games Based on Musicians, or Black Comedy Video Games.

The page for the video game infobox template, which describes how to fill out the genre field, states that the genre listed in the infobox should include genres as used by the developer or publisher, or how reliable sources classify it. It specifically states it should not include “broad gameplay mechanics that are frequently confused with genres, such as open world”, which is inconsistent with Wikipedia’s own list of genres, Wikipedia’s video game genre template, and Wikipedia’s video game categories, which all have an Open World or Sandbox listing.

Spore is classified as a God Game, Life Simulation, and Real-Time Strategy in its infobox, and these genres all have their own pages. If you scroll down to the bottom you’ll see that it also has categories that could be considered genres such as Biological Simulation Video Games and Science Fiction Video Games (I don’t think Science Fiction really qualifies as a genre, but others disagree).

There is also a category for video game themes, which has some potential overlap with genre, such as the Kaiju and Professional Wrestling themes.

MobyGames

MobyGames has been in operation for over 23 years and aims to be a comprehensive database of video game information. It has either 147,000 or 307,000 games, depending on if you count multiplatform releases as one game or not. Keep in mind I was not able to determine which way any other database in this study counts their games.

Anyone can propose an edit to a page on MobyGames, but proposed edits have to be accepted by someone in the “approver” group. In some ways it is like Wikipedia, but with much fewer people doing a lot of work in a very specific, and often opaque, way. I have used MobyGames for genre information for several projects, as I found it to be more comprehensive and consistent than other sites, even if I wished some things were done differently.

MobyGame’s 14 genres currently are:

Action, Adventure, Compilation, DLC / Add-on, Educational, Gambling, Idle, Puzzle, Racing / Driving, Role-Playing (RPG), Simulation, Special Edition, Sports, Strategy

DLC / Add-on and Special Edition seem to be more bookkeeping than proper genres, as these have separate entries from the games they are relevant to, and every page requires the genre field to be filled. So 12 genres might be more accurate.

Action is incredibly broad by MobyGame’s standards, including Rhythm games, Platformers, Shooters, and Fighting games. Many Sports, Racing / Driving, and Role-Playing games also have Action as a genre.
Adventure is here defined a game that is focused on decision over action.
Detailed on the genre page are other attributes that games can have, some of which could be considered genres too. Of particular note is the gameplay attribute, which includes many familiar genre names such as 4X, Action RPG, Japanese-Style RPG (JRPG), and Metroidvania. The naming is a bit odd, all genres describe gameplay, and the gameplay field contains more genres. There is a sports themes attribute with all of the various sports you could think of. Narrative theme/topic also has Horror and Survival, commonly used as genres.

Spore has the Action, Role-Playing (RPG), Simulation, and Strategy genres, and the gameplay field has Life / Social Simulation.

MobyGames has been very cautious with adding new genres, Internet Archive’s earliest snapshot of the MobyGame’s genre page  from 2003 has 8 genres:

Action, Adventure, Educational, Racing / Driving, Role-Playing (RPG), Simulation, Sports, Strategy
The old description for Adventure notes that RPGs are a subgenre of Adventure games, which is odd since RPGs are also a top level genre here.

GameFAQs

Created in 1995, GameFAQs hosts guides, message boards, questions and answers, reviews, and other game information for over 200,000 games.

GameFAQs uses 10 top-level genres (also called “category” in some places on the site) and 1 to 3 further levels of subgenres:

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Action
Action » Arcade
Action » Beat-‘Em-Up
Action » Beat-‘Em-Up » 2D
Action » Beat-‘Em-Up » 3D
Action » Fighting
Action » Fighting » 2D
Action » Fighting » 3D
Action » General
Action » Pinball
Action » Platformer
Action » Platformer » 2D
Action » Platformer » 3D
Action » Platformer » Metroidvania
Action » Rhythm
Action » Rhythm » Dancing
Action » Rhythm » Music
Action » Shooter
Action » Shooter » First-Person
Action » Shooter » First-Person » Arcade
Action » Shooter » First-Person » Tactical
Action » Shooter » Light Gun
Action » Shooter » Rail
Action » Shooter » Shoot-‘Em-Up
Action » Shooter » Shoot-‘Em-Up » Horizontal
Action » Shooter » Shoot-‘Em-Up » Top-Down
Action » Shooter » Shoot-‘Em-Up » Vertical
Action » Shooter » Third-Person
Action » Shooter » Third-Person » Arcade
Action » Shooter » Third-Person » Tactical
Action Adventure
Action Adventure » General
Action Adventure » Linear
Action Adventure » Open-World
Action Adventure » Sandbox
Action Adventure » Survival
Adventure
Adventure » 3D
Adventure » 3D » First-Person
Adventure » 3D » Third-Person
Adventure » General
Adventure » Point-and-Click
Adventure » Text
Adventure » Visual Novel
Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous » Application
Miscellaneous » Board / Card Game
Miscellaneous » Compilation
Miscellaneous » Demo Disc
Miscellaneous » Edutainment
Miscellaneous » Exercise / Fitness
Miscellaneous » Gambling
Miscellaneous » General
Miscellaneous » Party / Minigame
Miscellaneous » Trivia / Game Show
Puzzle
Puzzle » Action
Puzzle » General
Puzzle » Hidden Object
Puzzle » Logic
Puzzle » Matching
Puzzle » Stacking
Racing
Racing » Arcade
Racing » Arcade » Automobile
Racing » Arcade » Futuristic
Racing » Arcade » Other
Racing » General
Racing » Simulation
Racing » Simulation » Automobile
Racing » Simulation » Other
Role-Playing
Role-Playing » Action RPG
Role-Playing » General
Role-Playing » Japanese-Style
Role-Playing » Massively Multiplayer
Role-Playing » Roguelike
Role-Playing » Trainer
Role-Playing » Western-Style
Simulation
Simulation » Flight
Simulation » Flight » Civilian
Simulation » Flight » Combat
Simulation » General
Simulation » Marine
Simulation » Marine » Civilian
Simulation » Marine » Combat
Simulation » Space
Simulation » Space » Civilian
Simulation » Space » Combat
Simulation » Vehicle
Simulation » Vehicle » Civilian
Simulation » Vehicle » Combat
Simulation » Vehicle » Train
Simulation » Virtual
Simulation » Virtual » Career
Simulation » Virtual » Pet
Simulation » Virtual » Virtual Life
Sports
Sports » General
Sports » Individual
Sports » Individual » Athletics
Sports » Individual » Biking
Sports » Individual » Billiards
Sports » Individual » Bowling
Sports » Individual » Combat
Sports » Individual » Combat » Boxing / Martial Arts
Sports » Individual » Combat » Wrestling
Sports » Individual » Golf
Sports » Individual » Golf » Arcade
Sports » Individual » Golf » Sim
Sports » Individual » Horse Racing
Sports » Individual » Nature
Sports » Individual » Nature » Fishing
Sports » Individual » Nature » Hunting
Sports » Individual » Other
Sports » Individual » Skate / Skateboard
Sports » Individual » Ski / Snowboard
Sports » Individual » Surf / Wakeboard
Sports » Individual » Tennis
Sports » Team
Sports » Team » Baseball
Sports » Team » Baseball » Arcade
Sports » Team » Baseball » Sim
Sports » Team » Basketball
Sports » Team » Basketball » Arcade
Sports » Team » Basketball » Sim
Sports » Team » Cricket
Sports » Team » Football
Sports » Team » Football » Arcade
Sports » Team » Football » Sim
Sports » Team » Futuristic
Sports » Team » Ice Hockey
Sports » Team » Ice Hockey » Arcade
Sports » Team » Ice Hockey » Sim
Sports » Team » Other
Sports » Team » Rugby
Sports » Team » Soccer
Sports » Team » Soccer » Arcade
Sports » Team » Soccer » Management
Sports » Team » Soccer » Sim
Sports » Team » Volleyball
Strategy
Strategy » General
Strategy » Management
Strategy » Management » Business / Tycoon
Strategy » Management » Government
Strategy » Real-Time
Strategy » Real-Time » Command
Strategy » Real-Time » Defense
Strategy » Real-Time » General
Strategy » Real-Time » MOBA
Strategy » Real-Time » Tactics
Strategy » Turn-Based
Strategy » Turn-Based » 4X
Strategy » Turn-Based » Artillery
Strategy » Turn-Based » Card Battle
Strategy » Turn-Based » General
Strategy » Turn-Based » Tactics

If you don’t include the top-level genres (I could not find any games that were only described using just the top level) there are 149 total subgenres. Every top-level genre has a General subgenre in the second level which serves largely as “everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else”. GameFAQs does not provide descriptions of its genres.

There are some interesting divisions within subgenres though it seems a bit arbitrary as to what is given a 2D and 3D split. Fighting and Platformer sure, those play differently in 2D and 3D, but so do many others that don’t have a split.

Only a few Sports get divided in between Arcade and Sim, but there are definitely more, like Boxing and Tennis, that could be.

I think Action Adventure may have been a more popular term in the past, perhaps we will see it more often with older sources.

Overall the various ways genres are broken down are thoughtful and cover most games well, but it could be so much more descriptive if a game could have as many genres as was necessary instead of just one.

Spore here is Strategy » General. The decision between Simulation and Strategy was probably difficult, and General here is the best you could do for a game with so many play styles, but it goes to show how limited a system is where a game has to choose one genre.

IGDB

The Internet Games Database was founded in 2015 and is much like MobyGames as it is a database of game information and accepts edit suggestions from anyone with an account, as well as some social features. In 2019 it was bought by and integrated into Twitch. They claim to have over 213,000 unique games catalogued.

IGDB uses both a genre and a theme field, and games can have any number of either. First here are the 23 genres:

Adventure, Arcade, Card & Board Game, Fighting, Hack and Slash/Beat ’em Up, Indie, MOBA, Music, Pinball, Platform, Point-and-Click, Puzzle, Quiz/Trivia, Racing, Real Time Strategy (RTS), Role-Playing (RPG), Shooter, Simulator, Sport, Strategy, Tactical, Turn-Based Strategy (TBS), Visual Novel

The 22 Themes:

4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate), Action, Business, Comedy, Drama, Educational, Erotic, Fantasy, Historical, Horror, Kids, Mystery, Open World, Non-Fiction, Party, Romance, Sandbox, Science Fiction, Stealth, Survival, Thriller, Warfare

The biggest thing that sticks out to me here is the fact that Action is considered a theme and not a genre. Action is one of the ubiquitous video game genres, but looking at some games tagged as such I don’t even understand what it means for a game to be Action themed. Earthbound, Pac-Man, Mario Party 5, and random Pinball games all have Action as a theme. In fact, many of the other themes would be called genres on any other list.

Some of the themes make sense and could be applied to most genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Non-Fiction. These are how movie and book genres are divided up, but we generally use video game genres to describe gameplay. A separate theme field is not a bad idea, but I don’t understand the distinction here.

This is the first time we’ve seen Indie as a genre. A slippery and much argued about term for games, sometimes based on their publisher, but does it make sense as a genre? It certainly doesn’t make sense for a game’s sole genre to be “Indie”, and shouldn’t every genre be able to stand alone?

There is a page with their definitions of each genre. Indie is defined as being made by a small team, possibly without the support of publisher, and usually short. None of which speaks to gameplay. RPGs are said to include playing the role of a character (which many games do) and acting out a role in the narrative.

Reading the definitions for Strategy and Tactical it’s occurred to me that many of these video game resources treat them as different genres, but does that make sense? How many Strategy games are there where you set up big picture strategy but there’s no actual moment-to-moment or turn-to-turn tactical thinking? There are a few games you may call pure Tactics since there’s no permanent progression, where every battle is isolated and nothing carries over so you could possibly argue that it is not also a Strategy game. But these two are so intertwined, does it make sense to split them?

There is another field called mode which contains Battle Royale and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO). These were used as genres elsewhere, but it does make sense to list them alongside Co-Operative, Multiplayer, Single Player, and Split screen.

Spore is listed as Adventure, Real Time Strategy (RTS), Role-playing (RPG), Simulator, and Strategy. Five genres for Spore, a new record. The themes are 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate), Action, Comedy, Open world, and Science fiction.

Gameopedia

Gameopedia has a video game information database maintained by its employees, but they sell access to this and other game data to businesses. It seems like they are mostly targeting game publishers and advertisers. Everything is laid out very professionally and they regularly post long blog articles about the video game industry. They claim to have over 180,000 games in their database and have been around since 2008.

They use 22 genres and have a page with definitions:

Action, Adventure, Driving, Educational, Exergaming, Fighting, Flying, MMO, Music, Party, Platform, Puzzle, Racing, Real-World, Role-Playing, Shooter, Simple Activity, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Trivia, Virtual Life

Adventure is defined as games where you explore the world and experience the story through the protagonist’s eyes. They also may not be exhilarating, but more thoughtful, philosophical, or relaxed. This sounds very broad and doesn’t really cover the usual “narrative, not reflex focused” criteria that is more common.

Exergaming was a surprise to me, there can’t be a lot of games in this one, which makes the exclusion of some other, bigger, genres more puzzling.

Real-World here refers to games that simulate a “real world” game, such as Uno or poker. These would fall under a Strategy, Miscellaneous, or even Card Game genre in other systems.

Simple Activity was another genre I had not seen used. Their examples say it is for games where you draw, dress up, or cook, which sounds like what is commonly called a Simulation game. But then they are also defined by being stress-free and easy to learn which sounds like a much more casual type of game than something like SimCity. There is also Virtual Life which sounds similar to Simulation games too, but focused on mundane daily activities. The example is The Sims.

It’s not surprising that a company trying to sell data to other companies avoids using fan-made terms, which are often named after other games. Metroidvania and Roguelike are useful, descriptive terms, but they probably want to avoid using someone else’s IP.

I can’t tell you how they categorize Spore. There is not even pricing information on their website and so I was not able to look at what they have. I can show you these two promotional pictures that are probably representative of how genre information is displayed, though:

It looks like games can have as many genres as needed, as well as subgenres. Genres may be labeled as key feature, defining, notable, or element. There is a theme field as well, which has some overlap with genre.

GiantBomb

GaintBomb was started in 2008 and features videos, written articles, podcasts, and most importantly to this project, a game wiki with over 81,000 games. Edits need to be approved by a moderator before going live. There isn’t much in the way formal guidelines and there are no definitions of the genres they use, leaving it up to editors to figure out. The following 49 genres are used:

Action, Action-Adventure, Adventure, Baseball, Basketball, Billiards, Block-Breaking, Bowling, Boxing, Brawler, Card Game, Compilation, Cricket, Driving/Racing, Dual-Joystick Shooter, Educational, Fighting, First-Person Shooter, Fishing, Fitness, Flight Simulator, Football, Gambling, Golf, Hockey, Light-Gun Shooter, Minigame Collection, MMORPG, MOBA, Music/Rhythm, Pinball, Platformer, Puzzle, Real-Time Strategy, Role-Playing, Shoot ’em Up, Shooter, Simulation, Skateboarding, Snowboarding/Skiing, Soccer, Sports, Strategy, Surfing, Tennis, Text Adventure, Track & Field, Trivia/Board Game, Vehicular Combat, Wrestling

One thing that separates the small lists from the large ones is having to list every possible sport separately, though there is also a Sports genre. Most sport-related games on this wiki do not have the Sports genre, but some do. This is an issue with some of the larger genre lists, they contain both more general and more specific levels of detail without any hierarchy, and they aren’t used consistently. But we do have one of the rare appearances of the Boxing, Surfing, and Track & Field genres.

There is some wording that strikes me as odd. Block-Breaking is really talking about Arkanoid-like games, Dual-Joystick Shooters are overwhelmingly called Twin-Stick Shooters.

Shouldn’t any list of genres with Real-Time Strategy include Turn-Based Strategy too? Perhaps the more general Strategy genre is meant to hold all of the Turn-Based Strategy games.

GiantBomb also has a themes field for games, which again has a fair amount of overlap with genre.

