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

This was originally posted on reddit and I was overwhelmed with the response. So overwhelmed that I decided I wanted to do a lot more of this kind of thing. Please keep in mind that this was written in mid 2019. This post has been slightly edited.

One day I found myself wondering just how many Japanese exclusives there are and where games are being made and how it has changed over time. I really wanted to know, but I couldn’t find anything substantial. I started this project in November, 2018 and that is the cutoff, any games released after that date are not included. I made a collection of spreadsheets with every game, system, country(ies) of origin, developer(s), publisher(s), and release status among North America, Europe, and Japan. I used this data to create charts and infographics to answer my questions and look into video game history.

I stuck to Nintendo because they have a long history in games and I know them well. Even if you’re not into Nintendo, I think there is a lot of interesting information about the industry here and how it has changed since the 80s.

I know 15,000 is a suspiciously round number, but I didn’t plan it that way. After I pasted wikipedia’s lists into my spreadsheets, and added some games I found missing, it was about 15,035. I got rid of some stuff that didn’t belong, detailed below, and ended up with exactly 15,000.

What is included:
  • All officially licensed and released games on consoles and handhelds by Nintendo.

  • 64DD

  • Virtual Boy

  • Famicom Disk Drive

  • Digital-only titles, DSiWare, WiiWare

What is not included:
  • Virtual Console titles. These I considered the same thing as the original.

  • Satellaview. Many games have very incomplete information, and it’s not always clear if a game is “different enough” from its original SNES version to be considered a different game.

  • Non-games software. So no Game Boy Advance Video, Hulu app, or system settings. This also includes a few oddities like a sweater design program or 8 keys you can press to make music. I was very broad minded about this one, for example a study guide for taking a learner’s permit test for the DS said it had mini games, so I included it.

  • Games that didn’t release in North America, Europe, or Japan. There were fewer than 10 of these, but I did uncover a Hello Kitty and Bomberman game exclusive to South Korea, and some rugby/soccer and singing games exclusive to Australia. If I were to include them, I’d need release information for South Korea and Australia on every other game, and that information does not seem to exist.

  • Philips CD-i

  • Game & Watch and other miscellaneous electronic Nintendo gadgets.

Some Important Details

There are some important things to note about how I structured this data. 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 it 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. I found quite a few Switch games were handled by porting companies, but there are probably some that I missed on other systems because wikipedia is inconsistent about who gets credit.

Because of all this, some titles are credited to companies that might seem odd.

I wanted to get some stats about second parties, but that is a bit more complicated than it may seem. If you look for a list of Nintendo second parties, you will see different companies included and the likes of Intelligent Systems, Next Level Games, and HAL Laboratory. Developers that often or exclusively work with Nintendo. But most of these companies are not owned by Nintendo. Only four external studios are owned by Nintendo: Retro, 1-up, Monolith, and NDcube. I did actually make special note of these companies, they released 50 games total, on about half of Nintendo’s systems. This was pretty minor and not very interesting so I didn’t give them special sections in anything.

Sometimes companies were bought and sold and merged and went independent several times. Researching all of this took a lot of time. Have a quick look at the many Atari pages on wikipedia if you’d like to see how fun it was. I have about 10 pages of notes about company name changes and ownership.

There were also many cases of different sites having different information. On one occasion I found 5 unique developer and publisher combinations listed for a game on 5 different sites.

Some games (mainly tie ins and other very cheap stuff) will have a very obvious publisher that you can find anywhere, but the developer is unlisted. I did my best here, researching hundreds of games to try to find the company that made them. When I couldn’t find anything I credited the publisher as being the developer, which will be true in some cases and not in others. Konami and Bandai Namco seem especially likely to not credit development companies. Many of these are probably done by low profile and often anonymous outsourcing companies. You can read more about these companies here and here.

The Charts

First I’ll go through system by system, and then some charts detailing the overall progression of various things over time.

System Charts

This includes the Famicom, Famicom Disk System, and NES. Wikipedia lists them separately so I had to combine games when they were ported overseas. We can see right away that Japan dominates releases here in the 80s. Eight of the nine companies that developers or published the most games are Japanese, and most of them are still around! Most games were released in Japan and a majority were exclusive.

Nintendo’s next piece of hardware was the Game Boy. Not quite as Japan-dominated as their home console. That 7th developer is Graphic Research. Given its long life and how cheap it was to make games for, you might have expected more than 1053 games.

1751 games, a figure that would not be surpassed until digital distribution. If you’re not familiar with TOSE, here’s a quote from their wikipedia page:

“We’re always behind the scenes,” said Masa Agarida, Vice President of Tose’s U.S. division. “Our policy is not to have a vision. Instead, we follow our customers’ visions. Most of the time we refuse to put our name on the games, not even staff names.”

