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SONY GAME PROJECT – A STATISTICAL STUDY OF 15,489 SONY GAMES

Great Hair

Banned

gamer ps4 GIF

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.

source

ltSHhkN.jpg


 

Great Hair

Banned
Most Japan devs sucks now

A STATISTICAL APPROACH TO FINDING THE BEST SYSTEM FOR JRPGS AND MANY OTHER THINGS ABOUT JRPGS

OVERVIEW

A topic that comes up from time to time among Japanese Role-Playing Game enthusiasts is “what is the best system for JRPGs?” I look at these discussions and am often baffled by some of the things people suggest, but had nothing quantitative to back my opinions. As a big fan of the genre I have been wanting to do a project centered around them so I figured this would be an interesting thing to look into. In the process I also gathered a whole lot of data that is not related to game systems which I will also be going over.

Thankfully, a few days into the project and after realizing how many hours it would take just to decide what games from the Switch should be included, I saw a thread on /r/JRPG about a “JRPG Index” of every JRPG. This project may never have happened if I had not seen it, so thank you to JRPG Chronicles and the primary editor of its index, Lucca – more links in the Sources section.

Can you share a bit more about the Spanish games?
Sorry, can´t be of any help. I´m not the author the blog-article. :(
 
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slade

Member
Top developers countries:

PS1: Japan 58.13%
PS4: Japan 23.43%

:messenger_downcast_sweat:

The HD era did one hell of a number on Japanese development. I've read that most development houses there were just not ready for the manpower and time commitment HD consoles like PS3 and 360 required. Western development ran into the same issues but they had standardized game engines like Unreal to fall back on. Japanese developers created their own game engines and that quickly became a very expensive endeavour.
 
Good Job OP!

So most game were developed during the PS2 area by big publishers at least with less and less game's being developed up till now. I guess smaller studios and indies have taken up some of the slack today.

Interesting that Activison the biggest publisher by revenue has never made that many games. Surely they can only consolidate so much lol what happens if call of duty tanks in sales :pie_thinking:
 

yurinka

Member
Great job, Great Hair Great Hair . Are you from Spain? I'm a dev from there with friends in many studios, interested on the gamedev history of the country, and I'm surprised it has been a top 5 country regarding the amount of games made for GB, PSP, Vita, WiiU, PS4 and Switch.

I assume in GB was due to Bit Managers, in PSP due to Novarama and in PS4 or Switch due to many ports made by Ratalaika, Blitworks and many others. Can you share a bit more about the Spanish games?

P.D.: For PS you made a ranking of "Percent of games developed in select countries". Could you make the same one for Nintendo, please? Specially to add the "overall", I'm interested to see Spain's number there.

Top developers countries:

PS1: Japan 58.13%
PS4: Japan 23.43%

:messenger_downcast_sweat:
In PS1 only a few companies were able to develop games, and many of them were only from a few countries. The democratization of game development with engines like Unity or UE going almost free and specially easing the barriers and dropping the costs to publish games in digital storefronts caused that many countries joined the party, and that way more games are being developed.

So probably there are more Japanese games developed for PS4 than for PS1. But with a tiny difference of the amount of non-Japanese games published in PS4 vs PS1, that due to this democratization skyrocketed.
 
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MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
In PS1 only a few companies were able to develop games, and many of them were only from a few countries. The democratization of game development with engines like Unity or UE going almost free and specially easing the barriers and dropping the costs to publish games in digital storefronts caused that many countries joined the party, and that way more games are being developed.

So probably there are more Japanese games developed for PS4 than for PS1. But with a tiny difference of the amount of non-Japanese games published in PS4 vs PS1, that due to this democratization skyrocketed.

PS2 and PSP is also around 56-58%.
 
Amazing amount of data to pour over.
I'm suprised at the PSP numbers, I always thought it was just a small little nitch device. Boy was I wrong.
 
The pain of Konami's departure from videogames development stings even more seeing this.

The sheer number of amazing IP they're sat on and doing nothing with is astounding.