Abstract, Adult, Alternate Historical, Anime, Aquatic, Civil War, Comedy, Comic Book, Crime, Cyberpunk, Dating, Egyptian, Espionage, Fantasy, Game Show, Horror, Management, Martial Arts, Mayan, Medieval, Modern Military, Motorsports, Post-Apoclyptic, Prehistoric, Sci-Fi, Steampunk, Superhero, Vietnam, Western, World War II

One of the relative few sites that does not consider Horror a genre, but a theme. Game Show and Quiz has also often been a genre.

Spore has Strategy, Adventure, and Simulation listed as genres, and Sci-Fi, Comedy, and Management as themes.

Rawg.io

Rawg.io describes itself as the biggest video game database and as having over 809,000 games. This is 677,000 more than IGDB, the second or third largest. The PC section has 491,000 games and for comparison the largest game store, Itch.io, has 600,000 total games. It is edited by users and seems to have a strong focus on community and social features. It uses the following 19 genres:

Action, Adventure, Arcade, Board Games, Card, Casual, Educational, Family, Fighting, Indie, Massively Multiplayer, Platformer, Puzzle, Racing, RPG, Shooter, Simulation, Sports, Strategy

Something I am realizing now is that the Arcade genre really refers to two different things. The machines you put quarters into (and their console ports) that had their heyday decades ago, and games that are mostly digital-only and made by indie developers that have simple arcadey action. Does it make sense to use Arcade for both? Arcade is also a system in many of these databases, and not every arcade game has the Arcade genre.

Board Games and Card are often put under Strategy or an Other genre.

Casual, Family, Indie, and Massively Multiplayer all strike me as genres that are not likely to be used on a fairly contained list.

Rawg also has a “tags” field. For every game I checked that has been released on Steam the tags were nearly identical to what Steam’s user editable tags are. This field is also user-editable, so it seems people just copy whatever Steam has listed. For games that are not on Steam there are on average much fewer tags and they seem to be less consistent.

Spore has the genres Simulation and Family. While it doesn’t have any particularly objectionable content I’m not sure why it is a “Family” game. The description for the Family genre is partially written in broken English but seems to say Family games are appropriate for everyone and not too hard or complicated. Strategy seems a better fit than Family.

TheGamesDB

TheGamesDB launched around 2010. I can’t find any information on how many games they have. The GAMEYE game collection tracking app seems use them as its game database. It is ostensibly user-edited with some oversight, but I couldn’t get any test edits to work. They have 28 genres (I have omitted the GBA and PSP Video genre, as those aren’t used for games):

Action, Adventure, Board, Construction and Management Simulation, Education, Family, Fighting, Flight Simulator, Horror, Life Simulation, MMO, Music, Party, Platform, Productivity, Puzzle, Quiz, Racing, Role-Playing, Sandbox, Shooter, Sports, Stealth, Strategy, Unofficial, Utility, Vehicle Simulation, Virtual Console

Unofficial seems to refer to unlicensed, homebrew, and bootleg games, but it is difficult to tell since you can not search by genre. There does not seem to be any page for describing genres, either. It seems like a recipe for bad data to allow user edits but also provide little to no guidelines or rules.

Virtual Console is a very odd choice to include, as that refers to a subsection of Nintendo’s online storefront on some systems.

There are four separate Simulation genres, but Sports is just one. It’s interesting how sometimes things are split up and sometimes they are not. TheGamesDB keeps a fairly large number of genres while also not splitting them up very much.

Spore has the Adventure and Life Simulation genre. Two is a small number of genres for Spore, and I would say Action, Sandbox, and Strategy would all be better choices.

Universal Videogame List

Universal Videogame List, or UVL, claims to be the biggest and oldest video game database. There is a counter of the number of games they have documented on the front page which currently sits at 151,000. This is fewer than at least GameFAQs, Gameopedia, IGDB, MobyGames (counting multiplatform releases as separate), and Rawg.io. According to their copyright notice they were founded in 1998, which makes them a bit younger than GameFAQs, but among the first.

The way UVL handles genres is unlike anywhere else. UVL has something called “groups” that games can be put into. One type of group is game genre.

The game genre page is broken into three parts, starting with genre theme which has 173 items. Many of these are “containers”, which seem to be considered too broad to be genres or just not proper genres despite being listed on the genre page. For example, the first genre theme you will see is Action, and that it has 0 games. Despite this, the Action page says “21 games” and clicking it will take you to a list of 21 games that do have the Action genre. Some links to container pages tell you that the page has games within it, and some do not even though they do. This page also says that it is the “Informal group for finding action sub-genres” and has the following subgenres: Action-Adventure, Action-RPG, Fighting, Platformer, and Shooter. Fighting and Shooter are also container groups. The Fighting page has One-on-One Fighting, Beat ’em Up (a container group itself), and Melee Combat Simulation as subgenres. Container groups are essentially genres that don’t have any games themselves (except they often do), just subgenres. There are subgenres that don’t have a higher-level container, as well.

Next, the genre page has an “entities” section with Audio Game, Collectathon, Main Game Types, and Maze. Three of these four entities look like more genres, and it’s hard to tell what exactly makes these entities. The Maze page has a “parent group” of Puzzle, which is a genre and an “informal group”. Main Game Types contains Adventure, Beat ’em Up, Platformer, Racing, and Shooter. Perhaps this is trying to tell us that these are the 5 main video game genres?

Finally, there are 51 entries in the “concepts” section. Game genre concept pages seem to behave a lot like game genre theme pages: they contain games, they can be containers, they can be subgenres, and they sometimes both appear together and undistinguished from each other in the genre field of individual game pages. It’s difficult to tell what exactly the line between genre themes and genre concepts is supposed to be. A number of genre concepts end in “elements”, such as Simulation Elements, so part of it is for categorizing games that only incorporate a few elements of another genre. There are also the “-likes”, such as Diablo-Like. Some genres are named after a popular example, but I don’t know why that is more of a genre concept than a genre theme. Most, but not all, Diablo and Grand Theft Auto games are in their own -like genre, so the site isn’t consistent about how they use these genre  concepts.

There are many more genre themes and genre concepts than what are listed on the genre page. I do not know why only these particular ones appear on the page. Creating an exhaustive list seems a hopeless task, and it is not clear which the site even counts by its own standards since so many say they should not actually be used, but are.

Let’s look at how individual game pages handle this all this information. Spore has a genre field with Science Fiction, Biological Simulation, God Game, and Life Simulation. Science Fiction is the only that does not link to a page, and doesn’t seem to be a genre concept or genre theme. Many games have 1 or 2 of these unlinked entries (they don’t seem to have pages for listing all of the games with that genre, or explaining what they are), and they are generally a theme or setting. I have seen Science Fiction, Historical, Fantasy, Manga, Cartoon, and 3D displayed here. Many of these are not genres. Some games have a separate setting field, so I don’t think these unlinked entries are exactly meant as setting descriptors.

There is also a “type” field on game pages, the entries are not linked so they don’t appear to have pages with their definitions. In fact, nothing on the site seems to explain what the type field is or what it is used for. In this case Spore has the types Action/Reflex, Simulation, Manag./Econ., and Strategy. Some of these have genre pages, so I’m not sure what the difference is between genre and type, or why those are not also listed as genres.

There is also a tags section, which is divided into several categories and covers all sorts of minutiae, some of which could arguably be considered genres too. One tag category is game genre, under which are the items in the genre field, but only the ones which link to their own pages.

Overall, Universal Videogame List has a huge amount of data, categorizing games in many different useful ways. This is hampered by the needlessly complex and confusing way the data is presented. For further example, Mario games have a Mario Universe genre listed. The Mario Universe page tells you it is a theme, not a genre. The entire site is a hall of mirrors with nomenclature that is inconsistent, full of terms and distinctions that haven’t been relevant to gaming discourse for decades, and full of bloated systems that a seemingly small group of people have been busily expanding for many years without looking at how unusable the site has become.

Other Websites

Metacritic

Metacritic takes scores from various publications and averages them (with secret weights given to each publication) to give a metascore. The following 18 genres are shown on the main game page and are searchable:

Action, Adventure, Fighting Games, First-Person Shooters, Flight/Flying, Party, Platformer, Puzzle, Racing, Real-Time Strategy, Role-Playing, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Third-Person Shooter, Turn-Based Strategy, Wargames, Wrestling

The actual individual game pages are another story. There are many more unsearchable genres used on game pages, and searching via genre can even give you results that don’t have that genre listed. In fact many genre searches will not show you any games released within the last several years, suggesting that Metacritic has stopped using several of their genres internally.

These anomalies aren’t new either, Lumines for PSP has the following genres: Miscellaneous, Puzzle, Puzzle, General, Puzzle, Matching, General. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U: Action, Fighting, Fighting, 3D, 2D, 2D, 3D. Ico for PS2: Action, Adventure, Fantasy.

Back to the given list of genres we see some splits that are relatively common: both First-Person and Third-Person Shooter, both Real-Time and Turn-Based Strategy exist alongside Strategy. Wrestling is separated from Sports.

Wargames seems pretty redundant with three Strategy genres, and does indeed contain the fewest games among the searchable genres.

Spore is findable under Strategy, but its game page reads Strategy, Breeding/Constructing, General, Breeding/Constructing.

HowLongToBeat

HowLongToBeat allows users to record how long it takes them to beat games, and then averages and displays the results. There are 41 genres you can search with:

Action, Adventure, Arcade, Battle Arena, Beat em Up, Board Game, Breakout, Card Game, City-Building, Compilation, Educational, Fighting, Fitness, Flight, Full Motion Video (FMV), Hack and Slash, Hidden Object, Horror, Interactive Art, Management, Music/Rhythm, Open World, Party, Pinball, Platform, Puzzle, Racing/Driving, Roguelike, Role-Playing, Sandbox, Shooter, Simulation, Social, Sports, Stealth, Strategy/Tactical, Survival, Tower Defense, Trivia, Vehicular Combat, Visual Novel

For some reason a number of games also have additional genres listed, these always appear before the searchable genres. These are not consistently applied among a series. I have seen Third-Person, First-Person, Turn-Based, Real-Time, Top-Down, Strategy, Tactical, Chess, and Side.

That aside we have a large list despite relegating Sports and Strategy/Tactical to one genre. Some rare ones, too, like Battle Arena, Hidden Object, Interactive Art, Social, and Vehicular Combat.

Spore is simply Simulation, leaving out Strategy/Tactical and Sandbox at the very least.

IGN

IGN started in 1996 and is a news and reviews website for games and other media. It still has reviews on its website dating back from its genesis. Although review pages don’t actually state the genre of the game in question the individual game pages do, and you can search by 27 genres:

Action, Adventure, Battle, Board, Card, Casino, Compilation, Educational, Fighting, Flight, Hunting, Music, Other, Party, Pinball, Platformer, Productivity, Puzzle, RPG, Racing, Shooter, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Trivia, Virtual Pet, Wrestling

The actual list on IGN is alphabetical, except Party is two positions later than it should be.

The Other genre can be a necessary evil, but it hasn’t used for a game in 7 years.

While Virtual Pet is quickly recognizable as a type of game, I don’t think it’s nearly common enough to be useful in anything less than a truly exhaustive list of genres. IGN hasn’t used it in over a decade.

Battle is an odd one, it is used for some board and card games, like Slay the Spire and Scrolls, but also other games that I guess are “focused on battles” like Pokémon Go and Monster Rancher games. It’s not really a term I have ever seen someone use to describe a game. Searching Google for information on the Battle video game genre doesn’t really turn up anything about it, yet we will see it several more times.

Spore is just listed as Simulation.

Gamespot

GameSpot and IGN may be the two longest running video game review sites, they both launched in 1996 and eventually morphed into general entertainment websites. They also don’t list a game’s genres on its review page. It uses 68 genres for games:

2D, 3D, 4X, Action, Adventure, Arcade, Baseball, Basketball, Beat-‘Em-Up, Billiards, Bowling, Boxing, Card Game, Compilation, Defense, Driving/Racing, Edutainment, Fighting, First-Person, Fitness, Fixed-Screen, Flight, Football (American), Free-to-Play, Gambling, Golf, Hidden Object, Hockey, Hunting/Fishing, Light-Gun, Management, Matching/Stacking, Metroidvania, Miscellaneous, MMO, MOBA, Music/Rhythm, On-Rails, Open-World, Party/Minigame, Pinball, Platform, Puzzle, Real-Time, Roguelike, Role-Playing, Scrolling, Shoot-‘Em-Up, Shooter, Simulation, Skateboarding/Skating, Snowboarding/Skiing, Soccer, Sports, Strategy, Survival, Tactical, Team-Based, Tennis, Text-Based, Third-Person, Track & Field, Trivia/Board Game, Turn-Based, Vehicular Combat, Wakeboarding/Surfing, Wrestling, VR

A number of these, like 2D, Free-to-Play, Real-Time, or Fixed-Screen, are descriptions of non-genre elements of the game. These don’t really tell someone what the game is about or what they will be doing. Sure, there’s little harm in throwing them into a pile of genres, but you could also separate them into their own perspective and monetization fields to make detailed searches easier. Almost any genre can be

There are only 4 games with Text-Based. None seem to be Visual Novels (an odd omission from a list this large), either, but kinds of Adventure games.

We’ve got some rare sports in this massive list, Billiards, Cricket, even Wakeboarding.

Team-Based refers to team sports, not team versus team online games.

There are no games marked with Defense. I assume it was meant for Tower Defense type games. There are also no Track & Field games.

Spore only has Strategy as its genre.

Hookshot Media

Hookshot Media runs news and reviews sites dedicated to Nintendo (Nintendo Life), PlayStation (Push Square), Xbox (Pure Xbox), and retro games (Time Extension). They all have game databases and they all share the same 24 genres. I have excluded Import (games only released in Japan) and Apps (clocks, calculators, video streaming services):

Action, Adventure, Arcade, Board Game, Creative, Dancing, Driving, Education, Fighting, First Person, Fitness, FPS, Music, Other, Party, Platformer, Puzzle, Racing, Relaxation, RPG, Shooter, Simulation, Sports, Strategy

Driving is usually combined with Racing in other genre lists, and is one of the least used genres here.

First Person is also one of the least used, I’m sure there’s a lot more 29 First Person games on PlayStation consoles.

The Shooter genre has a mix of First Person Shooters (despite the presence of FPS), Third Person Shooters, and Vertical and Horizontal Scrolling Shooters.

Some The Legend of Zelda games have RPG and some don’t. The one that is and always has been an RPG, Zelda II, does not.

The Other genre is usually not listed on game pages, but if you search for Other you get a pretty random assortment of popular games: Super Mario 64, Splatoon 3, No Man’s Sky, Subnautica, Sonic Frontiers.

Creative (Super Mario Maker 2, Dreams, LittleBigPlanet games) and Relaxation (Go Vacation, Potion Permit, Dorfromantik) are uncommon. What qualifies as Relaxation can be very subjective but is pretty similar to the Casual genre in its use here. Not a lot of mechanics, low stakes, forgiving.

eBay

eBay is an online marketplace that launched in 1995 and it certainly sells a lot of video games, which are divided into 39 genres. “Not Specified” has been omitted and these genres cover digital items as well as games:

Action & Adventure, Arcade, Art Game, Battle, Beat ‘Em Up, Board Games, Casino & Cards, Cooking, Crime, Detective, Educational, Family/Kids, Fantasy, Farming, Fighting, Fitness & Health, Hack and Slash, Hidden Object, Karaoke, MMORPG, Music & Dance, Mystery, Party & Compilation, Pinball, Platformer, Puzzle, Quiz & Trivia, Racing, Robot, Role Playing, Shoot ’em up, Shooter, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Survival Horror, Virtual Pet, Visual Novel, War

Just like every other time Action & Adventure are combined, it is by far the largest.

Battle is back and it is still confusing. A number of RPGs, Mario Strikers: Battle League, Klonoa: Phantasy Reverie Series, Saints Row, and lots of hacked Pokémon and Modern Warfare skins.

