Our role: Data Scientists/Hired Analysts
Target audience: Game developpers, retail platforms (i.e: vendors), entertainers
The video game industry is a very competitive and profitable industry. In 2019, video game revenue was a reported $150.2 billion and is estimated to increase to $179.7 billion in 2020. While the content of the game itself is vital to the success of the game, things such as choosing the right platform of release, which regions to make it accessible to and what genre of game to make are also essential to the success of your game. There are many factors that affect the success of a game, many of which depend and are influenced by what goes on in the development phase. This is increasingly important for small developers with limited resources and even other related industries like streaming or ESports. Knowing which areas of the gaming industry are saturated, popular, or becoming popular will put you in a much better position for success.
With this app users will be able to gain insight into general idea such as performance of companies, most popular titles and genres. We are also able to dive deeper and look at changing genre popularity over time, regional preference in game genres/platforms and detailed information on the top titles according to your filtered needs.
The dataset contains a list of 16,598 video games with sales greater than 100,000 from 1980 to 2020. For each video game title, it contains information from 11 variables such as the name of the game (Name) platform of release (Platform), year of release (Year), genre (Genre), rank of the game (in terms of sales) (Rank), publisher (Publisher) and sales across various regions (NA_Sales, JP_Sales, EU_Sales, Other_Sales, Global_Sales). It is worthwhile to note that the number of sales are in millions.
Like mentioned above, this app will be useful in answering questions such as; what are the areas of success in the gaming industry, where are the areas of most competition, is there a noticeable trend or shift in the gaming industry.
For example, imagine you are part of a small development team and want to make a game. You have a general idea for the game concept but are still quite flexible (i.e. you can turn it into an Action game, Shooter, Role-Playing game, Strategy). You also want to avoid competing with huge companies like EA, Blizzard Activision etc. For now, you want to narrow down on a genre for your game and your biggest concern is competition (you do not want your game to be drowned out in a sea of new releases). With our app, you can quickly compare genres in terms of number of titles released as well as general success of each genre while filtering platform, region, and year of release. You can see details regarding the top titles of each genre to get a sense of how monopolized a genre is.
While the example was for a smaller company, the same can be applied for larger corporations as they create new titles and try to expand into other areas in the industry. While a big named developer might not be too concerned with competition, they may want to look at the top performers in a genre or platform of interest and see if there are any similarities that may have contributed to their success before expanding into an area not within their expertise.
Our app can even be expanded outside of the game development field. Since our app shows users what the trends in the gaming industry are, people involved with the entertainment side, such as Streamers, may find this helpful in choosing what game they want to stream.