Description of Client

The client who would order this analysis is a up-and-coming gaming company set on producing “the next big thing” in the industry. Thus they are very invested in finding the best approach for their new product. What genre should this new gaming marvel be? Which platforms should it support? Which producers should they look upon to gain insight in being a successful gaming business? Answers to all of this and more they can find in this analysis!

Goal: Determine which Video Game platform, genre and publisher would be best for releasing a succesfull game.

Description of Data Provider - Kaggle

The dataset was found on Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets) which is an online resource and community for machine learning and data science enthusiasts. As of March 8th 2017, Kaggle is a subsidiary of Google LLC.

Kaggle is home to hundreds of datasets on diverse topics and the number of datasets keeps expanding due to the competitions the website hosts. To quote the Wikipedia article on Kaggle competitions and the resulting datasets:

“After the deadline passes, the competition host pays the prize money in exchange for”a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable and royalty-free license to use the winning Entry“, i.e. the algorithm, software and related intellectual property developed, which is”non-exclusive unless otherwise specified“.”

Description of Dataset

The dataset can be accessed here - https://www.kaggle.com/gregorut/videogamesales

In its unaltered form, this dataset is a compilation of 16,598 video game titles with sales greater than 100,000 copies. The spreadsheet has 11 columns, explanations of which can be found further down.

The dataset was created in 2016 and contains video game titles starting from the 1980’s up to 2020. Using this dataset we may observe which video game platforms were most popular in certain time periods, disparities between genre and publisher as well as sales in differing areas of the world like North America, Europe, Japan and others.

Cleaning Done to the Dataset

The dataset in its untouched form is an absolutely massive collection of videogame sales data, so I’ve taken a couple of steps to clean it up and make it a little more concise for ease of data manipulation:

Brief Overview of Observed Data

The 11 columns featured in the dataset consist of the following data:

Here we can see all the variables used in the dataset:

names(vgsales2)
##  [1] "Rank"         "Name"         "Platform"     "Year"         "Genre"       
##  [6] "Publisher"    "NA_Sales"     "EU_Sales"     "JP_Sales"     "Other_Sales" 
## [11] "Global_Sales"

Here is a Brief Glimpse in the Dataset

str(vgsales2)
## 'data.frame':    2059 obs. of  11 variables:
##  $ Rank        : int  2072 2076 2077 2079 2068 2080 2078 2056 2059 2067 ...
##  $ Name        : Factor w/ 1614 levels ".hack//Infection Part 1",..: 629 1142 208 255 1512 192 1552 938 994 528 ...
##  $ Platform    : Factor w/ 25 levels "2600","3DS","DC",..: 17 14 14 14 23 23 21 21 23 14 ...
##  $ Year        : int  2013 2013 2013 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2008 ...
##  $ Genre       : Factor w/ 12 levels "Action","Adventure",..: 9 4 1 1 1 8 4 9 11 9 ...
##  $ Publisher   : Factor w/ 101 levels "3DO","505 Games",..: 76 89 28 26 87 56 87 28 44 89 ...
##  $ NA_Sales    : num  0.25 0.51 0.44 0.48 0.72 0.64 0.89 0.93 0.13 0.49 ...
##  $ EU_Sales    : num  0.49 0.27 0.38 0.35 0.21 0.28 0.04 0 0.76 0.33 ...
##  $ JP_Sales    : num  0.04 0.05 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.03 0.02 ...
##  $ Other_Sales : num  0.22 0.15 0.17 0.16 0.07 0.08 0.06 0.07 0.09 0.15 ...
##  $ Global_Sales: num  1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...

Visualising the Data with Various Graphs

This section offers a more interesting and easily comprehensible look into the dataset and a simple way to at-a-glance determine correlations between data columns.

I want to note, that when a concept in this analysis is described as “popular” or “relevant” it is meant in terms of - it has most entries or highest sales data.

Game Publishing Data Through the Years

As an introduction to the topic of video game sales, this graph offers an overview of how many video games - that have reached over 1 million sales - have been released through the years from 1980 up to 2016. We can observe a steady rise in the number of titles released which reach their peak in 2008.

Surprisingly, after 2008 the release numbers seem to dwindle. There may be multiple reasons for this, such as: * Newer game releases are known to be more and more ‘bombastic’ and feature exceedingly gorgeous graphics, long story lines with extensive animated cutscenes, advanced gaming elements etc. This may be why game release amount has decreased.
* There may be just as much releases, but fewer and fewer of these reach more than a million global sales.
* Newer game releases tend to be continuously updated and added-upon, so less games are being released but already established titles gain new downloadable content (DLCs).

NA & EU Sales Data - Linear Regression Model

In this Linear Regression Plot we can observe that Europe Sales and North America Sales data are quite similar in that most games sell around up to 10 million copies. With a single outlier in the 30-40 million sold copies range.

We can also observe that North America Scores higher sales numbers than Europe.

Japan & Europe Sales Data - Linear Regression Model

In this plot we can see that the sales data of Japan and the Other (AKA the rest of the world) data doesn’t have as strong of a corelation - with Japan having consistently higher sales data and the “Other” category having more of high-sales outliers than consistently high-selling titles.