Party & Compilation are an odd combination. Sure, many Party games, like Mario Party feature what can be described as a “compilation” of minigames, but Compilation generally refers to several previously released games sold together as a package. Sorting by this genre does include various Mario Parties as well as the likes of Neogeo Pocket Color Selection Vol 1 and Namcot Collection.

Crime, Detective, and Mystery are not commonly used and seem to have a lot of overlap.

Robot is a very weird one and not seen on any other genre lists. Many titles do include controlling or fighting against robots, like Super Robot Wars T, Little Battlers eXperience, and Horizon Zero Dawn. There’s also Metroid Prime, which has a somewhat robotic-looking character on the box art, and ROBOTICS;NOTES ELITE & DaSH Double Pack which is a series of Visual Novels about trying to build a giant robot.

This is the only appearance of the Karaoke genre.

The listing pages for games being sold have an “Item specifics” box with basic information about the game. These seem to take a few different forms and the fields vary. A minority of games have a “Sub-Genre” field. I was able to find this list of subgenres (Not Applicable and Not Specified omitted):

American Football, Atv, Baseball, Basketball, Billiards, BMX, Bowling, Boxing, Car Racing, Cricket, Cycling, Dance, Extreme Sports, Fishing, Golf, Handball, Hockey, Horse Racing, Hunting, Ice Hockey, Karate, Martial Arts, Mixed Sports, Motorcycle, Racing, Pool, Rugby, Skateboarding, Skiing/Snowboarding, Soccer, Tennis, Wrestling

All the subgenres are Sports and Racing related. There is something going on with Boxing, it is the largest by far and applies to many games it shouldn’t, like LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga and Prince of Persia. I also found a listing for God of War that has Linear Action Adventure, Greek History, and Greek Adventure as subgenres and I have no idea where those came from.

Most Spore listings have Simulation, but I also found a version with a different box that had Simulation and Strategy.

Digital Storefronts

My Nintendo Store

There are several large digital storefronts selling games, including the big three hardware makers. They all have their own genre systems. These stores likely use their sales data to refine a good set of genres that will help a broard range of customers find the games they want to buy.

The My Nintendo Store has around 14,500 games and lists genres under 20 “game types”:

Action, Adventure, Arcade, Board Game, Education, Fighting, First-Person, Lifestyle, Multiplayer, Music, Other, Party, Platformer, Puzzle, Racing, Role-Playing, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Training

Training has Fitness Boxing games, Pixel Artist, a Sudoko game, and overall a pretty random mishmash of cheap indie games that don’t appear to train you to do anything. It’s also the least populated.

About 60% of the Adventure games are also labeled as Role-Playing.

I’d argue that First-Person and Multiplayer don’t belong here as genres, though these are all labeled as “game types”. There is a seperate “No. of players” attribute that you can sort games by, which does not have an online multiplayer option. I have to wonder if there’s really a significant number of people browsing the store who choose to look for First-Person games. First-Person Shooter games are very popular, maybe it exists for finding those games without using the word “Shooter”?

I’m sure Nintendo has never used the term Metroidvania officially, despite being the partial progenitor of it, and selling a lot of indie games made to emulate Metroid.

PlayStation Store

The PlayStation Store lets you search by genre too, and has 23 of them for its 6,600 games:

Action, Adult, Adventure, Arcade, Brain Training, Casual, Driving/Racing, Educational, Family, Fighting, Fitness, Horror, Music/Rhythm, Party, Puzzle, Quiz, Role Playing Games, Shooter, Simulation, Simulator, Sport, Strategy, Unique

The Adult games mostly have anime aesthetics and most are rated Mature by the ESRB, though several are rated Teen. Most have the Sexual Themes descriptor.

I was quite surprised to see Brain Training as a genre. Not only is it pretty redundant with Educational, but Brain Age is a Nintendo series known as Brain Training in Europe and Japan. Brain Training games have not been shown to have any effect on cognitive abilities.

There are very few games focused on Driving that are not Racing games, so it makes sense to combine them. Music and Rhythm have some overlap, too. Other genre lists than have combined these genres often just call them “Racing” or just “Music”.

I couldn’t believe there was both a Simulation and Simulator genre. After looking at examples of both, I don’t understand the difference. Simulator has about one fourth as many games. Some games, like Farming Simulator 19 and 22, have both.

Some of the listed genres don’t seem to show up on actual game pages where their genre is listed, namely Family and Unique. Family has no games rated higher than Teen, a lot of multiplayer games, and little to no violence. I can’t find any common thread among Unique games, they seem randomly chosen. Minecraft and Outer Wilds might make sense, but are Far Cry 6, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, Family Feud, or Ys IX: Monstrum Nox particularly unique, even within their series?

Microsoft

Microsoft Store

The Microsoft Store has an Xbox section with 9 genres that sells about 3,400 games for the Xbox Series, Xbox One, PC, and cloud:

Action & Adventure, Fighting, Indie, Kids & Family, Racing & Flying, Roleplaying, Shooter, Sports, Strategy

This is tied with a later entry for the smallest number of genres in this study. The main page even has a “shop games by genre” heading that only displays 8, leaving out Fighting, but Fighting does exist as a searchable genre. It is rare for Puzzle or Simulation to not be listed as genres, and Educational is very common too.

However, a small number of game pages have other genres listed. These mostly appear to be holdovers from the Xbox Games Store (see next section), though there is no way to search by them. For example, Hollow Knight is described as Platformer as well as Action & Adventure. Unpacking is Family & Kids (not Kids & Family, though it does show up if you filter by that genre, and also this genre does not exist in Xbox Games Store either), Other, Puzzle & Trivia, and Simulation. There are other genres that show up on game pages that aren’t part of either game store, such as Simulation and Tools.

Action & Adventure applies to over half of the games available, not much of a filter.

I would never expect an Indie genre if you’re only using 9, but thankfully Minecraft is not included. I was curious as to what Microsoft considers small enough to be an independent studio, but it seems no games list Indie on their individual pages. It’s also not consistent with companies, Worms W.M.D. by Team17 shows up under Indie searches, but no other Worms games do.

Xbox Games Store

The Xbox Games Store was replaced by the Microsoft Store, but is still up, selling almost 2,000 games for the Xbox 360. It uses a different set of 16 genres (Avatar does not include any games and has been omitted):

Action & Adventure, Card & Board, Classics, Educational, Family, Fighting, Kinect, Music, Other, Platformer, Puzzle & Trivia, Racing & Flying, Role Playing, Shooter, Sports & Recreation, Strategy & Simulation

Action & Adventure again encompasses over 40% of the available games.

Classics includes original Xbox games and older games not originally released on Xbox systems, such as Dig Dug and Banjo Kazooie. Such a gulf of time separates these two that I don’t think this should be called “Classics”, or there should be at least 2 genres for older games.

Other mostly consists of Xbox UI themes but also has a few games, like Life is Strange Episode 1 and Bomberman LIVE.

Some odd combinations of genres here, are Puzzle and Trivia games or Strategy and Simulation games really similar enough to lump together? “Sports & Recreation” is a phrase, but not really used to describe video games. There’s a couple fitness games, like The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout that may be what the Recreation part is referring to.

App Store

Apple’s App Store hosts about 300,000 games for iOS devices. Games are a “genre” on the App Store and within it are 18 subgenres:

Action, Adventure, Board, Card, Casino, Casual, Dice, Educational, Family, Music, Puzzle, Racing, Role Playing, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Trivia, Word

The Word genre doesn’t come up often, but a good fit for mobile games. Board, Card, Casino, and Dice seem a bit redundant, though games that feature cards other than a standard playing deck, like Slay the Spire, use it here. Dice is the strangest one here, I’m sure there’s a few games about rolling dice (maybe not enough to warrant a genre), but the App Store’s web page displays no Dice games. This third party page documenting all the genres in the App Store also lists an Arcade genre in place of Casual.

Other than not having any objectionable content, I can not really tell what a Family game is. There are some classic board and card games that would fit in other genres, and a general smattering of everything else.

Play Store

Google’s Play Store has over 478,000 games for Android devices. It uses the following 17 genres:

Action, Adventure, Arcade, Board, Card, Casino, Casual, Educational, Music, Puzzle, Racing, Role Playing, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Trivia, Word

Extremely similar to the App Store. Compared to the App Store, The Play Store has Arcade, and does not have Dice or Family. I couldn’t find anything about the history of game genres on the two big app stores, but it clearly is not just a coincidence. Even the wording is the same. It’s also very interesting that Dice, the seemingly empty genre from the App Store, is missing here, while the one additional genre the Play Store has is Arcade, one that seems to technically exist in the App Store but is not used.

While Games on the Play Store only allow one genre they can also have many tags, some of which are essentially genres.

Steam

Steam sells PC games as well as providing news, forums, mods, and more for its games. It currently has over 50,000 games in its store. If you mouseover “Categories” on the top bar there is a display of 6 top level genres (though there are 7 or 8 genres buried in the search feature), each with 7 subgenres:

  • Action
    • Arcade & Rhythm
    • Fighting & Martial Arts
    • First-Person Shooter
    • Hack & Slash
    • Platformer & Runner
    • Third-Person Shooter
    • shmup
  • Adventure
    • Adventure RPG
    • Casual
    • Hidden Object
    • Metroidvania
    • Puzzle
    • Story-Rich
    • Visual Novel
  • Role-Playing
    • Action RPG
    • Adventure RPG
    • JRPG
    • Party-Based
    • Rogue-Like
    • Strategy RPG
    • Turn-Based
  • Simulation
    • Building & Automation
    • Dating
    • Farming & Crafting
    • Hobby & Job
    • Life & Immersive
    • Sandbox & Physics
    • Space & Flight
  • Strategy
    • Card & Board
    • City & Settlement
    • Grand & 4X
    • Military
    • Real-Time Strategy
    • Tower Defense
    • Turn-Based Strategy
  • Sports & Racing
    • All Sports
    • Fishing & Hunting
    • Individual Sports
    • Racing
    • Racing Sim
    • Sports Sim
    • Team Sports

Trying to fit everything on Steam into a nice even 16 rows and 3 columns of genres leads to some odd choices. There are both Sports & Racing as well as All Sports pages which display a very similar selection of games. Several subgenres here don’t exist as tags (more on tags below), like Team Sports, or are combinations of things that have their own individual tags (Hobby & Job, Grand & 4X) and so these “fake” subgenres aren’t searchable. The only way to reach these listings seems to be clicking on them from the Categories menu.

There is also a robust tagging system where users can apply tags to games, and other users can essentially vote on if they are appropriate. There are over 400 of these, so I won’t list them all, but a full list of tags can be seen here. Many of these tags are the same as the above genres and lead to the same pages. There is a great deal of granularity, Rogue-like, Rogue-lite, Action Roguelike, Roguelike Deckbuilder, Traditional Roguelike, and Roguevania, are all tags. Every sport you can think of, settings, themes, perspectives, compatibility, content, vehicles, difficulty, pretty much every aspect of a game can be represented with a tag.

The Categories menu also has a “themes” section. Many of these have the same names as a tag, but the URLs have the same format that genre pages do. They display different games than the tag page does, so these are essentially more “fake genre” pages.

On actual game pages the list of tags is visible right away, while the genre field is a few pages below. The genre field can have any combination of the 6 top level genres, but can also contain some other miscellaneous information such as Massively Multiplayer, Indie, Early Access, or Free to Play. The 42 subgenres in the Categories menu don’t seem to ever actually be listed under the genre field, and there is not always a tag with the same name.

The general search page allows you to search by tag, but not by genre. On genre or tag pages if you scroll down far enough there is a “NARROW BY” option which has a TOP-LEVEL GENRES option which shows the 6 we have talked about as well as Software (not relevant to us), Casual, sometimes Sports, and sometimes both Sports and Racing. Casual can appear in a game’s genre field, and while it is also a tag, the URL for the Casual page suggests it is a genre and not a tag. There are also GENRES and SUB-GENRES that you can narrow search results by, both of which display various tags. It is not clear which user-created tags are considered genres and which are considered subgenres here.

Spore has Action, Adventure, Casual, RPG, Simulation, and Strategy as genres, a new record for number of genres. It has 20 tags, including God Game, Open World, and Colony Sim.

GOG

GOG.com, formerly Good Old Games, sells games without any form of DRM. There are more than 7,000 games available for PCs. GOG’s search has 8 genre checkboxes:

Action, Adventure, Racing, Role-Playing, Shooter, Simulation, Sports, Strategy

Confusingly, if you mouse over the word STORE, which is displayed on the top left of every page, the following 8 are displayed:

Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG, Shooters, Simulation, Sports & Racing, Strategy

Role-Playing and RPG thankfully lead to the same search. Shooter and Shooters lead to different URLs but display the same games. Otherwise, between these two lists one has Indie and combines Sports & Racing, and the other has Racing as its own genre. The Sports & Racing genre is essentially a search page for both Racing and Sports genres. There are essentially 9 genres here, tied with Microsoft Store for the least. The common Educational and Puzzle genres are notable absences.

Game pages are a bit more complicated. Every game page has 2 or 3 things listed in its genre field, the first of which is one of those 8 genres in the first list. The other one or two can also be among those, but there are more genres, and some seem more like themes or playstyles. You can click any of these to search for other games with these genres. There doesn’t seem to be a list of these anywhere, so after looking at many game pages these are the 24 additional ones I found:

Arcade, Building, Combat, Exploration, FPP, Fantasy, Fighting, Historical, Horror, JRPG, Managerial, Mystery, Narrative, Off-Road, Platformer, Point-and-Click, Puzzle, Real-Time, Sci-Fi, Stealth, Survival, TPP, Tactical, Turn-Based

FPP and TPP stand for First Person and Third Person Perspective, abbreviations I have not seen anywhere else, and not really genres. We see some of the more common expanded genres here, but also some odd ones like Combat, Exploration, and Off-Road.

Real-Time and Turn-Based feel a bit odd when not connected to Strategy or RPG. Every game is one or both, after all.

Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, and Sci-Fi are more themes than genres, but this certainly isn’t the only time we’ve seen them listed as such.

Point-and-Click is not on many lists of genres of this size, but GOG has many older computer games, when such games were very popular.

There is also a tags field on game pages. There are a whole lot of these and while there is overlap with genre they are considered separate: a search for the Fantasy genre, and a search for the Fantasy tag returns different games.

Spore is sold on GOG, in a bundle. It has Strategy, Real-Time, and Fantasy as genres here. Simulation, Managerial, and maybe Survival would have been good choices too.

Itch.io

Itch.io is the largest game store, with over 600,000 indie games for computers and mobile devices. All of which fits into these 18 genres, which are a kind of “tag”:

Action, Adventure, Card Game, Educational, Fighting, Interactive Fiction, Other, Platformer, Puzzle, Racing, Rhythm, Role Playing, Shooter, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Survival, Visual Novel

A list of this size covers the absolute essentials, but also splits a few into their own genres. You could squeeze Card Game, Fighting, Interactive Fiction, Platformer, Shooter, Survival, and Visual Novel into other genres if you chose to, but these were considered important and distinct enough. Itch.io is the only game store that is dedicated to indies and I think it is reasonable to say that at least Card Game, Interactive Fiction, Platformer, Survival, and Visual Novel games are indeed more common genres for indie games than AAA games.

Itch.io also has hundreds of non-genre tags, some of which are considered genres elsewhere. Horror, Arcade, Roguelike, Music, Shoot ‘Em Up. These somewhat serve as subgenres to games.

On individual game pages you have to click “More information” to see the genre and tag fields.

Epic Games Store

The Epic Games Store is run by Epic Games and sells over 1,700 games. There are 34 genres excluding THQ Publisher Sale:

Action, Action-Adventure, Adventure, Application, Card Game, Casual, City Builder, Comedy, Dungeon Crawler, Exploration, Fighting, First Person, Horror, Indie, Music, Narration, Open World, Party, Platformer, Puzzle, Racing, Retro, Rogue-Lite, RPG, Shooter, Simulation, Space, Sports, Stealth, Strategy, Survival, Tower Defense, Trivia, Turn-Based

There are several things here that are more like themes (Retro, Space, and Horror), which we have seen with some other lists. Exploration is an activity some games focus on and is one of Bartle’s player types, but it’s unusual to have as a genre. Indie, Casual, and First Person could be applied to games of any genre.

