Analysing global video game sales

Objective

GameCo is a video game company which wants to use data to inform the development of new games for customers. An analyst was asked to perform a descriptive analysis of a video game data set to foster a better understanding of how GameCo’s new games might fare in the market.

Data set

Data set that covers historical video game sales (for games that sold more than 100,000 copies) spanning different platforms, genres, and publishing studios.

• Source: e VGChartz

• Download Data Set

Skills and Tools Used in the Project

Excel

For the data analyst, it's a powerful tool for quickly accessing, organizing and manipulating small data sets to derive and share insights. GameCo's analysis records were less than 1,000,000 so the preferred tool for analysis was Excel.

Cleaning

Ensured Incomplete, unclear, and duplicate data were cleaned from the data set along with other dirty data. Not only is dirty data frustrating to deal with, but it can also be costly for analysts and their employers. According to a recent article in Forbes, analysts spend up to 60% of their time cleaning data.
Grouping Data & Summarising the data

Pivot tables transform GameCo video games sales data into something more usable and insightful. Data are grouped into similar items, analyzed sales in regions to understand how games perform in the most popular market, filtered to look at specific subsegments, and created new variables to add more value to the data.

Visualizing results in Excel

GameCo data are explored via exploratory data analysis(EDA) and descriptive analysis fundamentals. Then acquainted with concepts of centre, unusual values, shape, and spread (CUSS),

Storytelling

Develop a narrative about data insights for stakeholders

Some of the visualisation used in the project

Using pivot tables and visualisation tools some of the insights from the data.

North America’s proportion of global sales has reduced each year, and Europe has shown better progress in the proportion of global sales. But the total North American sale is the highest contributor to global sales by 49%.

In 2016, European sales surpassed North American sales by 6%.

From 1992 to 1996, Japan’s sales contributed more than the other regions in global sales.

Action, Sports and shooter games are the most popular games in North America, Europe and Japan. Still, action games are the highest played in the region, with total revenue of 861.8 million.

Conclusion

GameCo administrative assumed sales across regions is consistent over the year, and the distribution of marketing resources equally would generate more revenue. But the sales timeline graph across regions has different profits.

Marketing resource distribution is prioritised depending on the publication, genre and platform the games are played in each region.

Shipping dates could be the possibility for the lower sale values in other regions. Online access/streaming of the games could generate faster revenue.

The lower-sale genre games like puzzle, adventure, and strategy games require more marketing.

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