Lilly Hooper
Video Game Analysis
3
Video Game Analysis Overview
I have been hired as a new analyst at a video game company, GameCo. The company wants to use data to inform development of new games. I was asked to perform a descriptive analysis of a video game data set to help GameCo gather a better understanding of how new games might fare in the market. Executives were interested in any insights, but have specific questions. This analysis will be conducted only using excel to clean and perform analysis.
Data:
The data for this project comes from a website called VGChartz. It covers historical sales of video games spanning different platforms, genres, and publishing studios.
Skills/Tools
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Excel
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Cleaning/ Grouping Data
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Pivot Tables
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Visualizing Results in Excel
Questions Asked:
● Are certain types of games more popular than others?
What other publishers will likely be the main competitors in certain markets?
Have any games decreased or increased in popularity over time?
How have their sales figures varied between geographic regions over time?
Project Steps
1
In step one of this project, I used excel to sort and filter the data. I created basic visualizations and built pivot tables to view data better. I described the data's dimensions and looked for potential bias. I also began to clean the data (look for missing values, duplicates, etc.) An example pivot table can be seen in figure 1.
Figure 1
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In the final step of the project, I generated bar, column charts, box and whisker plots, and scatter plots to better understand video game sales. This information was wrapped up into a presentation. The presentation link is located in my data portfolio presentation. A few snapshots from the presentation are seen in Figure 3.
2
In the next step, I ran through several business scenarios and asked descriptive questions to start my analysis. I applied techniques to better understand the distribution of my project data set, and worked with a business scenario to construct my own insights for allocating marketing budgets. One of the business scenarios is available for viewing in figure 2 below.
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Figure 2
Figure 2
Final Results
My findings are packaged within my data portfolio PDF. Listed below are what comprises the presentation:
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Background
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Metrics
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Findings
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Recommendations
I found that video game sales have fluctuated over time. this contrasts with GameCo's understanding of the business. A closer look showed declining sales for all regions. Europe experienced 2 years with sales increases, Japan and other regions experienced one. The US experienced no sales increases from year to year.
Recommendations
I recommended that GameCo implement a new marketing allocation system and analyze the 5 year prior data for future years. They should host an analysis 3 months prior to the marketing budget allocation date and use the new forecast to allocate marketing funds globally for all regions.
Challenges
I faced several challenges throughout this project. It was my very first project in my data analytics course. I had used Excel for ad hoc analysis before, but had not cleaned data like I did in this project before. It was a challenge getting my feet wet and trusting my analyzation skills.
In the future, I plan to continue to practice my excel skills. It is easy to overlook excel with all of the complex tools for analysis, but there is always something to learn with excel and I will continue to work on my skills.