The first-person shooter genre is firmly entrenched in modern gaming culture, and a recent study by the Entertainment Software Association (via Forbes) asserts that shooters and action games accounted for nearly half of all console video games sold in North America in 2014.
The study found that 28.2 percent of all console games sold in 2014 fit into the action genre, and 21.7 percent featured shooting as a primary mechanic.
Sports games captured 13.3 percent of the market in 2014, while the role-playing genre accounts for 9.5 percent of all console games sold stateside last year. Fighting games and adventure titles each claimed six percent in the ESA’s study, while strategy and “family entertainment” games trailed at 4.1 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively.
The ESA’s study produced substantially different results within the PC gaming market. 37.7 percent of all retail computer software titles sold in 2014 were strategy games, according to the ESA, while 24.8 percent of purchased PC games fall under the “casual” genre.
Shooters only accounted for 6.4 percent of PC game sales in 2014, and the action genre claimed a meager 2.5 percent. Other prominent genres within the PC gaming space include role-playing games (20.2 percent), adventure titles (4.8 percent), and compilations (1.6 percent).
Flight sims remain scarce within both markets, amounting to 0.7 percent of PC game sales and 0.1 percent of console sales in 2014. The racing genre, meanwhile, claimed a modest 5.2 percent share of the console gaming market in 2014, but failed to make an impact on PC platforms, where sales accounted for 0.3 percent of all tracked units sold.
The ESA reports that the top-selling console games of 2014 were Activision’s first-person shooter Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, EA’s American football sim Madden NFL 15, and the Bungie-developed FPS Destiny. The biggest-selling PC games of 2014, according to the ESA, were EA’s The Sims 4 and The Sims 3: Starter Pack, Blizzard’s RPG Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, and Bethesda’s MMO The Elder Scrolls Online.
