From Information to Intelligence

The Nintendo DS is one of the most successful console in the history. Hence it is not surprising that more than 2000 games where published. It is interesting to run a statistical analysis to see if we can find trends on DS game releases.

Average Size

The first thing I was looking for was to see if the popular assumption that game size never cease to grow was true for the DS. The first thing I do was to compute the average size release after release:

Simple moving average

The average size trends shows that if the rom size was increasing at the beginning, it now tends to stabilize. However this increasing is not linear as the previous diagram let us thought. A simple moving average analysis reveals that the pattern is not monotonic:

weighted mobile average

Using a weighted mobile average allow to see that even if it is not monotonic there is still a real trends that game size on the average are getting bigger and bigger:

Theses graphs shows that the assumption that games are getting bigger and bigger over the time is true for the Nintendo DS on the average. However game size does not grow monotonically. Some game with small size are still released.

Game releases by world region

The other assumption I wanted to verify was :

“there is much more game released in Japan that anywhere in the world.”

I wanted to quantify this notion of “more” so I broken down the rom release by region:

This diagram confirm that the japan have way much more roms than Europe and USA. More surprisingly it shows that there is now more game released in Europe than in USA. This is quite unexpected and this trend is very recent (maybe a few months).

Game releases repartition in percentage

The current repartition show that 42% of the game releases were done in Japan. Its mean that more than 1 game of 4 are not released in Europe and in the USA.

Accordingly the repartition in percentage over the time shows that except at the beginning the Japan as always get more releases. There is no sign that this tendency will be inverted so far.

Collusion

I was very surprised that the Europe start to get more release than the US. The fact that 1 game of 4 released in Japan is not available worldwide is not suprising. Finally the game average size let us hope that the DS is far from having reaching it maximum potential. The maximum size is 1024MB and in average we haven’t yet reach the half even when considering mobile average.