GameCo

To better understand the current video game market, GameCo management has requested analysis of the gaming industry overall and the primary influences to game sales. These insights will guide development of GameCo’s next games to give the best chance of success.

This analysis will provide visibility into markets, genres, platforms, and overall game sales performance as well as address GameCo management’s questions:

  • 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?

Tools used

  • Excel

  • Powerpoint

Skills required

  • Data wrangling and subsetting

  • Consistency checks

  • Data merging

  • Deriving variables

  • Grouping data

  • Aggregating data

  • Visualizations in Excel

  • Reporting in Excel

  • Population flows

Initial Exploratory Analysis

Working to understand the tables, data available, and relationships between tables

Understand the data available with a data dictionary

Identify questions that can be addressed with the available data

Identify limitations to the data and questions that cannot be addressed without additional data

Data Checks and Cleaning

Testing the data integrity and cleaning the data as needed

Use pivot tables and filters to investigate data looking for issues and patterns. This can include mean, median, max, and min to understand the data.

Identify, clean, and document all issues and changes

Analysis

Provide full analysis of the data to better understand Instacart’s customers and products and address management’s questions

Regional Sales over Time

Gaming regional sales

  • NA and EU tend to dominate sales consistently

  • Japan and Other show increases in sales, but continue to trail NA and EU significantly

  • Sales in recent years begins to close the gap between all regions

Genre sales by region:

  • Genre sales vary significantly by region and will influence sales in each according to gamer preference and culture

Regional sales as % of Global sales

  • NA Sales continues to decline

  • EU Sales increases steadily and overtakes NA Sales

  • Japan shows an increase after a long decline

  • Other sales gains in share

Game Genre Influence on Sales

GameCo Final Report and Recommendations

Recommendations for GameCo’s marketing strategy

  • Target non-NA regions as primary markets and not secondary

  • Include genre in a region’s marketing plan as genre is very region specific and will greatly influence game purchases

  • Increase marketing in regions where sales are declining such as NA to bolster sales and return to earlier sales levels

  • Continue to investigate sales in ‘Other’ region to identify if specific countries are key to sales performance here and target those markets

Final Report

Main points to consider

  • Our initial theory that sales by region has been and will remain consistent has been disproven

  • NA sales have slowed and are not as dominant as they once were; Non-NA regions are now significant influences to global sales and sales are increasing

  • Genres need to be considered in GameCo’s marketing plan; Targeted marketing should consider bolstering underperforming genres by region

  • Focus to be given to high performing genres and regions to support current growth

  • Global sales for the gaming industry overall have been in decline since about 2008