After the 1983 video game crash, a.k.a, Atari Shock, the video game industry has suffered a lot of downfalls. Being an ardent gamer it seemed interesting to me how the sales trends within the video game industry changed through the years. Recently video games have become a big deal, because of the lockdown and people being stuck at their homes.
This project focuses on visualizing the trends among video games sales between 1996-2016. After my initial research on the topic, I was intrigued by the following questions:
- How did the 2009 recession affect global video game sales?
- What are the most selling games after the recession?
- What are some of the most famous genres?
- Which are the most famous gaming studios in North America?
Based on these questions I complied together a series of visualizations into a dashboard that can be found on my Tableau page.
Previous Work
I found following two visualizations using the same dataset in Kaggle notebooks.
The visualization in Fig. 2 uses a heat map to draw comparison between genre and year, whereas the Fig.1 uses a bar graph. Although both the graphs indicate the same data, Fig.2 uses color more efficiently. The bar graph uses color for the sake of color without adding any value to the data, also the bars are organized arbitrarily, which does not give meaningful context to the Fig. 1.
Materials
The dataset used to create the visualization was acquired from Kaggle, which is an open-source community of data scientists and practitioners, and offers more than 50,000 public datasets from different domains. The data was mostly clean but required some regrouping and categorization.
I used Tableau Public to create all the necessary visualizations. Tableau is an interactive visualization tool that lets the user create visualizations using simple drag and drop methods. It also gave me the flexibility to compile my work on a dashboard and publish it on the Tableau website.
Process and Rationale
Video Game Sales in North America (1994-2016)
I started my analysis of the dataset by drawing a comparison between the sales in North America between 1994 and 2016. I drew the line graph as a percentage difference in North American sales, from previous year. This revealed two statistically important events, one in 1996 when the sales jumped by ~250% and the other in 2008 when the video games sales started dipping. I wanted to further analyze these two events in order to understand the root cause for this fluctuations. Unfortunately, there was no sound data available for the 1994-2000, hence I focused my study on the data after 2008.
Genre VS Sales (Global and North America)
To better understand the pattern in the sales after 2008, I further analyzed different dimensions of the data, to see what relations might affect the sales. I constructed two bar graphs for Global and North American sales, against all the different genres. This brought forward some common trends, like the most famous genre being “Action” followed by “Sports”. Although “Role Playing” games were famous globally, they were not liked much in North America.
Most Selling Video Games and Studios
After knowing that the most famous genre was “Action”, I wanted to dig deeper and analyze if the most selling games were actually action games. The bar graph of most selling games shows that 7 out of 11 most selling games are action games. The pie chart for the studios that made the most sales also resonates with the bar graph, as we can see that 2 out of the top 3 most selling games are developed by Nintendo. Using this information, we can verify that Nintendo has a higher market share.
Most Famous Platform in North America (2008-2016)
I also wanted to analyze if there was a difference between the sales by platform. This visualization makes comparison between 4 different platforms, namely, Nintendo, PC, Sony Play Station and X-BOX. In 2010, the sales for PC games went up by ~585%. One conclusion that can be drawn from this is, after the recession games did not want to invest in expensive console games and instead preferred PC. But there was not enough data to verify this conclusion.
Reflection
After the COVID lockdown, video game sales have been going up. It has become one of the top entertainment source for people stuck at home, while the lockdown has not been good for other industries, it came as a blessing to the drowning video game industry. Future analysis can be done to analyze the sales after COVID.
It was really great working in Tableau, it makes data visualization a seamless experience. Although it offers a lot of tools and customizations for the data, it has limited visual editing capabilities. It would also be great to have a smart guides feature, like adobe, to better arrange the floating elements in the dashboard.
The default arrangement of all the legends for every graph on the right side of the dashboard is a little frustrating. It makes it difficult for the user to compare and read the graphs. In order to better deliver the message, I used the float feature and then manually arranged the legends.
Note: To enhance web accessibility I have used a color blind compatible scheme throughout my dashboard.
Failed Graphs
I tried plotting the sales of different studios using a line chart, but ended up making a “spaghetti chart” which was difficult to interpret and did not convey any useful insights about the data. I chose the pie chart over this for my final dashboard.