Comedy is a rare one, but the likes of Untitled Goose Game, Goat Simulator, and the South Park games make sense for it. Narration essentially seems to be Visual Novels, and has a lot of crossover with Adventure.

It’s surprising to see Rogue-Lite. It refers to a kind of Rogue-Like game with permanent progression systems. Rogue-Like is more general and could cover both.

This time we have a Turn-Based genre but no Real-Time one.

Application has a wallpaper program, a digital art program, and a map and mod editor for Unreal Tournament.

Browser Game Sites

Facebook

Facebook hosts a large number of games playable on mobile or in a browser. The games are sorted by 21 genres, called “categories”:

Action, Adventure, Arcade, Battle, Board, Builder, Card, Casino, Design, Match, Merge, Puzzle, Quick Play, Quiz and Trivia, Racing, Role-Playing, Runner, Simulation, Solitaire, Sports, Word

These genres definitely sound like they are describing mobile games. Match, Merge, Runner, and Solitaire games aren’t exclusive to mobile, but they are strongly associated with it. Yet the two major mobile app stores don’t use them as genres.

Design seems to be a “Creative” genre with drawing, house designing, and dress up games.

Battle seems to be more PvP focused here. There are a lot of .io games in it.

Newgrounds

Newgrounds hosts user created movies, songs, animations, and games. Founded in 1995, there are, or were, over 80,000 games on Newgrounds. The discontinuation of Flash has necessitated the use of emulators to keep many games playable. There are 13 major genres, or 52 total including subgenres:

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Action – Fighting – Brawler
Action – Fighting – VS
Action – Platformer – Hop and Bop
Action – Platformer – Puzzle
Action – Platformer – Other
Action – Shooter – First Person
Action – Shooter – Fixed
Action – Shooter – Horizontal Flight
Action – Shooter – Multidirectional
Action – Shooter – Run ‘n Gun
Action – Shooter – Tube / Rail
Action – Shooter – Vertical Flight
Action – Other
Adventure – Point ‘n Click
Adventure – RPG
Adventure – Other
Gadgets – Construction Set
Gadgets – Dress Up
Gadgets – Musical
Gadgets – Soundboards
Gadgets – Webcam
Gadgets – Other
Idle / Incremental
Puzzles – Difference
Puzzles – Falling
Puzzles – Quiz
Puzzles – Sliding
Puzzles – Other
Rhythm
Simulation – Dating
Simulation – Job
Simulation – Pet / Buddy
Simulation – Other
Skill – Avoid
Skill – Collect
Skill – Toss
Skill – Typing
Skill – Other
Spam
Sports – Basketball
Sports – Boxing
Sports – Casino & Gambling
Sports – Golf
Sports – Racing
Sports – Soccer
Sports – Other
Strategy – Artillery
Strategy – Real-time (RTS)
Strategy – Tower Defense
Strategy – Other
Tutorial
Visual Novel

This is like GameFAQ’s multi-tier approach, but several top level genres do not have any subgenres.

Only Action gets three tiers. Fighting, Platformer and Shooter could have easily just been top level genres instead of within Action. All of the Skill genres seem like they could fit under Action, too.

Very strange to relegate RPG to a subgenre of Adventure, and there are no Action RPGs.

The Gadgets genre is more interactive software than games.

Puzzles – Difference doesn’t have a lot of entries, but is indeed “spot the difference” puzzles, something unique to Newground’s genre list.

Spam seems to be low effort games. I’m not sure if game makers decide their game is Spam, but some of these are over a decade old, so they aren’t on the chopping block or anything.

Collection Sites

PriceCharting

PriceCharting started in 2007 and primarily tracks physical video game prices based on eBay sales. It also allows users to keep track of their collections and how much they are worth. The administrator(s) handle most of the game data, but users can edit it too. The about page says they track over 45,000 games. There are 35 genres used after excluding some of the other things the site tracks:

Action & Adventure, Arcade, Baseball, Beat ’em Up, Basketball, Board & Card, Casino, Compilation, Dance, Extreme Sports, Educational, Fighting, Football, FPS, Golf, Horror, Light Gun, Minigames, Music, Other, Party, Pinball, Platformer, Puzzle, Racing, RPG, Simulation, Shoot’em Up, Soccer, Sports, Strategy, Third Person Shooter, Trivia, Visual Novel, Wrestling

Items on PriceCharting can only use one genre, but helping people discover games by genre isn’t really the site’s focus.

Action & Adventure covers a lot of ground and seems to cover about a third of modern games.

Three kinds of shooters seems a bit much for a list of this size. There are several separate sports genres that cover the bigger ones, and a general Sports genre. Dance and Extreme Sports are rare genres. A bit of an odd mix of specificity and generalness.

Simulation is how Spore is categorized.

VGCollect

VGCollect was started in 2011, and I can’t find how many games they have catalogued. Users can edit game data and add new games. Games can only have one of the following 30 genres:

Action, Action-Adventure, Action-RPG, Adventure, Arcade, Beat ’em Up, Casino, Classic, Edutainment, Exercise, Fighting, First-Person Shooter, Flight Simulator, Light Gun Shooter, MMORPG, Other, Party, Pinball, Platformer, Puzzle, Racing, Rhythm, RPG, Shoot ’em Up, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Survival Horror, Third-Person Shooter, Visual Novel

A generally reasonable list with a few odd choices. Action-RPG is a popular kind of game, but rarely makes genre lists, being covered by Action, RPG or both. Quite a few of these are types of Action games, yet other genres, like Sports, are not so divided up.

The musical games I checked are filed under Rhythm. The only Classic games I could find were Nintendo Mini Classics dedicated handhelds. Though not every Horror game is a Survival Horror game, that is the genre they are all put under.

Spore is considered a Simulation. It would like be that or Strategy when you can only choose one.

LaunchBox Games Database

Launchbox serves as a launching hub for digital games, seemingly with a focus on emulation. Basic information for each game, including genre, is “crowdsourced”. Launchbox started out using TheGamesDB as its game database but stopped several years ago. A lot of older data is still the same. As such its 26 genres are pretty similar to TheGamesDB:

Action, Adventure, Beat ’em Up, Board Game, Casino, Construction and Management Simulation, Education, Fighting, Flight Simulator, Horror, Life Simulation, MMO, Music, Party, Platform, Puzzle, Quiz, Racing, Role-Playing, Sandbox, Shooter, Sports, Stealth, Strategy, Vehicle Simulation, Visual Novel

The following were changed from TheGamesDB:

Beat ’em Up, Casino, and Visual Novel were added.

Family, Productivity, Unofficial, Utility, and Virtual Console were removed

I’d say the changes were a nice improvement, the removed genres were barely used on TheGamesDB and somewhat vague, and the added ones are nice distinctions from other genres. Not many places use Casino, but there’s always been a fair number of these types of games.

There are pages for their definitions of each genre, but unfortunately they are blank.

Spore uses the same genres as TheGamesDB, Adventure and Life Simulation.

Collectorz

Collectorz keeps track of movie, book, music, comic, and game collections. No master list of genres exists, and there are no pages listing all games of a genre. I contacted support and asked if they could tell me what their genres were, but I was told that they did not have such a list ready to send to me. So I manually looked up a whole lot of games and recorded all the genres I saw. This list may not be quite complete, but it should be pretty close. Here are the 40 genres I managed to find:

Action, Action/Adventure, Adventure, Arcade, Battle, Beat ’em Up, Board, Card, Compilation, Driving, Educational, Entertainment, Fighting, Fitness, Flight Simulation, FPS, Hack & Slash, Health & Fitness, MMORPG, Music, Other, Party, Pinball, Platformer, Productivity, Puzzle, Racing, Real Time Strategy, Retro, RPG, Sandbox, Shooter, Simulation, Simulator, Sports, Strategy, Survival Horror, Trivia, Virtual Pet, Visual Novel

Pretty comprehensive overall, but the absence of a Rhythm genre leaves such games in Music, and many don’t really belong there. Not for the first time we have Real Time Strategy, but no Turn Based Strategy.

Several genres I could only find a one or a few instances of, even when looking at other games in the series. For example, Viva Pinata and Super Mario Maker were Entertainment games, Cave Story and ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove! were Arcade. It is difficult to tell what exactly these genre labels mean.

In fact, many series had drastically changing genres, suggesting different people entered them without much communication about how genres should be applied. Some The Legend of Zelda games have RPG, some don’t. Minecraft’s various ports had different combinations of Adventure, Action, Simulation, Puzzle, Action/Adventure, Other, and Sandbox.

SEGA Bass Fishing has Adventure, Simulation, and Simulator as genres. I sure did not expect to see Simulation sitting beside Simulator again. I still don’t understand the difference.

Battle returns and I still can’t get a grip on what it is supposed to mean.

Spore (you will need an account to see this page) is listed as Simulation and Strategy.

Completionator

Completionator was launched in 2014 and has almost 56,000 games in its database. Its focus is keeping track of the games its users have completed, including how long it took, but there are many other social features. It looks like the people who run the site handle all of the game data. It uses 117 genres:

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4X Strategy, Action, Action RPG, Action Strategy, Action-Adventure, Adventure, Amateur Flight Simulation, Artillery, Battle Royale, Beat ’em Up, Biological Simulation, Board Game, Breakout, Business Simulation, Card Game, Cinematic-Platform, City-Builder, Combat Flight Simulation, Compilation, Dating Simulation, Dungeon Crawler, Educational, Exercise / Fitness, Exploration, Fighting, First-Person Shooter, Fitness, Fixed Shooter, Flight Sim, Gambling, Game Show, God Game, Graphic Adventure, Hack and Slash (Action), Hack and Slash (RPG), Hidden Object, Incremental Game, Interactive Movie, JRPG, Light Gun Shooter, Management, Maze, Minigame Collection, Miscellaneous (General), MMO, MOBA, Monster Tamer RPG, Multidirectional Shooter, Party, Pet-raising Simulation, Pinball, Platform-Adventure, Platformer, Puzzle, Puzzle-Platform, Racing, Rail Shooter, Real-time Strategy, Real-Time Tactics, Rhythm, RPG, Run and Gun, Scrolling Shooter, Shoot ’em Up, Shooter, Shooting Gallery, Simulation, Social Simulation, Space Combat Simulation, Space Trading and Combat Simulation, Sports (Baseball), Sports (Basketball), Sports (Biking), Sports (Billiards), Sports (Bowling), Sports (Boxing / Martial Arts), Sports (Dodgeball), Sports (Fishing), Sports (Football), Sports (Futuristic), Sports (General), Sports (Golf), Sports (Hockey), Sports (Horse Racing), Sports (Hunting), Sports (Rugby), Sports (Skateboarding), Sports (Skiing / Snowboarding), Sports (Soccer), Sports (Surfing), Sports (Tennis), Sports (Track and Field), Sports (Volleyball), Sports (Wrestling), Stealth, Strategy, Survival, Survival Horror, Tactical RPG, Tactical Shooter, Tank Simulation, Text Adventure, Third-Person Shooter, Time Management, Top-Down Shooter, Tower Defense, Train Simulation, Tube Shooter, Turn-Based Strategy, Turn-Based Tactics, Utility, Vehicle Simulation (General), Vehicle-Based Shooter, Vehicular Combat, Visual Novel, Wargame, Word Game

Despite having one of the smaller game totals Completionator has one of the largest amount of genres. This is a pretty exhaustive list with over 20 Sports, even including Dodgeball. I was quite surprised to see Amateur Flight Simulation appear on another list.

Games can only have one genre on Completionator. This hides how redundant some of them are, but makes more sense for such a large list, as long as a game can be fit into a single pigeonhole. Games with varied playmodes have to go with whatever is considered the most dominant one. Spore for instance is listed as Biological Simulation, ignoring its Strategy and other Simulation aspects.

An issue that comes up with some of these large lists is lumping together what I would call top level genres in with pretty much all of the subgenres you could come up with. Do you need RPG if you also have every flavor of RPG subgenres to choose from?

RF Generation

RF Generation is a collection site with over 140,000 games in its database. It was launched in 2004 and all data is edited by its users. Discounting Accessory, Cables, Controller, Memory/Backup, Non-Game and System it uses 19 genres:

Action, Action/Adventure, Adventure, Classic Shooter, Compilation, Education, Fighting, Fitness, Game Creator, Game Simulator, Music/Rhythm, Platformer, Puzzle, Racing, RPG, Shooter, Simulator, Sports, Strategy

Games can only have one genre. There is also a subgenre field but it is a text field, so editors can write whatever they want. There is no standardization as to what a subgenre is, some examples are Game Show, Board Game / Mystery, Board, Pinball, Party, Various, and Fighting / 3D Beat ‘Em Up.

Classic Shooter refers to what is more often called “Shoot ’em Up”.

Game Creator has level editors, pinball table makers, Dreams, the RPG Makers, Super Mario Maker and the like. This is a coherent idea for a genre that we don’t see often.

Game Simulator refers to games simulating non-video games, like solitaire or Family Feud. Other places might divide these into genres like Quiz or Board Game.

Visual Novels have to choose between between Action/Adventure, Adventure, and Puzzle, and it does not stay consistent within a series.

Award Categories

There are a number of video game awards that honor the best games of the year. Some of these award shows include genre-specific awards. None of these organizations set out to give an award for every genre, so rather than an exhaustive list these are the genres considered most important and recognizable and which have enough eligible games to be considered competitive.

This should hopefully give us a good idea of when various genres come into and out of prominence and how our perceptions of the boundaries of a genre change over time. I have organized these lists by genre rather than year to help show this more clearly. Although a small number of game awards include Multiplayer, VR, and certain other terms that don’t really describe a genre even though they have appeared on a genre list, I have not included them when they are used.

Golden Joystick Awards

The longest-running video game award ceremony, the Golden Joystick Awards, started in 1983. Anyone can currently vote for the nominees online, although it used to only be open to the British public. Some time in the late 80s eligible games were expanded from just computers to include console games. There was no 1993 or 1995 ceremony, the 1997 ceremony covered games from the previous 2 years, and there was no ceremony from 1998 to 2001.

  • Action/Adventure: 2010-2012
  • Adventure: 1984-1988
  • Arcade: 1983-1987
  • Fighting: 2010-2012
  • Indie: 2013-2021
  • MMO: 2011-2012
  • Music: 2010-2011
  • Puzzle: 2010
  • Racing: 2010-2012
  • RPG: 2010-2012
  • Shooter: 2010-2012
  • Simulation: 1988-1994
  • Sports: 2002, 2010-2012
  • Strategy: 1983-1987, 2010-2012

Game Critics Awards

The Game Critics Awards occur after E3 and only games that made an appearance at E3 are eligible. The judges are a select group of media outlets. There were 65 judges in 2019, which was the last time the awards were held.

  • Action: 1998-2019
  • Action/Adventure: 1998-2019
  • Fighting: 1998-2018
  • Independent: 2014-2019
  • Platformer: 1999
  • Racing: 1998-2019
  • Real-Time Strategy: 1998
  • Role-Playing: 1998-2019
  • Simulation: 2000-2006, 2008
  • Simulation (Combat): 1998-1999
  • Simulation (Non-Combat): 1998-1999
  • Simulation (Flight): 1999
  • Social/Casual/Puzzle/Family: 1998-2019
  • Sports: 1998-2019
  • Strategy: 1999-2019
  • Turn-Based Strategy: 1998

D.I.C.E. Awards

The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences is a video game industry non-profit organization that holds the D.I.C.E. awards every year since 1998. The AIAS selects over 100 professionals in the video game industry to choose the nominees, which are then voted on by AIAS members.

