GameCo Sales Analysis

Exploratory Data Analysis | Visualization | Data Storytelling

Project Overview

  • Video game company, GameCo, is planning their 2017 marketing budget with the aim of maximizing ROI.

    My goal is to analyze their historucak data to challenge the stakeholders’ internal assumptions and make budget recommendations.

  • GameCo’s video game sales from1980 - 2016

    Dimensions include region, publisher, genre & platform

    • Data cleaning

    • Descriptive & exploratory data analysis

    • Statistical analysis

    • Data visualization (bar & column charts, box & whisker plots, scatterplots)

    • Data storytelling

Analysis

From 2014 to 2016 the most popular video game platform globally was the PS4 and it's popularity was highest in the EU.

As a result, in 2016 EU video game sales replaced NA as the highest sale region. This challenges GameCo’s assumption of consistency across regions and over time.

Conclusions

Recommendations

Based on the analysis, our revised understanding is that sales fluctuate substantially across regions and over time.

As a result of GameCo’s new understanding, I recommend that marketing budgets be redistributed to reflect the sales breakdown in 2016. 

Next Steps

Further investigation should be done into regional differences that may impact popularity of different video game publishers, genres or platforms.

  • Why was the PS4 more popular in EU? Were there games released that catered to a European audience?

  • Is the declining trend a temporary result of decreasing sales of Xbox 360 and PS3?

  • Can we use these trends to estimate marketing budgets for years beyond 2017?