A significant proportion of our video gaming content (games and consoles) comes from Japan. In this post, I’ve compared the popularity (sales) of various games and consoles in the USA and Japan. All values are normalized to population (sales per 1,000 people) in the respective country in the year that the game/console was released. Games released on multiple consoles include sales across all console platforms.

Most of the game-specific data show strong biases toward one country or the other for games. In the scatter plot, I’ve included 268 of the best-selling games in history, and coded them by genre. You can see from this that RPGs are generally more popular in Japan (though there are a few that have much higher sales in the USA), while shooters and action/adventure games are more popular in the USA.

The console-specific data show that there is a slight bias toward handheld devices in Japan, with regular consoles preferred in the USA.

Data sources:

http://www.vgchartz.com/

http://www.multpl.com/sitemap