In July 2025, total video games sales in the United States amounted to **** billion U.S. dollars, representing a five percent year-over-year increase. Generally speaking, the video game industry has its most important months in November and December, as video game software and hardware make very popular Christmas gifts. In December 2024, total U.S. video game sales surpassed **** billion U.S. dollars. Birth of the video game industry Although the largest regional market in terms of sales, as well as number of gamers, is Asia Pacific, the United States is also an important player within the global video games industry. In fact, many consider the United States as the birthplace of gaming as we know it today, fueled by the arcade game fever in the ’60s and the introduction of the first personal computers and home gaming consoles in the ‘70s. Furthermore, the children of those eras are the game developers and game players of today, the ones who have driven the movement for better software solutions, better graphics, better sound and more advanced interaction not only for video games, but also for computers and communication technologies of today. An ever-changing market However, the video game industry in the United States is not only growing, it is also changing in many ways. Due to increased internet accessibility and development of technologies, more and more players are switching from single-player console or PC video games towards multiplayer games, as well as social networking games and last, but not least, mobile games, which are gaining tremendous popularity around the world. This can be evidenced in the fact that mobile games accounted for ** percent of the revenue of the games market worldwide, ahead of both console games and downloaded or boxed PC games.

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Data obtained using a program from the site vgchartz.com.

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"Founded in 2005 by Brett Walton, VGChartz (Video Game Charts) is a business intelligence and research firm and publisher of the VGChartz.com websites. As an industry research firm, VGChartz publishes video game hardware estimates every week and hosts an ever-expanding game database with over 55,000 titles listed, featuring up-to-date shipment information and legacy sales data. The VGChartz.com website provides consumers with a range of content from news and sales features, to reviews and articles, to social networking and a community forum." - from the site vgchartz.com.

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"Since the end of 2018 VGChartz no longer produces estimates for software sales. This is because the high digital market share for software was making it both more difficult to produce reliable retail estimates and also making those estimates increasingly unrepresentative of the wider performance of the games in question. As a result, on the software front we now only record official shipment/sales data, where such data is made available by developers and publishers. The legacy data remains on the site for those who are interested in browsing through it." - from the site vgchartz.com.

What can you do with the data set?

If you are new to data analytics, try answering the following questions: - in what year did the active growth in the number of video games produced begin? What year was the most successful from this point of view? What can you conclude if you look at the number of video games released by country? - on what day and month were the largest number of video games released? What could be the reason for this pattern? - is there a dependence of the number of copies sold on the ratings of critics or users? - which gaming platforms, publishers and developers are the most common (the largest number of video games have been released over time)? - which gaming platforms, publishers and developers have the largest number of video game copies sold (over all time, the total number of copies sold was the largest)?

If you have enough experience, try solving a regression problem. Train a model that can predict the number of copies sold of video games: - what signs can be used to prevent leakage of the target variable? - how do outliers affect the quality of the model? - which metric should be chosen to evaluate the model? - can adding new data improve the predictive ability of the model? - does the trained model have signs of heteroscedasticity of the residuals? How does this affect the predictive ability of the model? What can you do?

Field descriptions:

The data contains the following fields: 1. name – name of the video game. 2. date - release date of the video game. 3. platform - gaming platform (All – all gaming platforms, Series – all video game series). 4. publisher – publisher. 5. developers - developer. 6. shipped - the number of copies sent (relevant for records with the values All and Series in the platform field). 7. total - total number of copies sold (millions of copies). 8. america - number of copies sold in America (millions of copies). 9. europe - number of copies sold in Europe (millions of copies). 10. japan - number of copies sold in Japan (millions of copies). 11. other - other sales in the world. 12. vgc - rating VGChartz.com. 13. critic - critics' assessment. 14. user - user rating.

Found an error or inaccuracy in the data?

This dataset is the result of painstaking work. After collection and systematization, the data is checked for integrity and correctness. If you notice an error or inaccuracy in the data, or have a suggestion on how to improve the data set, please let me know.

You can look at working with data in my github repository.

Overview

The mobile games industry is worth billions of dollars, with companies spending vast amounts of money on the development and marketing of these games to an equally large market. Using this data set, insights can be gained into a sub-market of this market, strategy games. This sub-market includes titles such as Clash of Clans, Plants vs Zombies and Pokemon GO.

Background

This is the data of 17007 strategy games on the Apple App Store. It was collected on the 3rd of August 2019, using the iTunes API and the App Store sitemap.

Some ideas

You could use the number of ratings as a proxy indicator for the overall success of a game, and then work out what factors make a successful game. Or you could measure the state of the market over time and try predict where it is headed. And I think an analysis of the icons of the apps would be pretty cool.