Many of the games they are now credited with weren’t known at release. There’s a whole wiki dedicated to finding the developers of games. That 7th developer is Telenet Japan. This is the system with the highest percentage of games available in Japan, other than the Virtual Boy.

And speaking of the Virtual Boy, here it is, the holder of many distinctions. Two of the developers, Betop and Nacoty were so obscure they have no known logos. Probably the only video game system in the world to boast more than 18% of its library consisting of bowling or Tetris games.

Other than the Virtual Boy, the N64 had a publisher controlling the highest percentage of the catalog. It’s tough when your third party support vanishes so quickly. Also other than the Virtual Boy, the smallest number of games released on a Nintendo system. Few systems are as synonymous with a single developer as the N64 is with Rare, which managed to create the 6th most games for the system, all of them pretty well regarded upon release. We see a big uptick in the percent of games released in North America here, a trend that would continue with consoles. A big drop in the percent of games developed in Japan, too.

Quite a few games were released on the Game Boy Color, even though its successor was not far away. Many of these were ports of Game Boy titles, however. Nintendo made fewer games for the GBC than any other system except the Virtual Boy. The top developers is odd mix with several companies that we won’t see in the top 7 again. Please note that the Atari in the publishers is Atari, SA, which was at the time known as Infogrames. An incredibly even distribution of games available in each region, yet so few available in all.

The Game Boy Advance saw a flood of cheap tie in games. This is also towards the end of the era where even many small budget games would get separate versions released on handhelds, made by different developers. It’s very likely that many of those Konami games were not developed by them, but by third parties who did not want to be credited.

I was pretty shocked by how many Electronic Arts games there were on Gamecube. Several yearly sports titles all hit the Gamecube while Japan largely avoided the console. Over 85% of the library was available in North America, a new high for a region (excluding the Virtual Boy). Despite their last console coming out during the same generation as the Gamecube, Sega managed to make a substantial portion of its library.

Still the Nintendo system with the most titles, the DS was a phenomenon that became the second-best selling video game system. There was a big jump here in the number of countries that developed games. Nintendo developed 65 games for the system, second only to the NES/Famicom’s 72.

Japan’s lowest share of game development yet, with a lot of North American support. Like the DS, there were a lot of new or new-to-Nintendo developers for the Wii, trying to catch the zeitgeist. Unfortunately, a lot of these titles were shovelware. High Voltage Software and Data Design Interactive don’t come close to this level of output again.

The 3DS bucks the trends and has a lot more Japanese support. One of the things I wanted to look into was the Japanese preference for handhelds and here we can see the difference it makes. Despite this, we see a lot more titles released in all regions than ever before. Four companies make their first appearance in a top 7, all Japanese.

The U.S. takes first place in development for the first and only time with the Wii U. That was largely because of RCMADIAX, who was second in development and publishing output. RCMADIAX was a one man operation that flooded the eShop with cheap, barebones games. He submitted a game for approval on the Switch but was denied and left the video game industry shortly afterward. Skunk Software was also a one-man operation. At 8.41% the Wii U had my highest unknown country of origin. There were quite a few tiny indies that never even had a website and only existed for a couple years.

Keep in mind that the Switch has several years left so its library will change, but here is where we stood in November, 2018. At roughly 1000 games every two years, the Switch should eclipse the DS in number of games eventually. You may notice that the top developers and publishers have lower percents than usual. There are tons of new studios that are making Switch games, so it’s very spread out. I had to do the most research for this system because there were so many errors on the wikipedia list. Spain is so high here because there are a lot of Spanish porting studios and lots of those medium to large indie games seem to outsource their Switch ports. We also see an unprecedented surge in all-territory releases, with very few region exclusives. Despite combining their console and handheld teams, Nintendo has thus far developed and published a smaller percent of the Switch library than any of their other systems, largely because of the huge number of titles being released.

Overall Charts

 

We can see that more games have been coming to more regions over time, although a varying number of games have reached Japan.

While Japan had a large chunk of the exclusives in the early days, that number has fallen greatly. Europe has never had many exclusives.

Here’s a chart with all of the available in and exclusive to numbers, but also with combinations of two regions. Japan and Europe exclusives are mostly soccer/football games.

These are the top 8 countries that have developed the most games. Every console has seen Japan’s relative output drop, though they have rallied a bit with every handheld, while it’s mostly the opposite with the United States. Gamecube’s Canada spike was because of EA Vancouver’s sports titles. From the Wii forward Europe and Australia seem to go up and down together.

 

Here’s a chart with every country’s percentage of games and a map of every system put together. As you can see most countries represented only worked on a handful of games, while Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and a few Western European countries made the bulk of games. I’d say the Game Boy Advance was the start of more countries getting involved in development.