  • Action: 2005-2021
  • Action (Console): 1997-2004
  • Action (Computer): 1997-2004
  • Action Sports (Console): 2003-2004
  • Adventure: 2005-2021
  • Adventure (Console): 1997-1999, 2001-2004
  • Adventure (Computer): 1997-1999, 2001-2004
  • Adventure/Role-Playing (Console): 2000
  • Adventure/Role-Playing (Computer): 2000
  • Casual: 2008-2013
  • Educational/Skills (Computer): 1997-2002
  • Family: 1997-1998, 2004-2021
  • Family (Console): 1999-2001, 2003
  • Family (Computer): 1999-2001, 2003
  • Family/Children’s (Computer): 1998-2002, 2004
  • Fighting: 1997-2021
  • First Person Action (Console): 2002-2006
  • First Person Action (Computer): 2002-2006
  • Massively Multiplayer/Persistent World/Online/Online Role-Playing: 1997-2008
  • Racing: 1997-2021
  • Role-Playing: 2005-2008, 2017-2021
  • Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year: 2009-2016
  • Role-Playing (Console): 1997, 2002-2004
  • Role-Playing (Computer): 1997-1998, 2002-2004
  • Simulation: 2004-2006
  • Simulation (Computer): 1997-2003
  • Sports: 2004-2021
  • Sports (Console): 1997-2002
  • Sports (Computer): 1997-2003
  • Sports Simulation: 2004
  • Sports Simulation (Console): 2003
  • Strategy: 2004-2006
  • Strategy (Computer): 1997-2003
  • Strategy/Simulation: 2007-2021

British Academy Games Awards

The BAFTA Games Awards are run by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, a trade organization in the United Kingdom. Presumably because two consecutive ceremonies went from March of 2005 (games of 2004) to October of 2006 (games of the last 18 or so months), there was no “2005” ceremony.

  • Action: 2003-2004, 2009-2012
  • Action and Adventure: 2006-2008
  • Adventure: 2003
  • Casual: 2007-2008
  • Casual & Social: 2006
  • Children’s: 2003-2006
  • Family: 2010-2021
  • Family & Social: 2009
  • Puzzle: 2010
  • Racing: 2003-2004
  • Simulation: 2006
  • Sports: 2003-2010, 2013-2015
  • Sports/Fitness: 2011-2012
  • Strategy: 2003, 2006-2012
  • Strategy & Simulation: 2007

Spike Video Game Awards

The Spike Video Game Awards aired on Spike TV from to 2003 to 2013. A small group of a few dozen publications formed an advisory council to decide the nominees and vote on them. It was produced by Geoff Keighley during its run.

  • Action: 2003-2007
  • Action Adventure: 2008-2012
  • Comedy: 2009
  • Driving: 2003-2013
  • Fantasy: 2003
  • Fighting: 2003-2006, 2008-2009, 2011-2013
  • First Person Action: 2003-2005
  • Independent: 2008-2013
  • Individual Sports: 2005-2012
  • Massively Multiplayer: 2004
  • Military: 2004-2007
  • Motion: 2011
  • Music: 2008-2010
  • Rhythm: 2007
  • RPG: 2004-2013
  • Social: 2012
  • Shooter: 2006-2013
  • Sports: 2003-2004, 2013
  • Team Sports: 2005-2012

The Game Awards

After moving on from the Spike Video Game Awards Geoff Keighley started the The Game Awards. A committee is put together of major publishers and hardware makers which selects around 30 game industry news organizations to come up with nominees and then vote on the winners. These organizations get a 90% share of the votes, with 10% going to the public. I am omitting Indie Debut (later known as Indie), which is the best first game by an independent studio because it’s pretty redundant with Independent.

  • Action: 2016-2022
  • Action/Adventure: 2014-2022
  • Family: 2014-2022
  • Fighting: 2014-2022
  • Independent: 2014-2022
  • Role Playing: 2014-2022
  • Shooter: 2014-2015
  • Sim/Strategy: 2020-2022
  • Sports/Racing: 2014-2022
  • Strategy: 2016-2019

Electronic Gaming Monthly

Electronic Gaming Monthly was a multi-format gaming magazine that covered console but not PC (for most of its run) games. Once a year writers and readers of the magazine voted in separate polls for various categories. The Gamer’s Choice Awards continued after 2003, but without categories for genres. I could not find the award categories for 1993 or 1995, but they probably included Action, Fighting, RPG, and Sports.

  • Action: 1994, 1996-2003
  • Action RPG: 1998-1999
  • Action/Adventure: 1992
  • Adventure: 1996-2003
  • Arcade: 1996
  • Compilation: 1997
  • Driving: 1994, 2002
  • Fighting: 1994, 1996-2003
  • First-Person Shooter: 1997, 2002
  • Flying: 1996
  • Light Gun: 1997
  • Puzzle: 1996-2001
  • Racing: 1997-2001, 2003
  • Role-Playing: 1989-1992, 1994, 1996-2003
  • Shooter: 1994, 1996-1999, 2003
  • Side-Scrolling: 1996-1997
  • Sports: 1989-1992, 1994, 1996-2000, 2003
  • Sports (Action): 2001
  • Sports (Simulation): 2001
  • Strategy: 1996-2001, 2003

Early and Miscellaneous Genre Systems

Nintendo’s Black Box series refers to the first 30 games released on the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America. One feature of these boxes was a graphic showing the genre of the game in the corner. The genres that appeared were:

Action Series, Adventure Series, Arcade Series, Education Series, Light Gun Series, Programmable Series, Robot Series, Sports Series

Light Gun and Robot were to show off special accessories of the NES and are specific to it. The idea of Programmable games has faded over time, and it was only a minor feature in the games that were labeled with it. You can make your own track (but not save it) in Excitebike, for instance.

The Adventure Series graphic shows a child swinging on a rope over water, implying the games feature daring adventures, quite different from the “story heavy and slower paced” meaning that we generally use for it now.

Sega games released in Japan had a genre identifier on their box, using 10 genres:

Action, Adventure, Educational, Puzzle, Racing, RPG, Shoot-’em-Up, Sports, Simulation, Table

Sega Retro says that Master System (third generation) games used this system, but I couldn’t find any boxes from this era with them. Early Genesis/Mega Drive (fourth generation) games did, though. The logo for Adventure games tells a different story than Nintendo’s, with a Sherlock Holmes-like detective making a question mark with pipe smoke.

Shoot-’em-Up includes Shooters of all kinds. The icon for Table says “HOME” and has a die suggesting it is for Card and Board games, but it also seems to be a miscellaneous genre, including Educational and Compilation games.

Softalk was a magazine dedicated to the Apple II that ran from 1980 to 1984. It broke games into Adventure, Arcade, Fantasy, and Strategy genres. Fantasy’s description of “in which you create one or more characters with whom you identify as the game progresses” is essentially an RPG.

Computer Gaming World was another computer game magazine and in 1982 polled readers as to whether they preferred Adventure, Arcade or Wargame games. In 1989 this would be amended to Action/Arcade, Adventure, Role-Playing Adventure, Simulation, Strategy, and Wargames.

The Entertainment Software Association is the U.S. trade association of video games and lobbies the government, fights against copyright infringement, runs E3, and releases statistics about the industry. In these reports they break games into Action, Adventure, Fighting, Racing, Role-Playing, Shooter, Sports, Strategy, and Miscellaneous genres.

Academic Approaches to Genre

Eric Solomon, in his Games Programming book from 1984, splits games into three genres: Simulations, Abstract, and Sports. By today’s standards there seems to be little distinction between the realism of games from that era, none of them come close to really accurately simulating anything. It also seems like the great majority of what would be simulated would be sports, so why separate Sports of all things?

John C Wright et all in their paper (which I am unable to read, I am only going off what Wikipedia has to say) American children’s use of electronic media in 1997: A national survey divide video games into Educational or Informative, Sports, Sensorimotor, Other Vehicular Simulations, Strategy, and Other. Sensorimotor covers Action, Fighting, Driving, and more, while Strategy covers RPG, Puzzle, and Tactics games. This paper seems to be focused on how electronic games, not just video games, effect children, and this is reflected in the broad genre choices centered on psychological effects.

Jeanne B Funk and Debra B Buchman in Video Game Controversies (again, I am not able to read this article from a science journal) use 6 genres: General Entertainment, Educational, Fantasy Violence, Human Violence, Sports Violence. General Entertainment in this case refers to games with no fighting or destruction. From what I can gather this paper is about how video game violence affects children.

In Game Type and Game Genre Lindsay Grace draws a distinction between type and genre. According to him, game types describe game play, with following being a “brief list”: Action, Adventure, Puzzle, Role Playing, Simulation, and Strategy. Game genre on the other hand, describes the story. The list given is Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Science Fiction, Western/Eastern/Frontier.

The most substantive academic work about video game genres I was able to find was Mark Wolf’s 2000 paper Genre and the Video Game. It uses the following 40 genres:

Abstract, Adaptation, Adventure, Artificial Life, Board Games, Capturing, Card Games, Catching, Chase, Collecting, Combat, Demo, Diagnostic, Dodging, Driving, Educational, Escape, Fighting, Flying, Gambling, Interactive Movie, Management Simulation, Maze, Obstacle Course, Pencil-and-Paper Games, Pinball, Platform, Programming Games, Puzzle, Quiz, Racing, Role-Playing, Rhythm and Dance, Shoot ’Em Up, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Table-Top Games, Target, Text Adventure, Training Simulation, Utility

Many of these have not been seen elsewhere, but thankfully definitions are provided.

Abstract involves “nonrepresentational graphics” and is not focused on a narrative. The examples include Tetris, Pipe Dream, Pac-Man and Q*Bert, mostly Puzzle games.

Adaptation refers to games trying to mimic real life activities, such as poker, sports, or the narrative of a book. Many of the examples are licensed games, such as The Simpsons and Wheel of Fortune.

His definition of Adventure refers to going places on multiple screens or many rooms, finding keys, and a particular setting. There is no mention of being story focused and the examples include Myst, the Tomb Raider series, and the Ultima series.

Capturing is a very specific one where players capture something that is evading them. All of the examples are from before 1990.

Catching on the other hand is like Capturing, but the object being pursued does not evade.

Combat games feature 1 on 1 battles involving projectiles where the player tries to shoot their opponent before they get shot. Examples include Battletech, Battlezone, and Combat.

The Fighting description specifically says “without the use of firearms or projectiles”, but one of the examples is the Mortal Kombat series, which does feature some fireballs and other projectiles.

Platform games are said to be strictly from a side view, not a top-down one.

Target games involve shooting at non-moving targets and not being shot at.

Utility games have a function or purpose beyond entertainment. Some of the examples include programming guides, learning to type games, and household finance software. There is a lot of overlap with Educational games, Mario Teaches Typing is an example for both.

In the introduction Demo, Diagnostic, Educational, Puzzle, Simulation, and Utility are lumped together as “arguably not games” and included only because they are sold in the same format as games, and sometimes collected as such. While some argue that Visual Novels or Walking Simulators should not be considered “real games” I have not seen the idea that Educational, Puzzle or Simulation games are not.

Overall, almost all of the examples are 2nd and 3rd generation games. Even in 2000 when this was published many of these genres were just common gameplay elements that existed in many games and would not be considered genres of their own. Many of the distinctions between genres like Capturing, Chase, and Catching feel uncessary. Very few of the genre definitions seem to consider 3D games at all, though a few are cited as examples, such as Myst, Samba de Amigo and Diablo. Overall, the paper seems a decade out of date.

Conclusions and Building a Better Genre System

Nine Genres

Nine genres stick out as the bedrock, seen almost everywhere almost since the beginning of splitting games into genres, even if sometimes combined with each other or divided into smaller ones. I feel these 9 stand out as being the most common and recognizable, even if various subgenres like First-Person Shooters may be talked about more often. These are very close to the genres MobyGames uses, too.

Action: A very broad genre for fast-paced games relying on quick reactions and precise button inputs. Although many of the other foundational genres share these traits, they seem to take precedence. Pretty much every Sports or Racing game fits the Action criteria, but would be called Sports or Racing games first and foremost. In many ways Action is the most recognizable of the genres, it is emblematic of video games. If you are using a list of genres larger than the smallest possible a large portion of them will be split off from Action, like Music, Rhythm, Platformer, First-Person Shooter, Shoot-’em-Up, and Fighting.

Adventure: This genre has seen the most varied definitions, despite being the only one given a definitive start point: 1980’s Adventure-though MobyGames does list Wander as preceding it. Some aspects attributed to this genre are a narrative focus, not depending on precise player inputs to succeed, traveling to a variety of places, being mental in nature rather than physical, investigation, interacting with your surroundings, and a focus on decision making and puzzle solving. Adventure (the game) generally fulfills these, except there are enemies to avoid so there is definitely an element of precise control needed. Adventure games have taken several forms over the years, from Point-and-Clicks and Text Adventures, to Visual Novels, and FMV games.

Despite being defined almost as the opposite of Action, Action Adventure is sometimes considered a distinct genre of its own. Sometimes neither Action nor Adventure will be used, leaving Action Adventure to take on a huge number of games. When allowed to exist alongside Action and Adventure, Action Adventure is sort of a modern generic gamey game, where there is a fair amount of story, you travel around killing enemies, you explore, solve some puzzles along the way, manage your items, maybe choose some upgrades and talk to some NPCs. The Last of Us, the Uncharted series, the Tomb raider series, all sort of cinematic experiences with broad appeal.

Educational: It may be the smallest of the nine, but Educational has appeared on most genre lists, and has been recognized as a genre for a very long time. There are overall a small number of directly educational games, almost always made for children and relating to reading, math, and typing. The computer and video game industry saw a big edutainment boom in the 80s and 90s.

Although often segregated as something only children would play, and often only begrudgingly, there are some games appealing to adults which can be educational as well. Art Academy and Mario Paint are often classified as Educational and people of all ages enjoy making art. There are games that can teach you something about history (Civilization), urban planning (Sim City), or computer programming (Zachtronics’ games), yet these games are almost never considered Educational.

Puzzle: Featuring color matching, falling blocks, pattern and spatial recognition, moving objects around a grid, word games, logic problems, physics problems, and more, Puzzle games come in a variety of real-time and turn-based forms. Although many games incorporate puzzles in some way, few games today outside of indie and mobile releases are outright Puzzle games.

Tetris has cast a long shadow, being a breakout hit and the longest running Puzzle series. Falling Block games are likely among the first type of Puzzle game one thinks of. Matching Tile games are very popular on mobile devices.

Racing: Racing games have maintained a strong presence throughout gaming history. Broadly divided into Simulation and Arcade, Racing games can feature a wide variety of vehicles or means of locomotion, but cars are most common. Usually there is a track and a number of competitors that you are trying to beat to a finish line. Some games like Crazy Taxi are considered Racing games because they focus on getting from one place to another quickly, even though you are not racing against anyone, just a timer. This seems to only apply to games where you control a vehicle, as other speed focused games like Neon White are not considered Racing.

This genre is occasionally combined with Sports. Both are competitive and athletic, pitting racers or athletes against each other, and racing is usually considered a sport. Yet most lists of genres include Racing but not other individual sports as genres.

Racing is also often combined with Driving games. The Driving genre involves driving a vehicle, but not racing it, such as Euro Truck Simulator. Most Driving games are also Simulation games.

Role-Playing: Like Adventure games, Role-Playing games tend to have a lot of narrative and involve going to many places and solving some puzzles. But Role-Playing games also focus on character progression with some mixture of levels, stats, new skills to learn, passive abilities, equipment, and other party members with their own traits.  While many non-RPG games have incorporated these elements over time, RPGs have kept their identity and thrived more than Puzzle games have.

There are a couple major divides within the RPG genre. There are Computer/Western/Classic RPGs, which used to be mainly released on computers, follow Dungeons & Dragons tropes, give the player choice in the story and when to do things, and are not developed in Japan. On the other hand Japanese RPGs, are developed in Japan (although it depends on who you ask if this is a hard requirement), usually have a party of characters with a set backstory, influenced by Dragon Quest, and usually have linear storylines.

