Video Game Industry Analysis for GameCo.

  • Background.

    GameCo, a new video game company, wants to develop new games based on its data. To achieve this goal, needs a data analyst to provide descriptive statistics, so it can make informed choices to provide them with an understanding of how their new games might do in the video game market.

  • Context.

    This project was completed as part of the CareerFoundry's curriculum.

    Topics covered were Excel, cleaning data, grouping data, summarizing data, gather descriptive analysis, and visualizing statistics in Excel, as well as presenting results to stakeholders.

    This knowledge was used to solve business questions for GameCo, a fictional video game company.

  • Tools.

    Excel - a software application that allows the spreadsheets and their contents to be manipulated.

The Path to Answering Business Questions.

 

  1. Conducted exploratory analysis by: accessing, sorting, and filtering data; creating pivot tables; and visualizations in Excel.

    • Allowed future steps (such as cleaning) to be carried out more effectively.

Visualization created during the exploratory analysis stage.

 

Picture by Mike Tinnion.

2. Documented information about the dataset, including: data types, characteristics, and potential biases.

  • Gained a deeper understanding of data set which allowed future steps to be carried out more effectively.

  • Allowed others accessing project to understand further about data set.

 

3. Cleaned data set to ensure analysis was accurate.

  • Identified any missing values, inconsistencies, and duplicate values.

Cleaned data.

 

4. Grouped and summarized values using pivot tables to gather more insights from data.

  • Used groupings and summarized values to analyze data in a later step.

 

5. Conducted descriptive analysis to develop insights about the data set.

  • Based visualizations created in the next step on this descriptive analysis. 

Descriptive statistics.

 

Visualizations of region sales (percentage).

6. Created visualizations to communicate insights.

  • Decided on chart type and format to best convey information.

 

7. Developed a presentation for stakeholders to relay project findings.

  • Selected key points and charts to best tell an analytical story.

Stacked bar chart used in final presentation.

Key Findings.

  1. The percentage of total annual game sales each region contributes varies each year, resulting in a variance in total sales.

  2. Since 2006, annual European game sales have taken up an increasing percentage of yearly sales.

It is recommended the marketing team prepare to reallocate their budget. A suggestion is to reallocate a good size of their resources to the European market, in hopes of maximizing return on investment and increasing sales for the 2017 fiscal year.

Image by Z.

Deliverables.

  • Stakeholder Presentation

    Access

 Next Step.

While the above information fulfills the requirements of the project, the next step would be evaluating the reallocation of the budget, should the above recommendation be improved and implemented.