GameCo is a video game company that wants to use data to inform the development of new games. They want to perform a descriptive analysis of a video game data set to foster a better understanding of how their new games might fare in the market.
Goal
This analysis aims to:
Analyze how sales have changed over time in each main geographic area (North America, Europe, and Japan)
Identify which genres, publishers, and platforms are most popular in each location to help GameCo's management understand how to distribute funding among the areas to maximize a return on investment.
Tools
Excel (full analysis)
PowerPoint (final presentation)
Data
The dataset for this project can be found here (available on VGChartz). It contains historical sales of video games across various platforms, genres, and publishing studios.
Data Limitations
This data set records the total number of game units sold between 1980 and 2016. Therefore, there is no data available after 2016.
The provided data only contains the number of units sold and not the price per unit.
To get a better sense of the approach used to gather and correlate this data, take a look at VGChartz’s methodology.
Skills applied
Data Cleaning
Grouping & Summarizing Data
Descriptive Analysis
Developing Insights
Data Visualization & Storytelling
Business questions
Are certain types of games more popular than others?
What other publishers will likely be the main competitors in certain markets?
Have any games decreased or increased in popularity over time?
How have their sales figures varied between geographic regions over time?
1. Data Cleaning
In this first step of my analysis, I categorized data, characteristics, and potential bias and used techniques to clean up a "dirty" version of the dataset, such as inconsistent formatting, duplicates, and missing values.
2. Deep Analysis
I created several line graphs to show how sales have changed over time in each main geographic area.
We can observe as follows:
The gaming industry has been declining since 2008, after reaching its peak.
The North American market appears to be the most important one for this business, followed by the European and Japanese markets.
However, in the last few years, European and American markets seem to be on the same level.
When we examine the proportion of sales by region and year, we might notice some unexpected trends:
After over a decade of market dominance (1996-2015), North American sales have been progressively dropping since 2010.
From 1992 to 1996, sales in Japan surpassed those in the US, but after this period, they started to decrease drastically.
European sales, meanwhile, have been substantially growing since 2006 and overtook North American sales in 2016.
The next step was to investigate the most popular game makers, platforms, and genres to guide GameCo in in proposing the most suitable inventory in each region.
Sports and Action games produce the largest overall sales in both North America and Europe, while the market for Role-playing games is led by Japan instead.
We can draw the following conclusions about the publishers:
Nintendo leads the market in every region (it accounts for more than 45% of sales in Japan), making it the most important publisher worldwide.
Electronic Arts comes in second place among game makers in Europe and North America, followed by Activision.
Namco Bandai Games and Konami Digital Entertainment are the second and third most important publishers in Japan instead.
3. Recommendations
I would advise GameCo’s executives to prioritize the European market above the other two since it looks to be more stable and predictable. Furthermore, it has grown significantly since 2006 and this trend is very likely to continue in the coming future.
Marketing
I would consider genre popularity while making marketing decisions. Therefore, it would be appropriate to promote more Sports and Action games in Europe and America, and Role-playing games in Japan.
Revenue Maximization
For determining how to distribute the budget throughout the areas, I would look into both the most popular platforms (Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox) and game publishers (Nintendo overall).
