Mobygames is a website, database, and forum for cataloguing all games ever. There’s an API, and every now and again they use it to publish a big chart of popularity by platform, and perhaps more amusing than that, a bar chart race.
Here’s 1980, when the mainframe loses top spot - to the TRS-80
They now have 553 mainframe games up to 1994.
First you can’t compare combined “mainframes” with a specific home computer. And there are many duplicates like any Adventure and Chess version for every computer and all BASIC games from Creative Computing. So they try to tag every possible hardware.
And they have just 5260 Commodore 64 games. GB64 knows 29,000 games.
So it’s also a question how many fans of one computer adding games. Those databases are always incomplete and it’s always depends on the hardware, when it is available and spread.
Agreed, it’s quite the cataloguing task, and the stats are at the level of being fun, rather than definitive.
(I wonder if proportion of new games per platform per year would be interesting - maybe the CPC’s best year was pretty good even if it never hit the top spot for total.)
