Video Game Sales Analysis — EntryLevel Capstone Project
An analysis of Video Game Sales Between 1980 and 2020
On 13th September 2022, I began a bootcamp/training with EntryLevel where I carried out two projects. One of them particularly piqued my interest for reasons I don’t yet understand. Since that was the case, I decided to publish on Medium and make it My First Official Data Analyst project.
Tools Used:
Spreadsheets (Google Sheets)
Knowledge Required:
Formulas in spreadsheets including but not limited to;
- VLOOKUP
- Arithmetic and Conditional Statements (e.g. SUMIF, COUNTIF, etc.)
- FILTER
- Pivot Tables
- Charts and other Visualisation tools
Project Description
In order to make an entrance as a publisher in the video gaming industry, a startup has requested analysis on the leaders in the video game market. The aim of this exercise is to understand what aspects of the market are the most lucrative, know the major competitors and the best ways to enter into the market.
To achieve this goal, I retrieved a video games sales dataset from Kaggle from games with over 100,000 copies sold. I imported this data and analysed it using spreadsheets (Google Sheets) from formatting and cleaning to visualisation. This report provides insight into the data and the process used in analysing it.
Data Design
The video game sales dataset has 11 features and 16,598 observations. The observations so rank (according to global sales), game, platform, publisher, genre, year of release, sales in North America, Japan, Europe, other countries, and total global sales. The data was stored in a Comma-Separated Values (CSV) format as vgsales.csv. In this format, I imported the document into Google Sheets.
To begin the data cleaning process, I filtered the columns to check for missing data. I discovered that missing year and publisher data were replaced with “N/A” in the dataset. I decided to clean the “Year” data using this logic; several gaming platforms have existed since the origin of video gaming and have gone in and out of vogue. Hence, I decided that the platform on which a game was released could very well be used to guess the time period during which it was released. Hence, I created a new column, “Year_Cleaned” and replaced each N/A with the Median release year for the corresponding release platform. The publisher column remained untouched.
It is also worthy of note that there is no data available for the years 2018 and 2019. There is also very little data available for 2020.
From here, the next step was the analysis and visualisation, all of which was done using pivot tables and charts in Google Sheets.
Analysis Questions and Insights
We begin by exploring the total sales per year and the popularity growth and decline of video games in the 40 years covered within the dataset; 1980–2020.
#1. World Video Game Sales
According to the area chart above, video game sales in the 80’s remained pretty steady while rising and dropping at a regular rate. In the mid-90’s, however, sales began to skyrocket as video and game technologies got better. Sales peaked in the late 2000’s and dipped after 2010. Does that mean the video game market is dying?
#2. Where are the best game markets?
Going by the Doughnut chart above, North America is the best continent in the world to establish a gaming business as they alone constitute nearly half the total global sales (49.3%). Japan (a country, unlike other continents here) accounts for 14.5% of global game sales.
#3. What are the most popular video game genres?
The dataset shows 12 distinct video game genres over the 40-year period. We measure the popularity of the game genre by total sales. Action games, sports, and shooter games are the top 3 with strategy coming bottom of the lot.
#4. Where do these games sell best?
As previously mentioned, North America usually has the most sales by a mile, so it makes sense that nearly all genres sell well in North America. You would also notice that in Japan, genres like strategy, role-playing, and puzzle sell pretty well, compared to games like shooter and racing that do not. Still, I wouldn’t base any decision on those numbers considering they compare to continents rather than just countries.
#5. How have these genres fared over the years?
The plot above is a heatmap that shows how sales have progressed over the decades. The most popular game genres over the last two decades are action and sport games. Shooter, miscellaneous, and role-playing games are up there as well, but not quite on par with the first two. Having large markets like that might mean you have a larger potential audience. However, it could mean bigger competition as well.
#6. What is the competition like in each Genre?
Action games have the highest number of publishers, corresponding with their popularity. The Action game market has the highest competition.
#7. Who are we competing against in the market?
The chart above shows the 10 most successful game publishers in the market with respect to total sales. Nintendo, a leading game publisher in the Action and Sports genres, is the biggest market leader.
#8. How do these competitors fare in the market?
The aim of the radar chart above is to show how each of the top 10 competitor’s global sales (in millions of copies sold) compares to the number of games released. From the radar chart, Nintendo is the only publisher whose market performance far outweighed their number of games released. This could mean they have excellent profit on each game released.
#9. What gaming platforms are most popular with publishers?
First things first, the reason we consider only platforms since 2010 is because Gaming platforms come and go. When releasing a game, we wouldn’t want to consider platforms that were popular in the 90’s. The list above will help us decide our scale of preference as we plan what platforms to release games on.
#10. What are the best-selling gaming platforms?
Even though it is important to know the most popular platforms with publishers, it is more important to know the ones consumers prefer. From the bar chart above, customers obviously prefer the PlayStation (PS3 and PS4) and the X360 (Xbox 360) platforms. Other popular platforms are 3DS, Wii, XOne (Xbox One).
Next Steps
The analysis above shows us some of the important things we need to know about the video game market and what opportunities to exploit. We’ve identified who our main competitors are, the best platforms on the market and the best genres to enter the market through. We shall now explore the decisions to make and the actions to take before moving into the video game industry.
- Set up an office in North America and another in Japan. These two have the largest gaming markets for continent and country respectively.
- Venture into sports or shooter games; they have low competition compared to their market popularity.
- Try to look into Nintendo’s and Activision’s business models and see how they penetrate the market. Nintendo is a leading marketer in sports and action while Activision has the same pull in shooter.
- The games we release should be available on PlayStation 3 and 4 (maybe 2 as well). It should also be available on Xbox 360.
Conclusion
The said game publisher company for which this analysis was done is an entirely made up one. The task required us to come up with a business problem we would solve using the data provided, so I created one.
Below is a list of other related links to this project:
Dataset on Kaggle:
Spreadsheet Used for the Project:
EntryLevel Portfolio, including First Project:
If my First Data Analyst Project impressed you, find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I’d love to hear your feedback and I’m currently open to internships.