I wanted to measure how similar the group of developers/publishers were from system to system. For instance, maybe a lot of developers were only interested in the handhelds, or maybe publishers would only touch systems that were market leaders. This is a difficult thing to measure, but I gave it a try. Please consider the results as experimental and potentially inaccurate as I am not sure my methods were sufficient. The numbers are not percents, but more like “scores” where the maximum (the exact same developers/publishers in the exact same proportions) is 100. Mostly we see that systems are most similar to systems released close in time to them, which makes sense but is not very enlightening.

I listed the top 7 of each system, but here are the top 25 overall, by number instead of percent this time. Konami’s lead will erode over time, but it will take a few generations with how long it takes to make games nowadays. TOSE is not a well-known name, but it probably worked on a fair number of games they weren’t credited for. Bandai Namco could take both second places if you add their pre-merger companies together. Sunsoft largely left video games by 2001, yet still makes both lists.

In case you wanted an even bigger list, here are the top 100. Please remember that because of the way I combined companies that some of these names will be strange. To hammer home how much cheap junk RCMADIAX pumped out, they hit the top 50 despite being active only during the Wii U.

 

Here are the developers that released at least one game for at least 10 systems. This time I did combine companies before they merged with their merged company. Lot of absences for the Virtual Boy, of course. Intelligent Systems will make its Switch debut very soon with Fire Emblem: Three Houses and become the only second/third party to support every Nintendo system. Kemco had a rare Virtual Boy title, but skipped the DS of all things. Konami only released Virtual Console titles for the Wii U, yet had a launch title ready for the Switch. Square had a bit of a falling out with Nintendo over the move of Final Fantasy 7 to the Playstation, which kept them away for a time, but they eventually made up.

And here are the publishers that have supported at least 10 systems. Square Enix let Nintendo publish Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, which keeps them from the “everything but Virtual Boy” club. Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two weren’t always huge publishers, but they have been releasing games on Nintendo systems for a long time.

Have you ever wondered how popular it was to put “64” in the title of N64 games? More than a fifth of them did. Seven is the least common digit in titles. Almost every game title is made up of at least two words (this is a count of titles in which a text string occurs, not a total count).

Here’s the same data grouped into themes and maybe a bit easier to read.

And finally, some miscellaneous data, like how many developers/publishers only released one game on a system, and how many games were developed by more than studio, published by more than one company, and made in more than one country. Here we see that collaborations between studios, including studios in different countries has increased over time.

Other Facts I Came Across

  • From Ubisoft Montreal’s wikipedia page: “The studio as of 2017 employs more than 3,500 staff, making it one of the largest game development studios in the world.”

  • I recorded numbers for Hong Kong separate from China, but didn’t end up using them. There were 33 games developed in Hong Kong, and 50 elsewhere in China.

  • Similarly for the UK: England 1474, Scotland 74, Wales 18, Northern Ireland 1.

  • Just Dance 2014 for the Wii and Yo-kai Watch Dance: Just Dance Special Version for Wii U both had 7 development teams listed, although these vary a bit by source.

  • The shortest game title was X for Game Boy.

  • The longest game title, which I cannot confirm is accurate, is a 3 in 1 game collection: Kunio-kun Nekketsu Collection 3 Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki da yo – Zenin Shūgō! Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey-bu: Subete Koronde Dairantō.

  • The total developer count was 2299 when combining studios owned by companies. However, the way I structured things included these subsidiary studios separately. There were 2547 developers including them (plus a few tiny ones that I lumped together).

  • Atlus was owned by Takara (7 games), Sega Sammy (12 games), Index (17 games), and was independent (46 games) which would have been good enough for 22nd most prolific developer if combined.

  • I have 14 THQ-owned, 15 Take-Two-owned, 23 Electronic Arts-owned, and 24 Ubisoft-owned developers recorded.

  • I noticed some recurring themes in developer names. The following are the number of studios with a given string in their name. 21: 3, Infinite: 5, Planet: 5, Silicon: 6, Ninja: 8, Black: 12, Dream: 14, Pixel: 20, Star: 21.

Sources

  • Wikipedia’s lists of games was my starting point, although I had to make a lot of corrections and additions. I also visited hundreds of developer, publisher, and individual game pages.

  • Moby Games has lots of great information, including port teams, developer histories, and official website links.

  • The Giant Bomb wiki has a lot of more obscure titles and some info I couldn’t find anywhere else.

  • GameFAQs has pages for almost every obscure Japanese game.

  • RF Generation was useful for a list of eShop titles.

  • Nintendo has pages for most games released on their last few platforms.

  • Dolphin wiki for some info about Gamecube and Wii games.

  • Nintendo life for some Wii U eShop game information.

  • Youtube videos showing the splash screens as games start up.