In this report we will take a look at the trends in video game releases from 1980 to 2020. We will look at the number of games released per year, the trends within the year, and the top genres of games released. We will also take a look at the reviews of the top 100 games. We will see what the reviews are saying and what the most common words used in the reviews are. This page also allows you to select the number of games to display in the word cloud. Some data cleaning was done to remove games not released yet, and to remove reviews that were not in English.

Data source: kaggle.com/datasets/arnabchaki/popular-video-games-1980-2023

Yearly releases
From the graph, we can very clearly see an increase in the number of video games released over the last 40 years. This can be attributed to the increase in gaming popularity and the rise of demand for video games. We can also use linear regression to see the trendline of the graph, and using that to extrapolate the number of games released in the future.
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Trends within the year
While the previous graph showed the yearly trend, this graph shows the trend of games released within a year. We can see two spikes in the graph. The first spike is in February to March, corresponding to the release of games for the spring season, leading into summer break. The second spike is in September to November, corresponding to the release of games for the holiday season.
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Top 15 genres
This graph shows the number of games released in each genre. We can see that the most popular genre is "Adventure", followed by "RPG", then "Shooter". Some genres have made recent jumps in popularity, such as "Indie", and "Visual Novel". These jumps in popularity can be attributed to the rise of small development teams in gaming and the rise of japanese media in the west.
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Times listed vs. Rating vs. Number of playing
This graph shows the relationship between the number of times a game is listed, the rating of the game, and the number of people playing the game (marker size). From the graph, we can see that the more a game is listed, the higher it is rated. The log scale allows us to see this more clearly. It is interesting to note that some games have a very high number of people playing, but are not rated very highly. For instance, "Genshin Impact", has a rating of 2.6, but 2700 concurrent players.
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Reviews for top games
This section shows the wordcloud of the most common words used in the reviews of the top N games. Selecting the top 100 games shows that they mostly refer to 'Story' and 'time'. By selecting a larger number of games, we can see more words such as 'fun', get emphasized, while 'story' gets deemphasized.
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