Manufacturer statistical charts

TheShanMan

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Following up on a recent thread, I was motivated to produce some charts that illustrate what some of the major manufacturers produced on a year by year basis in terms of video games only. It took quite a bit of effort to compile the data, and once I did I found it hard to produce a single chart that shows all of the "major" manufacturers without my own personal bias of what "major" means. In other words, if I simply added up all the games produced over the lifetime of that manufacturer and established a "cut off" point that was high enough to prevent the chart from looking like spaghetti, most of the classic manufacturers would be left off of the list.

So instead, I chose to focus on "eras" and which manufacturers dominated in each. I came up with 5 charts. They may not be perfect in some people's eyes in that I haven't included manufacturer "X" or "Y" but that's because I wanted to maintain the lack of bias. Hopefully you guys will enjoy the results of my effort.

A couple things stood out to me with these charts. First, the Konami spike in 2000. Don't know what's up with that. Crazy! Second, Sega and Taito are on all 5 charts. Konami is on all but Bronze. I'd like to hear what other people think is interesting about these (if anything - lol).

Now that I have produced these, I would also consider requests for what manufacturers to chart together, and over what time period, e.g. top American manufacturers over the entire time line. Just bear in mind that in my experience 10 or more manufacturers makes for an unreadable chart. I'm also not going to produce charts left and right, so if there are a bunch of requests I'll try to address common ones and if your request is ignored well, please realize that I'm tired of working on this so don't be offended if I don't produce the chart you request.

Thanks to Greg Mclemore for helping me gather some of this data.

ArcadeGameProduction-Bronze.png


ArcadeGameProduction-Golden.png


ArcadeGameProduction-Silver.png


ArcadeGameProduction-Post.png


ArcadeGameProduction-Death.png
 
Those are really cool. Thanksa for posting em'!
 
DDR was Konami's big surge there. New upgrades and updates along with all the countless new rhythm games they released took Japan and the US market by storm.
 
I hope the industry picks up so the production charts in the future arn't all flat. I would love to see a "rebirth" of the arcades.
 
Awesome! Nice work Jeff!

Man, interesting to see how the companies roller-coastered throughout the decades. You can definitely see the different milestones (Ex. Nintendo Vs./PC-10 mid 80s until the release of NES in 1985, Fighters in the 90s). It seems like Sega has been the one constant company until most recent years.

It would be sweet to see this in a more graphic form where it serves as a timeline as well where it's one long chart that highlights major games and accomplishments for the different companies.
 
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I'd be curious to see a chart, all time, for those manufacturers that are still making games (console or arade) just to see what their lifecycle looked like:
Nintendo, Sega, Namco, Atari, Konami, Capcom, SNK.

I think that's it since Midway got bought by Warner Bros.
 
Williams is an example of what I personally would consider a major classic manufacturer, but in terms of volume they just didn't make the cut. IMO they were a quality not quantity manufacturer. Obviously these results favor the quantity manufacturers. Williams in particular is who I had in mind when I suggested the top American manufacturers chart, although they could be worked in in various ways. I'm open to suggestions on what exactly that chart should entail.

I'll wait a bit to see what requests come in before I start making more.
 
Defender: This game shared the title of Highest Grossing Video Game of All Time along with PacMan. To date it has earned more than one billion dollars

Turkey Shoot is your best memory of Williams?
 
good idea but there's other issues.

Some companies produce games that were sold under liscense. Capcom and early Namco games were distrubuted under Romstar and Midway respectively.

This throws off the statistics
 
Defender: This game shared the title of Highest Grossing Video Game of All Time along with PacMan. To date it has earned more than one billion dollars

Turkey Shoot is your best memory of Williams?

it's tough to tell when someone is being sarcastic on the net. ;)
 
So are these charts a representation of the titles released by each manufacturer, or are they the total number of sales? I assume this is number of titles released, which I think is interesting but not a good measuring stick for success, which could explaing Williams poor representation.
 
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