How Microsoft Might of Viewed the 90s Video Game Market

This analysis explores the video game industry in the 90s, specifically from Microsoft's perspective and the possibility of them entering the console market. I will break down the data step by step and show the specific actions Microsoft could take to maximize their initial entry into the Home Console Wars.
The original data for this analysis is available from this source. However, for the purpose of this study, I have specifically extracted and focused on sales data from the 1990s, ensuring a targeted and relevant analysis.
I used Tableau for sorting and cleaning the data, along with graphing the results.

Deciding Where to Start

By sorting global sales by year, we can observe that the bulk of individual game sales occurred in the last four years of the 90s. Therefore, our focus will be on the period from 1996 to 1999.

When analyzing home platforms, we can see that N64 and PlayStation have a significant lead over PC in terms of sales. As a result, we will exclude PC sales from this analysis.

North America constitutes approximately half of the global sales market. To leverage Microsoft's expertise, we will focus solely on analyzing North American sales. Additionally, we observe that PlayStation holds a much larger market share than N64.

A quick look at the top sales for each platform suggests that N64 outshines PlayStation in terms of best-selling games. However, N64's sales decline more sharply compared to PlayStation, which remains steady above three million copies per game. To identify any trends, we should further examine the top games by year.

Examining N64 first, we observe that the steep sales decline for their top games carries over from year to year, with 1999 being somewhat more consistent. This may be due to the maturity of the video game market or the release of exceptional games.

PlayStation's top sales, on the other hand, exhibit much more consistency. There is little change year over year, which challenges the notion of a maturing market. It seems that the same players are returning to the same systems. To gain a better understanding, we should explore the top-selling genres for each platform.

Analyzing genre sales reveals why PlayStation outperforms in terms of sales. PlayStation's top three genres, Action, Sports, and Racing, are almost equally popular. N64's top-selling genre, Racing, represents only about half of PlayStation's Racing sales. However, N64 still has the top four selling games. Again we should dig a littel deeper to try to understand what hold N64 has on the market.

Yearly genre sales for Nintendo appear to be somewhat inconsistent. N64 manages to achieve high sales for certain games, but it struggles to retain those players for other games, unlike PlayStation. On the other hand, PlayStation demonstrates growth in nearly every genre.

After exploring this data, we can draw some general conclusions about the video game market and its players. PlayStation boasts a large user base with a greater number of stable games compared to Nintendo.
Although Nintendo's sales performance may not have been as consistent as PlayStation's, their ability to create highly popular games highlights the importance of quality content and innovation in capturing market attention and driving sales.
For genres, Action, Sports, and Racing are the best sellers. Thus, it would be a safe bet for Microsoft to consider developing more games in those genres, which is what they did.

We didn't compare games to see if they were released on both consoles or exclusively on one. We are unsure if Playstations' consistent sales are due to a lack of super hits. Could extremely popular games affect sales for other games on the same platform?
We didn't delve into platform processing power to gain insight into what Microsoft should focus on building, nor did we examine the hardware of the games themselves.
Exploring the correlation between platform features and sales performance could provide insights into the preferences of gamers in the 90s and inform Microsoft's decision-making process regarding hardware capabilities and unique selling points for their potential console.