What makes a blockbuster video game? An empirical analysis of US sales data

This study uses a unique data set of individual video game titles to estimate the effect of an exhaustive set of observable characteristics on the likelihood of a video game becoming a blockbuster title. Due to the long-tailed distribution of the sales data, both ordinary least squares and logistic regression models are estimated. The results consistently show that blockbuster video games are more likely to be released by one of the major publishers for popular hardware platforms. Results also show that games of higher quality are significantly more likely to sell a greater number of units than those of a lower quality.