There are also Turn-Based RPGs (which includes most Strategy RPGs) and Action RPGs. The line between RPGs with action combat and Action games with RPG elements can get quite blurry.

Simulation: In Simulation games the player controls some kind of simulation. Simulations can range from as realistic as possible to completely ridiculous for humor. The thing being simulated can vary wildly, there are games about running some kind of business (theme parks, zoos hospitals), living a character’s life, operating a vehicle (cars, planes, submarines), a specific job (chef, photographer), playing or managing a sports team (especially football), and more.

There aren’t a lot of Simulation games made, but they have been a steady force in gaming. Maxis and their Sim games were synonymous with the genre for many years. Animal Crossing and The Sims continue to be big sellers and have little competition in their niches.

Sports: Sports are a natural fit for games, there are clearly defined rules, there’s inherent competition, and they appeal to fans of the real life sport. Virtually every sport has had a Sports game dedicated to it, even back in the 8-bit era when games could barely represent what they were meant to portray. Sports games are generally split between Simulation and Arcade. The Simulation side, concerned with realism and often with an official league license tend to release annually. The Arcade side focuses on fast-paced action and doesn’t necessarily follow all the rules of the sport. There are even fictional sport games.

Sports Manager, or GM games, are also often classified as Sports games, though they can be Simulations too. These games don’t involve playing the sport yourself, but managing a team through menu-based choices.

Strategy: Styled as another “thinking over action” genre, Strategy games often depict battles and war, two or more sides making careful moves, managing resources, scouting the enemy, planning upgrades, and picking the right time to strike. Some Strategy games feature RPG elements where units level up or have equipment.

The major split in Strategy games is Real-Time versus Turn-Based. More intertwined is the distinction between Strategy and Tactics. Strategy generally refers to big picture plans, things that happen outside of combat missions, while Tactics refers to the small scale plans of what each unit should be doing at any time. Though there are a number of games with “Tactics” in their title and few with “Strategy”, pretty much any Strategy game has both, and almost any game calling itself a Tactics game is also a Strategy game.

An Idealized System

If I was going to build some kind of video game database there would be several fields dividing genres and genre-adjacent concepts.

First, every game would have one or more of the nine above genres as its “Top Level Genre”. I believe you can reasonably fit everything within at least one of these nine, but perhaps an Other would be necessary occasionally. It’s not an issue that Action is so big if there’s plenty more subgenres and other ways to refine a search.

A “Contains Elements” field could be filled in with one the big 9 genres. This would be useful to describe games that just have some of an element, but it’s not the main focus and it doesn’t quite deserve to be listed as one of the Top Level Genre.

Next, there would be a “Subgenre” field. Subgenre refers to any specific genre that is not one of the nine, like Card Game, Hockey, Rhythm, or Platformer. There are potentially hundreds of these, and there’s no reason to hold back.

Themes and settings appeared in a lot of genre lists, but I think they should be their own field. Horror, science fiction, western, space, historical, and fantasy can be applied to a game of any genre. Survival Horror is a distinct subgenre and can still have horror as a theme.

A few other things like VR, 3D, compilation or multiplayer crept into a lot of genre lists as well, and should have their own appropriate fields concerning the number of players, visual formats, camera perspectives, etc. It’s hard to go wrong with more fields, as long as you have a robust search function to utilize it.

A lot of what I’ve said here may sound like minor quibbles, but as I went through all of these lists of genres a lot of the time genre seemed like an afterthought. Like the makers of these giant game databases just put down what came to mind first. I think this does a disservice to the greater video game playing community. To able to find games you may be interested in, or to research some aspect of video game history, it’s important that games are properly categorized. Well thought out genre systematization makes these resources more useful.


Sources and Further Reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_genres

https://www.gameopedia.com/video-game-genres

https://github.com/twitchtv/igdb-contribution-guidelines/wiki/Genres

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Joystick_Awards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Critics_Awards

https://www.giantbomb.com/game-critics-awards/3015-3766/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.I.C.E._Awards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Academy_Games_Awards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Video_Game_Awards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Awards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softalk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Gaming_World

https://web.archive.org/web/20171227061829/http://www.mweb.co.za/games/view/tabid/4210/Article/28870/ESA-Report-Best-selling-video-games-and-super-genres-of-2016.aspxhttp://www.robinlionheart.com/gamedev/genres.xhtmlhttps://www.statista.com/statistics/189592/breakdown-of-us-video-game-sales-2009-by-genre

https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1167&context=istpub

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-evolution-of-game-genres-nes-gameboy-and-snes-2

https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-evolution-of-game-genres-early-nintendo-consoles/

https://segaretro.org/Sega_Retro:Determining_genre

https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2894&context=publication

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_classification#Video_games

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genre#Popularity

http://aii.lgracegames.com/documents/Game_types_and_genres.pdf

 

Overview

A topic I have long been interested in is how it is decided which platforms a game is released on. It costs time and money to port a game, or to develop for multiple platforms at once, and this must be balanced against expected sales. How well a game “fits” a system, how active a playerbase for a system is, how technically difficult it may be to port a game, the money to be earned from exclusivity deals, and more must go in to these calculations.

I have gathered data on what systems every game for 6th generation consoles (Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Gamecube, Xbox) was released on. This does not take region into account, a game could have released in a single country. This data, the naming conventions of systems, and the decisions of what counts as a distinct game come from MobyGames, with some exceptions. For example, MobyGames considers Resident Evil 4 for the Gamecube to be exclusive and different than the Resident Evil 4 released on 9 other platforms. I have combined game entries in a few cases where it made sense to me, including counting a game if it is included in a compilation. MobyGames also seems to consider ports to handhelds to be the same game, even if there are fairly significant changes, such as Guilty Gear X for the Game Boy Advance. I have kept these as they are.

The list of games were all released on at least one of the 6th generation home consoles, a total of 4,073 games, and 32 systems are included in the study. There were a couple more systems that these games appeared on which I decided not to keep track of. These platforms either only had a handful of games, or the lines between them and another system were too blurred. The exclusion list includes Super Nintendo, WonderSwan Color, PalmOS, tvOS, FireOS, BREW, J2ME, DoJa, Windows Phone, Gloud, PlayStation Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Blacknut, and dedicated plug and play consoles.

Windows, Macintosh, and Linux were combined into a “Personal Computer” system, as well as iPhone and iPad into “iOS”.

All 6th Generation Console Games

Systems are listed chronologically by earliest release date. After PlayStation 5 are some miscellaneous systems, then games only released on the four systems this study is about, and lastly games only released on a single platform. I don’t believe there were any cases where a game released on one of the 4 and also other systems not included in the study.

Of the 4,073 games included in this study, most released on what was by far the biggest seller, the PlayStation 2, while the short lived Dreamcast got much less support. The Xbox’s somewhat PC-like nature surely helped give it a solid lead over the Gamecube in number of titles despite their close overall sales numbers. The Gamecube has even been overtaken by PCs in the years since, as games have trickled in for many years.

What surprised me the most was just how many games have remained stranded among these four consoles. It’s also amazing that 42% of these games were made for one system and have remained that way for the 15-20ish years since. System exclusivity went down dramatically after the 6th generation.

This venn diagram shows how many games each system and every combination of systems had.

Those four games that were released on each of the four systems were Puyo Puyo Fever, NBA 2K2, Castle Shikigami 2, and Capcom vs. SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium.

Ports of Each System

As the first of the 6th generation systems it’s not too surprising the Dreamcast has a comparably larger number of games from the 5th. It also has the largest overlap with arcade games, as Sega still had a very active arcade presence at the time and those games came to the Dreamcast in droves.

I can’t tell you why, but the Dreamcast also has the largest percent of its games also release on the handheld systems, minus the DS and 3DS.

The PlayStation 2’s huge library had the largest percent of games never ported to another system and the smallest percent of games that made their way to the PC.

The Gamecube’s distinction is having the largest percent of its games also release on its three competitor’s systems. It also has the smallest percent of its games come out for mobile devices in the future.

The Xbox has the fewest true exclusives among this group and the most PC ports. It also received ports of games from previous generations the least.

Trivia

Among the systems included in this study Metal Slug 3 appeared on the most, at 14. There was also Garou: Mark of the Wolves (13), The King of Fighters 2002: Challenge to Ultimate Battle (12), Rayman 2: The Great Escape (11), and Metal Slug 5 (11). Mostly SNK arcade games.

The average number of systems a game appeared on was 2.18, while the most common number of systems was 1.

Sources

MobyGames for game data.

Venny for the venn diagram template

Overview

It seems clear that fighting games have been stuffing more and more playable characters into their rosters. But how exactly has roster size changed over time? And how has selling characters as DLC changed things?

Game Inclusion Criteria

I started with the list of games on wikipedia’s list of fighting games, not including the wrestling or sports games. This was gathered in early 2022, and no 2022 games were included. To be included, games had to include multiple chooseable characters that have distinct non-cosmetic characteristics. Those characters must be able to fight other chooseable characters, rather than generic enemies like a beat ’em up. Games could be traditional 2D fighters, arena fighters, anime fighters, platform fighters or anything else commonly referred to as a fighting game.

Only one version of a game is counted, the one with the largest roster. If multiple versions have the same character count the earliest one is counted. For example, although there are many versions of Street Fighter 2, only the 2017 Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers was counted because it had the largest roster.

Noncommercial games were not included.

The total number of games included was 615.

This project is not meant as any kind of comprehensive look at all fighting games, just as many as I could reasonably find good information on quickly. Most of the games I was unable to include were Japanese exclusive, very old, not a fighting game according to the definition I am using, or defunct online-only browser and mobile games.

Character Inclusion Criteria

Characters that need to be unlocked or require a code to access count, but characters that require a cheat device, such as a Game Shark, do not. Non-chooseable boss or other characters do not count even if you can play against them. Characters that are not chooseable on a character select screen but appear as part of a special move and disappear quickly (often called assist characters) are not counted. Alternate costumes that play identically to a base character, even if they are chooseable on a character select screen, do not count. Characters given away as free DLC are still counted as DLC.

Number of Fighting Games by Year

There’s a big gap between 1985’s Galactic Warriors and 1989’s Spitting Image. I’m sure there were more fighting games released in between those two, but it’s hard to find information on games that old. The green bars represent years in which DLC characters were being sold, the first of which was Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds among the games included in this study.

The early 90s releases of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat led to a huge surge in fighting game popularity. The fall of the arcade market and a new generation of consoles cooled the market in the early 2000s. I’m not sure why 2010 saw such a decrease, it was well into the HD era and in the middle of a generation.

Total Number of Fighting Game Characters by Year

Before we get into the differences of DLC and non-DLC characters, here is the total number fighting game characters by year. Of course, years with more fighting games will generally have more fighting game characters, but I thought it would be fun to look at what is sort of the total creative output of character designers. The years with most games don’t actually quite come out on top here.
In total there were 11,921 fighting game characters included in this study, though some are the same character appearing in many games.

Average Fighting Game Roster Size by Year

Roster sizes have generally been growing over time, but recent years seem to stick to the high 20s, with some notable exceptions.

The largest roster on record is Tobal 2’s 200, which is the reason 1997 sticks out. That’s more than double #2: Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 which had 98.  Four early games had roster sizes of 3. The most common roster size was 8.

Average Fighting Game Base Roster Size by Year

The years prior to DLC characters being introduced are of course the same as the previous graph. Roster size isn’t effected very much until 2018 when DLC characters start making up a larger chunk of characters.

Average Size of DLC Rosters in Fighting Games by Year

Since fewer fighting games have been made over time and not all of them have DLC characters, some of these years have small sample sizes, causing the averages to bounce around a lot.

The largest DLC roster was in BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, with 33.

Average Percent of Fighting Game Roster That is Comprised of DLC Characters

So how much of a fighting game roster is comprised of DLC characters? Overall, the maximum seen was 34% of the characters in a given year but is generally around 20%. Just among the fighting games that have DLC characters it can be almost half and is typically around 30%.

Average Percent of Fighting Games with DLC Characters

The overall number of fighting games that have DLC characters has generally been going up, though only one of the four 2020 games had character DLC.

 

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fighting_games

https://mobygames.com

https://mortalkombat.fandom.com/wiki/Mortal_Kombat_Wiki

https://ranma.fandom.com

https://snk.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page

https://virtuafighter.fandom.com/wiki/Virtua_Fighter_Wiki

https://guilty-gear.fandom.com

https://wiki.gbl.gg/w/Main_Page

https://onepiece.fandom.com/

https://naruto.fandom.com

https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page

https://onepiece.fandom.com/wiki/One_Piece:_Gear_Spirit

https://bleach.fandom.com

https://blazblue.fandom.com/wiki/BlazBlue_Wiki

https://skullgirls.fandom.com/wiki/Characters

https://soulcalibur.fandom.com

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC84X0epDRFdTrybxEX8ZWkA

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyOJzQzyDGihKpTO3-zyhYg

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG4vQ1sUbqy_1B8ePnqaBrw

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVi6ofFy7QyJJrZ9l0-fwbQ

 

 

 

 

Overview

More than two years ago I published the Nintendo Game Project, looking at various statistics of all (at the time) 15,000 games on Nintendo platforms. I thought it would be interesting to do the project again, but with Sony games this time. While Sony doesn’t have as long a legacy as Nintendo, it should be interesting in its own right, and I can do some comparisons. Nintendo can be at odds with the rest of the video game industry, while Sony has largely dominated it since the PlayStation.

I have kept my methods the same as before to facilitate comparisons, but let’s go over them. This study includes officially licensed games from the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, and PlayStation 4. My cutoff date for games was the last day of 2020, so not all PlayStation 4 games are included. I have not included PlayStation Classics, just as I did not include Virtual Console games. Unlike last time I did include games not released in North America, Europe, or Japan.

I combined development studios and publishing companies that were owned by another company into one. For example, Ubisoft Paris and Ubisoft Barcelona are both Ubisoft studios, so they both just count as “Ubisoft”. Ubisoft bought Red Storm Entertainment in 2000, so that company counts as Red Storm Entertainment before they were bought, and as Ubisoft after. Sometimes video game companies are bought by non-video game companies, I ignored these unless that company also owned at least one other video game company. For example, Atlus was bought by Index, which also owned Interchannel, so those companies were counted as Index. I counted a company as owned by another if they owned more than 50% of it, so D3 Publisher counts as Bandai Namco from the date that they acquired most of their stock.

Merged companies I counted as a new company. So Squaresoft and Enix are counted separately from Square Enix. If a company changed their name, I used the most recent. When games were ported, I credited the porting studio, whether that was the original creator or not.

Many games are likely fully or partially developed by uncredited studios in countries with cheaper labor, art assets have especially been outsourced in recent years. I can only list developers officially named, please keep in mind that developer and country data can not be perfect.

I have included some data from my Twenty-Five Years of Games Across Eight Metrics project, namely ESRB ratings, genres, and average lengths of games. This data only covers games released in North America, and the PlayStation 4 data is a few years old now, though since this data is presented as an average it is unlikely to have changed much.

Fortunately, there were few issues with even the oldest Sony games having no developer named, or with vague release dates.

System Infographics

Before we dig in I have to talk a bit about the original PlayStation and why it’s incomplete. In late 2020 I copied the list of PlayStation games from wikipedia to get started on this project. At the time I thought it was a shame that the PlayStation 4 list would not include many games that would come out before I finished this project. I did not expect to come back to the PlayStation list almost a year later while I was working on these infographics and see that almost one thousand new games had been added to this 25 year old console’s list of games.

Almost all of these games seem to be Japanese exclusives. According to Sony, 4,944 games were released in Japan, which likely means the original PlayStation’s library is even larger than the PlayStation 2’s. I’m glad Wikipedia editors are documenting these games, but I do wish I had somehow timed things better. This throws my numbers off for the number of games developed in Japan, and the top developers and publishers is likely off a bit too. I apologize for the errors.

