This project looked at visualizing video games sales data for the purpose of initially explorating at and then later performing analysis. The data used for this project is from Kaggle. The data was visualized using Tableau.
The project was worked on by a team of 4 as part of the CS6730 - Data Visualization course at Georgia Tech.
Exploration
We started of by exploring the data as a table. The data had the following schema:
Several dimensions in the data looked interesting, and we started to narrow down on sales numbers as well as review scores (User scores and Critic scores).
Analysis
After the initial exploration, I found it interesting to analyze the sales data by platforms. It was evident that there were essentially 4 major platforms: Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo Wii and PC. I then grouped the remaining platforms together and named them"Others" and their sales as a group were comparable to the popular platforms.
Moving into the analysis phase, I targetted this research from the point of view of a game publisher. Specifically, I wanted to be able to answer the following questions for a game publisher in order to maximize sales:
What platform(s) should be targetted to build their next game?
What genre of games should be considered for the next development project?
I started of my analysis by looking at how each game's sales could be attributed the different platforms. As seen below, we can see for example Grand Theft Auto V is a great selling game but its sales came mostly from consoles, speficially from the Sony Playstation.
For the visualization below, I have used color to encode the platform and used size as an encoding for the amount of sales on that platform.
Next, I wanted to dig deeper into this story so I analyzed the platforms by looking at game sales globally and regionally as well as by genre. As seen in the visualization below, eventhough global game sales looks to be most on the playstation, it is actually heavily impacted by the EU market since a lot of games were sold for playstation in that region. However, in other regions it isn't that significant of a difference and looks to be more balanced between the platforms. Further, if we look at the right side of the viz below, even within the platforms, the sales data varies by platform. Looking at the playstation, for example, it can be seen that action games were sold the most.
For the visualization below, for the line charts, I have used color to encode the platforms and the line chart is plotted on a timeline as the X-Axis and global sales number on the Y-Axis.
Next, I thought it would be useful to look at review scores of the games as well. Review scores are a bit complicated as its mostly based on how interesting the game is vs the platform. The visualization below has the global sales by platform line chart on top. Below that is a correlation of platforms to critic (Left) and user scores (Right). The upper half shows average scores of games by platform by year and the below half breaks down that user score into genres. Each point represents a different genre.
For the visualization below (Displaying the scores), for the column charts I have used color to encode the platforms and the height of the bars to encode average scores (Critic and User). For the scatter plot below, I have used color to encode the platforms and position of the points to represent a genre and its sales within the platform.
The visualization above is interactive and the filters on the right side can be used to explore the data better. Upon exploring the genre filter, I found that the sports genre is on a decline in terms of review scores across all platforms.
Results
Based on my analysis, I was able to answer my research questions from earlier.
What platform(s) should be targetted to build their next game?
If the publisher is operating in the EU region, they should target the Playstation as a platform to maximize sales.
They should avoid developing on the XBox platform if operating in the JP region.
For the NA market, both Playstation and XBox are good platforms to target.
What genre of games should be considered for the next development project?
For the playstation platform, the Action, Role-Playing and Shooter are well selling genres.
Based on review scores, I would recommend avoiding Sports genre as that is on a decline over the years in review scores.
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