Global Sales Comparison to Europe Sales Data

Compared to Global Sales, Europe has produced a large part of these sales in the 1~15 million sales bracket. We can see that only one gaming title outlier with 30 million sales has been recorded - with this being a large part of the 75+ million sales record for Global Sales.

Global Sales Comparison to North America Sales Data

## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = vgsales2$Global_Sales ~ vgsales2$NA_Sales)
## 
## Coefficients:
##       (Intercept)  vgsales2$NA_Sales  
##            0.4427             1.7237

When comparing North America and Global sales data, we can note that North America makes alarge part of Global Sales data in the 1-20million bracket, with a bit more higher selling outliers than Europe had. One game title has experienced so many sales in North America (40+), that it makes half of the Global Sales data (80+).

Games Published By Genre

In this graph we can undeniably see that the Action genre rules the video game industry - with more than 400 releases. The next most popular category is Sports, no doubt fuelled by the Fifa football simulation games (with a new title released annually) and other similar titles. The third place in the graph is taken by the Shooting genre - a genre of likewise predictably high popularity and sales amounts.

What is surprising, however, is the low placement of Strategy and Adventure games which could be explained by the fact that many games exist in various genres simultaneously - namely an Action game can be just as much of an Adventure game, but maybe the Action genre has more coverage.

Games Published by Platform Through the Years

This boxplot offers insight in video game playable platforms. Of course, the PC or personal computer has prevailed as the main system used to play a plethora of video games through the years - as we can observe in the plot starting from the 1990’s. Another highly popular platform is the GameBoy (GB in the plot) which experienced its march of fame in the 1990’s. Some of the more recent platforms which are just gaining their popularity now are the XBoxOne (XOne in the Plot), the Wii, PS4 and the Nintendo 3DS.

Genre Popularity by Platform

The PlayStation, especially the PS2 and PS3 seem to be the platforms of choice for most Action game titles. The XBox360 (x360) is also a favoured choice in this regard. These same gaming consoles also feature many of the Sports and Shooter games.

The WiiU has many of the Miscellaneous (Misc) gaming titles - these are the virtual dancing and music games like “Guitar Hero”. The PC takes a comparatively small part of this plot - this may be due to the fact that many games available for the consoles are available for the PC as well, but are listed under only the consoles. The PC also absolutely dominates in regards to Strategy games.

Genre Popularity Through the Years

Here we can see the popularity of various game genres through the years. A significant relevance spike is displayed for the Sports genre around the year 2006 - we can see that this genre has been popular since the 1980’s. This graph also shows us that Strategy and Simulation genres are relatively more recent and the Platform genre seems to spike in popularity every couple of years and does not lose relevance through the years.

The Action genre - as we saw previously, the most popular genre - has maintained steady relevance through the years. The Puzzle genre seems to have steadily lost popularity in recent years.

Comparison of Global Sales to Regional Sales by Genre

Even though we previously saw that the Action genre is the most produced genre in games, the Sports genre is most sold - with North America (NA) and Europe (EU) combined producing almost all of the global sales figures in this genre. NA also favours Shooters and Platforming games, while EU gives preference to Racing, Action and Simulation games. Both region sales figures show least preference to Strategy games.

Unlike NA, for the Japanese market the Shooter genre is one of the least bought game genres, alongside Strategy games. The most bought games in the Japanese market are ones of the Role-playing and Platform genre. Simulation and Puzzle games are quite popular as well. The “Other” market (which Latvia is a part of as well), favours Action, Racing and Sports games, with Strategy and Adventure games garnering least sales.

Game Releases by Publisher Through the Years

This and the next Plot are zoom-able when opened in a browser

This boxplot offers us insight in the most consistently relevant game publishers through the years. We can immediately observe that the publisher which has stayed most relevant from the 80’s up to now is Nintendo (with Wii, WiiU and GameBoy being some of the most popular consoles from this publisher). Atari and Capcom are quite popular as well, although more in the pre-2000’s era.
Electronic Arts (more commonly known as EA) has observed major game releases ever since the 90’s. Activision, Sega and Sony Computer Entertainment also have retained long relevance in the game publishing market.

Global Sales (in millions) by Publisher

When observing Global Sales of games sorting by publisher, we can notice that Nintendo has maintained its relevance because they show consistently high sales ratings, with one release even exceeding 80 million sales globally. Other high selling publishers are Microsoft Game Studios, Activision and Take-Two Interactive.

Conclusions and Recommendations After Data Analysis

To finish off the analysis of the Video Game Sales dataset, we can conclude that the most well-selling video game genre is the Action genre, with Sports and Shooter as the next best things.
The most long-standing Platform through the years is the personal computer (PC), although the Playstation4 and XBox are more recent additions to the platform selection.

If going with the Action genre, the most popular platforms for this genre are the PS2, PS3 and XBox360.

In more recent years (2010+) the genres that have observed spikes in popularity are Shooter, Action and Role-playing.

The Sports genre has generated most global sales and is the most bought game genre in the North America and Europe regions. The most successful publisher both by amount sold through the years and global sales is Nintendo.

To a client I would recommend aiming for an Action or Sports game title available on the PC and Playstation platforms. They should focus marketing on the North America and Europe regions and do collaborations or work together with Nintendo.