I need a new Ring of Red. Wish Konami would sell off all their IP.
 

yurinka

Member
PS2 and PSP is also around 56-58%.
I'd say that democratization of game development came later, for the digital indie games that started to be popular during mid/late PS3 and 360 or start of PS4/XBO, once age rating started to be free for digital indies and some important game engines started to be "free" or cheap. Notice the number of developers:

Total-Number-of-Developers-For-Each-Sony-System.png


Regarding Nintendo platform we also saw a decrease in % of games developed in Japan.
PS1: Japan 58.13%
PS4: Japan 23.43%

NES: Japan ~83%
Switch: Japan ~28% (15% in WiiU)

Percent-of-Games-Developed-in-Selected-Countries-2.png



Nintendo-Popular-Countries-chart3.png


But these graphs are only a %, not the total number of games. Without knowing the amount of total games developed for each console we can't know if the amount of games developed in a specific country increased or decreased. We only have a % of the total. We know that a majority of NES and PS1 games were Japanese and that around a quarter of PS4 and Switch games are Japanese.

The article doesn't mention the amount of games released for NES, PS1, PS4 and Switch. But I'd bet NES and PS1 got way less games released than for respectively Switch and PS4 (specially once they lifecycle ends). But I bet that even if the % of games developed in Japan decreased since the NES and PS1, the total amount of games developed in the world highly increased from NES to Switch and from PS1 to PS4. To the point that I think it's pretty likely that there are more Japanese games developed for PS4 than for PS1, and more for Switch than for NES.
 
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synce

Member
Nice work although some of the numbers are a little misleading. Japan did have a fuckton of exclusives for PS1 through PSP, but many of those are ADV/visual novels which don't seem to be included in your genre breakdown for some reason, only the exclusives breakdown.

Edit: Can verify if I go on gamefaqs and compare RPG results vs ADV for PS1. Both come up with 4 pages worth of games.
 
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Apologies if I missed this in the link, but how did you normalize what a "game" is? Are you counting a shitty $.99 PSN PS4 game the same as a boxed PSX game, or are you only counting boxed games? Both approaches would have issues when making comparisons so I'm curious what your approach was, if anything. Honestly not even sure how to fairly and accurately normalize something like that.
 


gamer ps4 GIF

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.

source

ltSHhkN.jpg



This is some fascinated info. I have to say, watching the Japanese game output slowly decline over each infographic while western game development gradually increases system after system warms my cockles. Love it. Love me some western game development, leave that dated Japanese nonsense behind!
 
I'd say that democratization of game development came later, for the digital indie games that started to be popular during mid/late PS3 and 360 or start of PS4/XBO, once age rating started to be free for digital indies and some important game engines started to be "free" or cheap. Notice the number of developers:

Total-Number-of-Developers-For-Each-Sony-System.png


Regarding Nintendo platform we also saw a decrease in % of games developed in Japan.
PS1: Japan 58.13%
PS4: Japan 23.43%

NES: Japan ~83%
Switch: Japan ~28% (15% in WiiU)

Percent-of-Games-Developed-in-Selected-Countries-2.png



Nintendo-Popular-Countries-chart3.png


But these graphs are only a %, not the total number of games. Without knowing the amount of total games developed for each console we can't know if the amount of games developed in a specific country increased or decreased. We only have a % of the total. We know that a majority of NES and PS1 games were Japanese and that around a quarter of PS4 and Switch games are Japanese.

The article doesn't mention the amount of games released for NES, PS1, PS4 and Switch. But I'd bet NES and PS1 got way less games released than for respectively Switch and PS4 (specially once they lifecycle ends). But I bet that even if the % of games developed in Japan decreased since the NES and PS1, the total amount of games developed in the world highly increased from NES to Switch and from PS1 to PS4. To the point that I think it's pretty likely that there are more Japanese games developed for PS4 than for PS1, and more for Switch than for NES.
Cool so the amount developers dipped in the ps3 era then rebounded massively in ps4 era.

I ve seen alot of posters that moan about big studios releasing less games per generation.But honestly I think its a good thing it allows them to be more ambitious,polished and ultimately release better games.

Now the smaller studios can release smaller more experimental games
 

K2D

Banned
Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy 9 rated so highly was a pleasant surprise. Thought maybe FFVII would have had them beat at least..
 
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