I was reluctant to mention The Last Guardian since it's not out yet but from what I've seen it would fit in ;)
ICO did have fighting though, didn't it? You fought the shadow things? Didn't play the entire game so I can't say for sure :P

Well you can just look at Nintendo. They have some of the most popular franchises around and they are pretty non-violent. Unless you think something like fighting cute creatures until they pass out is violent.

Don't know if this has been said already, but Portal 1 and 2 count I think.

With the exception of the ending boss fights.

Are you saying koopa stomping Mario, moblin slaying Link and the Metroid genocide caused by Samus are non-violent?

Like 80% of Nintendo's hits are non-violent games. Unless you consider jumping on a goomba's head or hitting Tom Nook on the head with a bug net to be violent. Last gen there was Wii Sports, Brain Age, Wii Fit, and a lot of other games which had significantly higher demand than any violent game.

Ubisoft had their Just Dance series which sold tens of millions.

Most puzzle games are non-violent.

All the Sim games, and games that have copied them, many of them sell in the millions.

Mobile is packed with non violent games. Candy Crush, Pokemon Go, all those casino games, Hay Day, the Kim Kardashian games and their clones, lots of adventure games and virtual novels, walking simulators, etc...

There's quite a few.

Chell can still die. Either by falling. Or by the laser turrets. The turrets and cores are "alive". You're killing those too.

Weird question since we have successful games like Journey, but if the demand is there, why does the industry only make games with combat and why are those the games that shine the brightest on E3/Gamescom/TGS? Check any showreel for Unreal or Unity to see that a vast majority uses combat. Journey, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and The Stanley Parable are successful and none of them rely on combat. 

This makes it sound like a "There are too many violent video games!!"-rant but trust me, I play the crap out of my fair share of violent games (How else do you act out your frustration that comes from the world around us?... Just me?)

The reason I ask the question is because I have an entrepreneur course where we have to find a market and make a product. I do have an idea for a game I want to make but I'm not sure how I can defend my business decision if there's no hard data to go on. So I was wondering what you thought about it and if you knew where I could find hard data? Maybe the fact that they do sell well is proof enough but I might need more to go on.

I'd appreciate any sort of help, THANKS! Oh, and yay for my first post :D

ICO is relative..and there'd be much to talk about. You don't hurt or kill anything as a) enemies are an atmospheric threat and do not need to be engaged; b) enemies aren't hurt or killed, they are either driven away ("action" route) or ignored (focus on the puzzle "route") (except the mandatory scene i mentioned where it's ambiguous whether anything/anyone is being killed/destroyed*)**. Enemies can't do more than push you either. For all intents and purposes, the interactions that can occur between the boy and the shadows is harmless for both parties.

* IMO they are, which means that it's the only part of the game where you commit violence. But others may view it differently.

**Also, to make matters more complicated, it can be argued that the "action" route is actually less violent. If you drive away the shadows, nothing happens to them, while if you avoid them, they will be killed/destroyed when Yorda activates the special/magical doors***.. Maybe an analogy could be made with stealth games, where in this case fighting the shadows is like sneaking up and using tranquilisers on the enemies while leaving without causing harm, meanwhile avoiding the shadows and not fighting is more in line with sneaking through a base and leaving explosives planted which will be detonated when you successfully leave. I wrote this as a note because some of what I wrote depends on your interpretation of the events, so it shouldn't be up there.

*** Yes, another note.. because it's not 100% clear (nothing in the game is, really..) that they are destroyed**** when this happens.

**** Oh boy, things would get even trickier if we delved into semantics, considering we're talking about non-corporeal entities whose nature is completely unknown to us.

Btw, now that I think about it, when taking these things into consideration, ICO is likely less violent than TLG, because I forgot that in TLG the "non-corporeal entities" (if that's what they are, because somehow they can don armor and handle physical objects unlike ICO's shadows; we'll see) can harm Trico (the animal) with physical objects (spears). Even if you don't fight them, you still see occurrances of bodily harm. Poor Trico