Video games are played by hundreds of millions of people around the world, but not every game sells the same number of copies.

Some genres are much more popular than others, so I wanted to see how their sales compare.

For this project, I am using a video game sales dataset from Kaggle.

My main question is:

Which video game genres sell the best?

To answer this, I will compare:

• Total sales across different genres.
• Average sales per game.
• How much sales vary between games.

We can calculate the average number of copies sold per game to compare the video game genres.

The formula for the mean is:

\[ \bar{x} = \frac{\sum_{i=1}^{n} x_i}{n} \]

Where:

• \(\bar{x}\) = Average sales per game
• \(x_i\) = Sales of each individual game
• \(n\) = Total number of games

This will help us compare the genres fairly, even if some genres have more games than others.

This graph shows the total worldwide sales for each video game genre.

Sports, Action, and Shooter have the highest total sales.

Sandbox has the highest average sales, but only one game has reported sales. Shooter has the next highest average with 1,485 games included.

This graph compares the number of games in each genre with their average sales.

Standard deviation measures how much video game sales vary.

The formula is:

\[ s = \sqrt{\frac{\sum_{i=1}^{n}(x_i-\bar{x})^2}{n-1}} \]

Where:

• \(s\) = Standard deviation
• \(x_i\) = Individual game sales
• \(\bar{x}\) = Average sales
• \(n\) = Number of games

A higher standard deviation means sales vary more.

Here is the standard deviation for the three genres with the highest total sales.

All values are in millions of copies.

Shooter has the highest standard deviation at 1.57 million, meaning its sales vary more than Action and Sports.

We used R to calculate the average sales for each video game genre.

avg_sales <- games %>%
  filter(!is.na(total_sales), !is.na(genre)) %>%
  group_by(genre) %>%
  summarise(
    count = n(),
    average = mean(total_sales)
  )

This code finds the average sales and counts how many games are in each genre.

After looking at the video game sales data, I found that:

• Sports, Action, and Shooter had the highest total sales.
• Sandbox had the highest average sales, but only one game had reported sales.
• Shooter had the second-highest average sales, with 1,485 games included.
• Total sales and average sales can tell us different things about how well a genre performs.

In conclusion, I learned that looking at averages and the number of games is important when comparing video game genres.

Source: Video Game Sales 2024 (Kaggle)