Sony’s first system was an immediate success, with over 10 times as many games as their nearest competitor, the Nintendo 64, and selling three times as many hardware units.

We’ll be seeing Konami a lot on these lists, and they are off to a roaring start here. You probably haven’t heard of any of Lightspan Adventure’s games, even though they released over 100 titles for the PlayStation. Lightspan sold educational games directly to schools, and were quite prolific while they lasted.

While many will call PlayStation a haven for Role-Playing games, it actually has the smallest share of them of any Sony system. What it does have the most of is Racing and Sports games.

The age ratings of PlayStation games are heavily skewed towards younger audiences with the highest share rated E for Everyone and lowest share rated M for Mature among Sony systems.

This was before the E10+ rating was introduced, but the PS1 has the only Early Childhood games on a Sony system (probably, it’s harder to find Early Childhood games since the ESRB got rid of the rating and made them unsearchable for on their website).

The PlayStation 2 is the best selling video game system of all time with a huge and varied library.

Konami takes the top developer spot again, by a wide margin. Sega left the hardware business in 2001 and still became a top developer for both the PlayStation 2 and Gamecube. They merged with Sammy in 2004, and if you were to count Sega and Sega Sammy as the same company they would be ahead of Koei among developers, and in the top 7 publishers. Very few of Idea Factory’s games left Japan, but they mostly make tactical RPGs and visual novels.

With two systems to compare we can see some trends: games have become more mature, longer, and less exclusive to one region, though not so much with Japan quite yet.

Being a handheld, the PlayStation Portable still has a strong Japanese presence. I was a bit surprised to see how many sports and racing games Electronic Arts released. QuinRose made otome games, published every single one themselves, and not a single one left Japan.

Puzzle, Strategy/Tactics, and Role-Playing games reach higher proportions on the PSP. If my genre data had included Japanese exclusives the PlayStation Portable would likely have looked fairly different, with many Japanese-exclusive visual novels qualifying as Adventure games.

This is the only Sony system where one of the top 5 best sellers is exclusive to one region: Monster Hunter Portable 3rd.

The PlayStation 3 is where things change for Japan. From making nearly 60% of the PS2 and PSP libraries to 30%, and there are also now three non-Japanese companies among the top 7 developers. Japanese exclusives drop from around 40% to 12.51%, and the amount of games released in all regions doubles. Fewer best sellers and top rated games are developed in Japan.

Regional exclusives in general suddenly become much less common, and with Japan making fewer games they are now the region missing out on the most games.

I would have expected average game lengths to increase with the advent of trophies, but it actually goes down a bit from the PSP.

There is also a shift towards more games with more mature age ratings.

The PlayStation Vita is Sony’s biggest aberration, receiving little support after its first few years and selling much less than any other Sony system.

While the PS3 stepped away from Japanese games, the Vita was much more popular there than anywhere else, and there were about the same portion of games released there as with the PSP. Meanwhile, the North American and European markets had nearly identical libraries.

Without Electronic Arts’ support there are much fewer Sports games, and we see some new companies in the top 7s, while Sony develops and publishes fewer games than any of its other systems. Idea Factory and 5pb made a lot of visual novels. None of Media5’s games left Japan, 18 of them start with “NextRev” and might be designed to help you study for various kinds of exams, such as nursing, if I can trust google translate. We’ll talk more about Limited Run in a moment.

Sales data is very limited for the Vita, with very few official announcements, likely due to its poor sales.

The top developers and publishers represent much smaller pieces of the pie than ever before with the PlayStation 4, something also seen with the Switch. Games take longer to make, and there are more small studios making games than ever before.

Limited Run was the first and probably currently is the largest company making limited amounts of physical versions of smaller, mostly indie, games that wouldn’t otherwise have been able to release physically. Their first PS4 release was about 2 and a half years into the system’s life, making it all the more difficult to claim the top spot. Limited Run were just getting started with the Switch when I released my Nintendo project, I’m sure they are currently near the top there too.

Japan falls even further in the country rankings, but barely manages to remain the top producer of PS4 games.

While the Vita’s sales numbers are likely spotty due to poor sales, there also seems to have been a change with major publishers in this era that led to them releasing fewer and more vague sales numbers, which is why these sales numbers are so nicely rounded. Many reports by these companies now focus on total revenue or number of active players. Nintendo on the other hand releases sales numbers to the ten-thousandths place for any titles that have sold at least one million copies every quarter.

At this point region exclusivity is almost dead, I had only 2 European exclusives recorded for the PS4. Japan has become the big loser when it comes to games not being localized.

Sony Games by System

This graph shows us the lifespan of the Sony systems, and how new systems supplant the old. 2013 was quite a year, with 5 systems receiving new releases.

Rather than relative amounts, here we can see the total number of games by year. The PlayStation era numbers should be quite a bit higher, as wikipedia had not documented many games at the time I grabbed its data. The increasing amount of time it takes to produce a game is apparent here with 2018 and on releasing fewer games than ~20 years ago, despite the larger number of developers. Even in the PlayStation 3’s third year it was still barely outdoing the output of the PlayStation 2.

Countries and Regions

Here’s all the data for the regions by system. Unlike with the Nintendo project I included games not released in the big three regions, and there were a fair number for the PS2. European exclusives have always been rare.

A more graphical way to look the data from the chart.

The 10 countries that developed the most games for Sony systems, and their share of all games released for each system.

Overall we have seen more and more countries develop video games over time, with the PlayStation 4 making a large jump.

We don’t often think of Canada as a powerhouse of game development, but several provinces provide tax breaks for game studios, and Montreal is home to many development studios, including one of the largest in the world, Ubisoft Montreal, while Electronic Arts Vancouver makes a lot of sports games.

It’s difficult to get a good color gradient for this map, since many countries have only produced a handful of games, but it is nice to see that game development has truly become a global effort.

This graph is a bit silly, and probably a bit hard to understand. What I wanted to find out was which countries had a lot of game developers per capita and which didn’t, but there isn’t that kind of data for many countries. Instead, this is how many games were developed in each country per person, as of 2020. So for instance, Japan developed 7,498 games in this study, and had 126,476,461 people, so it made 0.0000593 games per person. This is a bit cumbersome to read, so scientific notation is used. 5.93E-05 means 5.93*10^-5, or 5.93 with the decimal moved left 5 times, or about 6 games per 100,000 people.

Japan is clearly very dedicated to making video games, and second place, the United Kingdom, has about half as many games per person with roughly 3 games developed per 100,000 people. Malta may have only worked on 6 Sony games, but that is a lot for its population of 441,543. China, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia have large populations, but few games, putting them on the bottom of the list.

Developers and Publishers

These graphs are very similar, but please note the y-axis is different on each.

I’m surprised the PSP has the fewest, it sold much better than the Vita, games were relatively cheap to make for it, and digital distribution had just begun, opening the way for smaller titles.

I would have expected the PS3 to have more developers and publishers as well, with the indie explosion in full force during its lifetime.

Self publishing has become a viable option for many small digital-only games, one cause of the large number of publishers for the PlayStation 4.

When we consider games per developer or publisher, things are a bit different. The PlayStation 2 was a huge hit and a lot of companies threw everything they could at it. Over 6 games per developer on average is incredible. Two generations later it was only possible to make a third as many.

Here is a look at how many Sony systems developers and publishers supported. A great majority had short lives or didn’t stick around for more than one system. Twenty-nine developers and 23 publishers have released a game for every Sony system, and I will show you who they are soon. Nintendo has had 6 developers and 8 publishers if you omit the Virtual Boy and combine Bandai/Namco/Bandai Namco and Koei/Tecmo/Koei Tecmo.

I did not include companies before and after merger as one company for this, unlike the equivalent Nintendo chart. If I had Bandai/Namco/Bandai Namco, Koei/Tecmo/Koei Tecmo, and Sega/Sammy/Sega Sammy would have been included in both developer and publisher lists.

The usual suspects are here, but there are some lesser known companies too.

Nacon was known as BigBen Interactive until recently.

Behaviour Interactive, formerly known as Artificial Mind & Movement does of lot licensed games.

Very few of SystemSoft’s games leave Japan, but they have some long running series, including Daisenryaku, WWII era war strategy games.

Despite their shorter history Sony has both developed and published more games for their platforms than Nintendo. Konami is not far behind, once again showing its prolific output, it was the #1 developer and #2 publisher for Nintendo.

Idea Factory is not well known outside of Japan, yet claims fifth most prolific developer.

Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are the only non-Japanese companies in either top 10.

Lightspan is the only company to make this list that only supported one console, and 3 others managed it with only 2.

If I had combined pre- and post-merger companies as a single entity the totals would have looked like this:

Bandai/Nacmo/Bandai Namco: 519 developed, 1016 published

Koei/Tecmo/Koei Tecmo: 412 developed, 422 published

Sega/Sammy/Sega Sammy: 291 developed, 472 published

Square/Enix/Square Enix: 218 developed, 328 published

This graph shows the difference in the percent of games developed in each country between Sony and Nintendo. Negative values mean a country has a larger share of the total Nintendo games, while a positive value means Sony does. For example, 50.960% of Nintendo games were developed in Japan, while 48.409% of Sony games were developed in Japan. The difference is -2.551, indicating that a larger percent of Nintendo games were developed in Japan when compared to Sony. If a value is red it means that no Sony games were developed in that country, if it is black then no Nintendo games were developed there.

I have heard before that Nintendo is generally not as popular in Europe as it is in the United States. While that seems to be true of the United Kingdom, Poland, and Sweden if we are to judge by game development, it is not true of France, Germany, or Spain. These six countries are the European countries that developed at least one percent of all games for either company.

I also wanted to look in to which hardware maker different developers and publishers favored. The developers and publishers included are the top 25 for Sony and Nintendo, which has a lot of overlap. The percents are of Sony and Nintendo’s libraries, not the developer’s or publisher’s.

Please keep in mind the Nintendo data is a few years old, so Limited Run is probably very close between the two by now.

Electronic Arts, Koei, Koei Tecmo, Nippon Ichi, the newer SNK, Square Enix, and Take-Two are some developers making significantly more of Sony’s games. Hudson Soft, Intelligent Systems, Kemco, and TOSE are some that make many more Nintendo games. TOSE likely just got credited less often by the time Sony entered the game, however.

There is a huge gulf in the share of Sony developed games and Nintendo developed, that is made only slightly more even when considering HAL Laboratory, Intelligent Systems, and other not-owned-by-Nintendo-but-work-almost-exclusively-with-them developers.

It is striking how Konami is the first or second biggest developer and publisher for both Sony and Nintendo and also manages to represent almost the same share of both libraries, especially since few of those games released on both a Sony and Nintendo system.

On the publishing side Sony and Nintendo are much closer.

Game Titles

All game title data uses North American English localized names when they exist, European English names when they don’t, or Romanized Japanese names when neither exists.

I wanted to try this word occurrence graph again with some different words. This time I included roman numerals preceded by a space, to get a better idea of how long some series tend go on for. This is somewhat hampered by games with a space followed by a new word that begins with I or V. Final Fantasy XV is the only roman numeral-ed game that has gotten to XV.

PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable games had the longest titles, while PlayStation 4 saw quite a reduction in title length. This chart correlates fairly closely with the number of Japanese exclusives, which can be quite wordy.

The shortest games titles were D and Z, both for the PlayStation. There is also a game called X for the Game Boy.

The longest title was Hisshou Pachinko*Pachi-Slot Kouryoku Series Vol. 5: CR Shinseiki Evangelion 2nd Impact * Pachi-Slot Shinseiki Evangelion, with 120 characters. The exact title varies a bit by source, but every way I saw it rendered easily put it at the longest title.

Thirteen is the most common length, with a gradual drop off as titles get longer.

In closing

This project took a lot longer to make than I expected it to, even with the knowledge I gained making the Nintendo Games Project. I made fewer infographics for systems, but a lot more graphs covering different kinds of data. Not having to fix and research a lot of data for games from the 3rd and 4th generation helped speed things up somewhat.

I don’t see myself ever making a Sega or Microsoft games project, they just weren’t/haven’t been around long enough as hardware makers.

I hope you enjoyed this project and learned something interesting.

Sources

MobyGames – Genre information

MetaCritic – Metascores

ESRB – ESRB ratings

List of best-selling video games by platform  – Lists of best selling games

Lists of video games – Lists of games for each system

Overview

Video game magazines used to be the hub of video game discourse, with the latest news, editorials on the state of the industry, and reviews. While the internet eventually led to the demise of most of these magazines I still find it fascinating to look through them to see what was and wasn’t a big deal at the time.

I made this archive to make these magazines more accessible and to help fans of my favorite genre. I have collected as many JRPG reviews from magazines as I could find and presented them here. If you’re here you’d probably also be interested in my JRPG project, where I analyze JRPGs based on review scores, price, exclusivity, and more.

These scans mostly come from RetroMags, Out of Print Archive, Datassette, this archive, and the Internet Archive (including many uploaded by Foxhack). I update this archive periodically, see the section below. As for the games, I am using JRPG Chronicle’s JRPG Index, which is maintained by Lucca. It’s a great website and discord channel for JRPG lovers, check it out if you’re into JRPGs.

This project includes video game magazines from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Every English language gaming magazine I could find:

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360Zine
64 Extreme
@Gamer
Advance
Arcade
Australian PlayStation
Computer & Video Games
Computer Game Review and 16-bit Entertainment
Control
Cube
Cube Australia
DC UK
Dreamcast Magazine
Dreamcast Monthly
Electric Brain
Electronic Entertainment
Electronic Game Player
Electronic Games
Electronic Gaming Monthly
Extreme PlayStation
Fusion
G-Force
GameFan
GameFan (reboot)
Gamefreaks
GBA World
GMR
Games World
Game Boy Official
Game Boy Power
Game Informer
Game On!
Game Players
Game Player’s
Game Zone
GameNow
GamePro
Gamereactor
Gamestar
Gamers’ Republic
Games Domain Offline
Games TM
Hardcore Gamer
HGZine
Hyper
IGN64.com
Incite
Intelligent Gamer
Maximum
Mean Machines
Mean Machines PlayStation
Mean Machines Sega
Mega
Mega Drive Advanced Gaming
Mega Play
Mega Power
MegaZone
Megafan
Megatech
Mr Dreamcast
N-Force
N64
N64 Magazine
N64 Pro
NGC
NGamer (UK)
NGamer (USA)
NewType Gaming
New Age Gaming
New Zealand PlayStation
Next Generation
Next Generation
Nintendo Game Zone
Nintendo Gamer
Nintendo Magazine System (Australia)
Nintendo Official Magazine
Nintendo Power
Nintendo Power Flash
Official Dreamcast Magazine
Official Nintendo Magazine UK
Official NZ PlayStation Magazine
Official PlayStation 2 Magazine UK
Official Sega Dreamcast Magazine
Official Sega Magazine UK
Official Sega Saturn
Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine
Official UK PlayStation Magazine
Official UK Xbox Magazine
Official Xbox Magazine
P.S.X.
PLAY
Play (Australia)
PS Max
PSExtreme
PSM2
Planet Game Boy
Play (UK)
PlayStation Magazine
PlayStation Plus
PlayStation Pro
PlayStation Official Magazine-Australia
PlayStation 2 Official Magazine-Australia
PlayZine
Pocket Gamer
Pocket Games
Polygon
Power
PSW
P2
P3Zine
Pure
Q 64
R-Zone
Raze
S the Sega Magazine
SNES Force
Saturn Plus
Saturn Power
Sega Force
Sega Magazine
Sega Master Force
Sega Power
Sega Pro
Sega Saturn Magazine
Sega Visions
Sega XS
Sega Zone
Silicon Magazine
Station
Super Action
Super Control
Super Gamer
Super Gaming
Super Play
Super Pro
Surge
Team Sega Newsletter
The Games Machine
The Official Australian PlayStation Magazine
Total 64
Total Control
Total Game Boy
Total Gamer
Total Games
Total PlayStation
Total Saturn
Total!
TurboForce
TurboPlay
Ultimate Future Games
Ultimate Gamer
Ultra Game Players
UVGM
VSIXTYFOUR
Video Games Underground
VideoGames & Computer Entertainment/Video Games – the Ultimate Gaming Magazine
Videogame Advisor
Walmart GameCenter
Xbox Live Gamer
Xbox Nation

Games are listed by their official title in North America at the time and in mostly alphabetical order without leading articles. Series with roman numerals or other inconsistencies have been put in an order that hopefully makes sense. The order can look weird with the varied useage of spaces, numbers, colons, and other special characters. Games with the same name on different systems are separated, unless they came out around the same time and are pretty much identical.

