VGChartz - Video Game Sales Charts

VGChartz - Video Game Sales Charts is the Interactive Home Entertainment catalog's demand-side ledger: estimated retail sales of video game hardware and software, organized as four connected surfaces. Weekly software charts cover Global, USA, Europe, UK, Germany, France and Japan, with an index reaching back to December 2004. Platform totals rank consoles by lifetime units across hardware, software and tie-ratio views, each broken into North America, Europe, Japan and Rest of World columns. The Game DB catalogs 67,171 titles with position, platform, publisher, editorial and aggregate scores, shipped-unit totals and release dates, filterable by keyword, console, region, developer, publisher, genre and year. Monthly regional reports round the set out as narrative summaries.

Datadory catalogs it under Interactive Home Entertainment, shelved beside the player-count and catalog datasets that share its titles. Get a sample of this dataset.

Real rows, shown exactly as they arrive - three chart entries from the week ending 29 December 2018, then the top of the lifetime hardware table:

week_ending  : 29th Dec 2018          region  : Global

pos : 1  game : Super Smash Bros. (2018)     console : NS
publisher : Nintendo                genre : Fighting
weekly : 1,103,894                  total : 8,951,009
week_number : 4

pos : 2  game : Red Dead Redemption 2        console : PS4
publisher : Take-Two Interactive    genre : Action-Adventure
weekly : 705,407                    total : 13,940,203
week_number : 10

hardware totals - lifetime units (millions)
rank 1 : PlayStation 2 (PS2)
north_america : 53.65   europe : 55.28   japan : 23.18
rest_of_world : 27.90   global : 160.01

rank 2 : Nintendo Switch (NS)
north_america : 54.04   europe : 39.91   japan : 37.01
rest_of_world : 24.36   global : 155.32

Read the first row as a launch story: Super Smash Bros. (2018) sits at position 1 in week 4 with 1,103,894 units that week against 8,951,009 lifetime. Week # counts weeks since the title's release on that platform, so early-week rows are where launch-window velocity lives. Read the hardware block as an installed base: the four regional columns sum exactly to the global figure, which keeps attach-rate arithmetic self-contained. And read every number with its label - these are industry sales estimates, described by their own publisher as unguaranteed, which makes them the right instrument for market sizing and the wrong one for invoice-grade accounting.

Twenty documented columns span the three surfaces - nine describe a weekly chart row, five describe a platform-total row, six belong to the Game DB. The load-bearing distinctions are between Weekly (units in the covered week) and Total (lifetime units for that release), and between the per-title grain of the charts and the per-platform grain of the totals table. Scores appear only where a title was reviewed; a blank beats an invented number:

Geography: seven chart regions - Global, USA, Europe, UK, Germany, France and Japan - with platform totals additionally split into North America, Europe, Japan and Rest of World.

Temporal: the weekly chart index reaches back to December 2004, roughly two decades of weeks per region; platform totals compress every console generation into one lifetime-units table; the Game DB reaches from the 1980s onward. One recency caveat stated plainly: our research pass found the classic weekly index running to December 2018, with fresher weeks appearing inside article-format chart posts rather than the classic table - we confirm the freshest structured cut with you before any feed goes live.

Granularity: per game per week per region on the charts; per platform lifetime on the totals; per title in the Game DB. Three grains, three tables, joined on title and platform.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly. Pick the channel that matches the workload - an API for tools that want current rows on demand, files for batch analysis, or delivery straight into your warehouse for teams joining these tables against their own. Cadence is your call too.

Start smaller than a feed. Get a sample of this dataset scoped to a region, console or genre you care about, check the rows against your question, then scale the cadence.

Install-base arithmetic. Lifetime hardware totals with four-way regional splits turn "how big is the Switch market in Japan" from a forum argument into a lookup: 37.01m of its 155.32m units sit in Japan, against 23.18m of PlayStation 2's 160.01m.

Launch-window velocity. Weekly units, lifetime units and weeks-since-release in one row mean decay curves fall straight out of the table - useful to anyone pricing a launch or forecasting a quarter.

Attach-rate studies. A dedicated software-per-console view supports tie-ratio analysis across generations instead of anecdote by anecdote.

Back-catalog valuation. 67,171 titles with publisher, genre, release dates and shipped totals give IP holders and acquirers a screen for dormant franchises.

Historical benchmarking. Weeks reaching back to December 2004 mean today's launches can be compared against equivalent weeks across two decades of chart history.

Estimate-honest reporting. Every figure carries its own estimate label, so citations stay accurate by construction.

• Market Researchers & Consultants - sizing console generations, regional demand and genre performance against one consistent estimate series.
• Competitive Intelligence & Product Teams - tracking rival publishers' title velocity week by week instead of waiting on quarterly filings.
• Investors & Quants - install-base and attach-rate series for diligence on platform holders and publishers.
• Data Scientists & ML Engineers - a 67,171-row title table with scores, dates and shipped units, ready for feature work and clean join keys.
• Developers & Data-Product Builders - stable per-title and per-platform grains powering storefront widgets, dashboards and recommendation features.
• Journalists, Academics & Students - citable historical context whose estimate status is stated up front.

Three things. First, epistemics: these are sales estimates, and their publisher states that accuracy is not guaranteed - size markets with them, don't audit invoices with them. Second, recency: the classic weekly-table index ran to December 2018 on our research pass, while newer weeks surface inside article-format chart posts, so tell us which weeks you need and we will confirm exactly how fresh the structured cut runs before wiring anything. Third, grain: weekly chart rows, lifetime platform rows and per-title Game DB rows are different shapes - decide whether your question lives at title-week, platform-lifetime or title level, and we deliver each as its own table keyed to join cleanly.

• Steam Charts - Concurrent Players - engagement beside sell-through on PC titles; player counts move first, unit sales confirm.
• SteamSpy API - independent ownership estimates for PC games, a second opinion where the catalogs overlap.
• Video Game Sales with Ratings (Kaggle) - a static 16,598-title snapshot of the same sales universe frozen at October 2016; handy for quick baselines, superseded by the maintained archive described here.
• itch.io Indie Games Browse - the supply-side long tail that retail charts rarely see, over a million and a half listings deep.
• RAWG Video Games Database API - metadata, store links and ratings to enrich every title row.
• TwitchTracker - Game & Channel Rankings - attention signals to place next to unit sales.