The earliest game included is 1988’s Phantasy Star, the third JRPG to reach North America or Europe, while the latest is 2023’s Final Fantasy XVI. There are fewer reviews from after 2010, as there were few magazines left, and even fewer scans available of them. The 1992-2005 era probably has the most coverage.

There are a few anomalies worth noting. Magazines occasionally reviewed games that never came to their region, or never left Japan at all. There are a few retrospective reviews, written years after a game came out. Nintendo Power’s early days threw out review scores inconsistently, sometimes giving scores to games without a written review, or giving scores in a walkthrough. They even reviewed Brandish twice.

You can click on the images to expand them to full size. Pressing the right arrow key or clicking on the right half of the image will go to the next image, while the left arrow key and left half of the image will go to the previous. Pressing escape will close the image lightbox. You may want to open some very large images in a new tab. Filenames start with the the name of the magazine if you ever want to check.

Update Log and Totals

October 9th, 2023 Update

I expected updates to get smaller and smaller over time, yet this is the largest I have made. 1,151 new page scans have been added. This is mostly due to really going through Out of Print Archive and discovering a mysterious archive. I have also split a few more letter pages and redistributed a few split letters to be more even.

A total of 53 (or so, it became very difficult to keep track of) new magazines now have scans. One of these is WalMart GameCenter, which I wasn’t sure I should include. It is something given away for free by WalMart to entice people to buy games, but it does have the typical sections of a video game magazine, with a smaller page count. There’s typicaly a single game review per issue and they seem pretty fair and in line with other reviews so I decided to include them. This is the newest magazine included in the archive, making Soul Hackers 2 the newest game to have a review.

Fifty-nine new games have reviews:

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Azure Dreams (GBC), Bleach: The 3rd Phantom, Bomberman Tournament, Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, Chrono Trigger (iOS), Crimson Shroud, Crystal Defenders, Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 (Wii), Dragon Force II: Kamisarishi Daichi ni, Dragon Quest 25 Shunen Kinen: Famicom & Super Famicom Dragon Quest I·II·III, Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, Elden Ring, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (Wii), Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VIII (PC), Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Fossil League: Dino Tournament Championship, Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, Genji: Dawn of the Samurai, Genji: Days of the Blade, Graffiti Kingdom, Grandia Digital Museum, Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax, Harvest Moon DS, Inazuma Eleven, Inazuma Eleven 3: Lightning Bolt/Bomb Blast, Knights in the Nightmare (PSP), Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, The Last Remnant, The Legend of Heroes III: Song of the Ocean, MagnaCarta 2, Monster Hunter Tri G, Monster Hunter: World, Monster Racers, Monster Rancher DS, Mother 3, Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn, Ninety-Nine Nights II, Octopath Traveler, Phantasy Star II (iOS), Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness, Remindelight, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (DS), Seiken Densetsu 3, Shining Force (iOS), Soma Bringer, Sorcerian: Shichisei Mahou no Shito, Soul Hackers 2, Spectral Force: Genesis, Valkyria Chronicles II, The World Ends With You: Solo Remix, Yakuza: Dead Souls, Ys Strategy, Zoids Assault

November 28th, 2022 Update

I didn’t expect to ever have more magazines to add, but 6 more are now included. A total of 596 new images have been added and 78 new games. A new letter has also been added: #.

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New games: 3D Dot Game Heroes, The 3rd Birthday, Ar Tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel, Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland, Brave Story, Crimson Sea, Crimson Sea 2, Custom Robo (N64), Digimon World: Data Squad, Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, Dragon’s Crown, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation, Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, Dragoneer’s Aria, Drone Tactics, Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground, Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3, Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan, Fate/Extra, Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection, Final Fantasy VI Advance, Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIII-2, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage 2, Fullmetal Alchemist and the Broken Angel, Gods Eater Burst, .Hack//G.U. Vol. 3//Redemption, Hyperdimension Neptunia, Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, Inuyasha: Secret of the Divine Jewel, Inuyasha: The Secret of the Cursed Mask, Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja, Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, Mana Khemia: Student Alliance, Mega Man Star Force 2: Zerker X Ninja/Zerker X Saurian, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, Muramasa Rebirth, Mother 1 + 2, Metal Dungeon, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, Naruto: Path of the Ninja 2, Orphen: Scion of Sorcery, Pandora’s Tower, Persona 4 Golden, Phantasy Star Portable, Pokémon Black Version /White Version, Project X Zone, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, Radiant Historia, Record of Agarest War, Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny (PS3), Shaman King: Power of Spirit, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers, Star Ocean: The Last Hope, Soul Sacrifice, Summon Night: Swordcraft Story, Summon Night: Twin Age, Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity, Soul Nomad & the World Eaters, Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation, Tales of Xillia, Tales of Innocence, Tales of Destiny: Director’s Cut, Tales of Graces f, Traysia, Unchained Blades, White Knight Chronicles II, Way of the Samurai 4, Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls, What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord!?, Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monster Coliseum, Yakuza 4, Ys I & II Chronicles

May 6th, 2022 Update

Instead of just using the biggest magazines I have added every English language magazine I can, a total of 46 additional magazines with at least one scan have been added. A total of 824 new images including 132 new games have been added.

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New games: Arc Rise Fantasia, Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica, Astonishia Story, Blaze and Blade: Eternal Quest, Baroque, Battle Hunter, Blue Dragon: Awakened Shadow, The Bouncer, Castlevania: Double Pack, Chaos Wars, Class of Heroes, Code of Princess, Crimson Gem Saga, Cross Edge, Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls, Digimon World 2, Digimon World 4, Disgaea 2: Dark Hero Day, Disgaea DS, Dissidia Final Fantasy, Dokapon Kingdom, Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2, Dragon Warrior, Dragon’s Dogma, Drakengard 2, Drakkhen, Dual Hearts, Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of the Ancient Art, Dungeon Maker 2: The Hidden War, Dynasty Tactics, Dynasty Tactics 2, Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2, Eternal Poison, Eternal Sonata (PS3), Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City, Final Fantasy XI: Treasures of Aht Urhgan (PS2), Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light, Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage, Fossil Fighters: Champions, Front Mission (DS), Fullmetal Alchemist 2: Curse of the Crimson Elixir, Generation of Chaos, Glory of Heracles, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, Guardian Heroes (Xbox 360), Half-Minute Hero, Harvest Moon DS Cute, Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar, Harvest Moon: More Friends From Mineral Town, Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns DS, Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns 3D, Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility, Hexys Force, Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix, Infinite Space, Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Langrisser III, The Last Story, Legaia 2: Duel Saga, Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked, Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis, Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy, Mario Tennis: Power Tour, Master of the Monster Lair, Medabots: Infinity, Mega Man Battle Network 5: Double Team DS, Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel/Team Protoman, Mega Man Battle Network 6: Cybeast Falzar/Cybeast Gregar, Mega Man Star Force: Dragon/Leo/Pegasus, Metal Saga, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Monster Hunter Tri, Monster Rancher Evo, Naruto: Path of the Ninja, Nier, One Piece: Unlimited Adventure, Operation Darkness, Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Phantasy Star Online Ver. 2, Phantasy Star Online: Episode I & II Plus, Pokémon Black Version 2/White Version 2, Pokémon Conquest, Pokémon HeartGold Version/SoulSilver Version, Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs, Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia, Ragnarok DS, Record of Agarest War, Resonance of Fate (PS3), River King: Mystic Valley, Riviera: The Promised Land, Rondo of Swords, Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, Rune Factory 3: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny (Wii), Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, Sands of Destruction, Shaman King: Legacy of the Spirits, Soaring Hawk/Sprinting Wolf, Shaman King: Master of Spirits, Shaman King: Master of Spirits 2, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Shiren the Wanderer, Solatorobo: Red the Hunter, Spectral Force 3, Spectral Souls: Resurrection of the Ethereal Empires, Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals, Star Ocean: Second Evolution, Star Ocean: The Last Hope International, Steambot Chronicles, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Tales of the Abyss (3DS), Trinity: Souls of Zill Ơll, Uncharted Waters (SNES), Valhalla Knights 2, Way of the Samurai 3, White Knight Chronicles, Xenoblade Chronicles, Yakuza 2, Ys Seven, Ys: The Oath in Felghana, Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards, Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger VS Darkdeath Evilman, Zoids: Legacy

November 22nd, 2021 Update

26 games have had new reviews added, and 12 new games have been added: Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Car Battler Joe, Dragon Ball Z: Legendary Super Warrior, Dragon Warrior III, Exile, Faxanadu, Lufia: The Legend Returns, Metal Gear Ac!d, Mystic Heroes, Pokémon Crystal Version, Ring of Red, Star Ocean: First Departure

Totals

Total Magazines: 160

Total Images: 3,857

Total Games: 908

Total Games with a Colon in the Title: 365

# – 4 Games

A – 33 games

B Part 1 – 19 games

B Part 2 – 17 games

C Part 1 – 18 games

C Part 2 – 27 games

D Part 1 – 55 games

D Part 2 – 54 Games

E – 28 games

F Part 1 – 28 games

F Part 2 – 33 games

F Part 3 – 41 games

G – 33 games

H – 33 games

I – 12 games

J – 3 games

K – 25 games

L Part 1 – 26 games

L Part 2 – 23 games

M Part 1 – 35 games

M Part 2 – 42 games

N – 15 games

O – 15 games

P Part 1 – 14 games

P Part 2 – 20 games

P Part 3 – 35 games

Q – 1 game

R  – 32 games

S Part 1 – 30 games

S Part 2 – 25 games

S Part 3 – 51 games

T – 33 games

U – 5 games

V – 16 games

W – 21 games

X – 5 games

Y – 18 games

Z – 5 games

When a popular video game has been out for a while and its sales have slowed the publisher may release a discounted reprint. The requirements and names for these reprints vary by system and region. In North America Nintendo calls them “Player’s Choice” or “Nintendo Selects”, Sony calls them “Greatest Hits”.

This isn’t a comprehensive history of the practice though, what I’m interested in is the secondhand market for these games. Due to the addition of strongly colored banners and other changes to the box art many collectors will turn their nose up at these, considering them an eyesore. Some may consider them too “common” or “cheap” to be worthy collector’s items. Consequently, the common thought is that they are less valuable, and thus sell for less.

It has occurred to me many times that these reprints must actually be the rarer versions, since they are only released once a game has sold most of the copies it is going to sell and the publisher is willing squeeze whatever extra money they can from a game. What an unusual situation, where the rare version of something is cheaper and less desired. Collector’s editions and other variant printings are also less common, but generally sell for more than the base game in the secondhand market.

I wanted to quantify this, just how much rarer are these discounted reprints, and how much less valuable are they? I started with Wikipedia’s lists of games to receive these reprints and recorded the complete price and sales volume from PriceCharting. While I added a few from PriceCharting’s lists that weren’t on Wikipedia, I found I had to remove far more. PriceCharting just doesn’t list the reprints separately for dozens of games.

In total 1,075 games were used, although 38 discounted reprints did not have price data, seemingly because they were so rarely sold. I only used data for “complete” games, this is more common than loose or new. PriceCharting gets its data by looking at completed listings on eBay.

Sales Volume

PriceCharting has a quirky method of displaying how often a game is being sold and I must start by explaining it. Rather than displaying the average number of sales during a standard period of time such as a year, it instead uses the format “X sale(s) per day/week/month/year”. X never contains a decimal, so it has been rounded.

Fifteen different sales volumes were observed from the games I recorded, and it is likely there are no others.

On the right is how PriceCharting describes the sales volume, in the middle is how much this comes to per year, and I broke these down into tiers for some of the graphs I will be using, shown on the left. The two gray tiers, 15, and 16, were never observed and are probably very rarely, if ever, used, considering that tier 17 consists of a single game (try guessing what it is before we get there).

This is a somewhat haphazard way of describing sales volume, and the gap between tiers varies from a factor of 1.2 times to 2.34 times.

Right away we can see that discounted reprints sell less often on average than the original version of a game. No original release was observed as being sold less than once a month, but keep in mind these are some of the most popular games for each system.

The most commonly sold discount reprint version of a game (at 2 a day) was also the most commonly sold original release of a game (6 a day): Wii Sports.

The three original releases at tier 14 (3 sales a day) are all Gamecube releases: Super Mario Sunshine, Super Smash Bros. Melee, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

Another thing I wanted to look into was how sales volume changed over time. This isn’t based on the games market overall, just games that have a discounted reprint. I wasn’t able to include the discounted reprints themselves because very few of them have reliable release dates.

The earliest games included were for the Game Boy, but there weren’t many with separate Player’s Choice listings. Volume remains pretty stable starting from 1998, probably due to 4th generation systems phasing out. I would have expected a gradual increase over time, as older games have more time to find permanent homes or be thrown away, and fewer people are interested in the retro scene. There was only one 2018 game included, God of War for PlayStation 4.

Price

I’ve done other studies on game prices before so I didn’t look too deeply into prices alone, but here’s how much the original versions of games with a discounted reprint cost over time. The three Game Boy games from 1989 (Super Mario Land, Tennis, and Tetris) aren’t terribly expensive, but the 1991-1994 games that used cardboard packaging sure are. As games get newer from there they slowly get cheaper.

Price vs Sales Volume

This scatter plot gives some idea of how spread out the prices are in some tiers, but it’s difficult to see much of any correlation between sales volume and price since so many dots overlap each other.

You might not expect the least sold games (remember, tier 1-6 are all discounted reprints) to be so consistently cheap. The most expensive of the discounted reprints was Super Mario World at $287.08, while the most expensive overall was the original release of Super Mario World at $580.00.

Are the rarest (or at least the least often sold on eBay) games actually the most expensive? It actually seems to be closer to the opposite, although there is not a clear a progression. Some of the wild swings are due to small sample size – tier 8, 14, and 17 among original releases have no more than 4 games each. Discounting them the average tends to creep up the more common a game is.

Discounted Reprint Vs Original Release

This graph shows just how much rarer discounted reprints tend to be. If a discounted reprint sold half as often the original release, it would be 50% here.

More than three fourths of discounted reprints have less than 15% the sales volume of the original release.

Curiously, for 48 games studied both versions sold in equal amounts. I did not see any particular pattern among these other than none of them being from before the 5th generation.

Here is another way of looking at the price difference between discounted reprints and original releases, we can see the overall trends better than the scatter plot. The price difference is small in most cases, but cheaper is a bit more common.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within’s Platinum Hits version for Xbox is for some reason over 10 times more expensive than the original release.

And here are the price differences in absolute dollar amounts. For most games the difference is within $5.00 either way.

Super Mario World again holds a record for largest price between versions, with the Greatest Hits version being $292.92 cheaper, while the Sega All Stars version of Ready 2 Rumble Boxing for the Dreamcast is $165.00 more expensive. While I don’t have dates for either release I imagine Mario World’s Greatest Hits release was available for much longer and in much larger quantities.

Some More Trivia

The average cost of the discounted reprint of a game in this study was $16.59, while original releases went for $19.35 on average. Not as large of a difference as I suspected going in to this project.

The average reprint sold 52.09 times a year, while an original averaged 313.53 sales per year.

The biggest difference in sales volume was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King for PlayStation 2. The original sells 2 a day, while the reprint sells 1 a year, or 0.14% as often.

 

Sources

Nintendo Selects – Wikipedia

Sega All Stars – Wikipedia

Greatest Hits (PlayStation) – Wikipedia

Platinum Hits – Wikipedia

PriceCharting