Portfolio
Gameco
Objective
Perform a descriptive analysis to gain insights into the current video game landscape for a marketing and sales’ team 2017 planning.
Problem
GameCo intends to develop new games in order to remain competitive in the market. They are looking for market, competitor, and sales insights to make the best use of their resources.
Data
- Project Brief
- Data sourced from VGChartz. See The following link
Techniques Applied
- Data Cleaning
- Data Integrity and Quality
- Pivot Tables
- Data Grouping and Summarizing
- Calculated Fields
- Descriptive Analysis
Tools
Time Analysis
- European sales until 2016 had an almost linear upward behaviour.
- North American sales were predominant among the other markets.
Data Preparation
From a technical point of view, this was a really simple project, but it was an incredible teaching experience about how easy it is to misinterpret data due to visual assumptions and the importance of doublechecking one’s thought process behind an analysis. The assumption was that if a temporal analysis was requested, the data provided should support it. In this case, before being able to work on this project, I needed to clean and take care of the missing values. Even though it was one of the simplest projects, the amount of data was too large. However, with a good cleaning job and dedication to the project, it was possible to move forward and carry out the necessary analysis.
Descriptive Data Analysis
One of the key objectives of the project was to perform a time series analysis and see if sales trends in different geographic markets had been the same over the years. The analysis showed that indeed, all markets had similar variations. In particular, there was a peak in sales at the end of 2007, followed by a decrease. I also focused on the reason behind the request for temporary analysis, which is the optimization of the marketing budget according to the markets for the next year. With that in mind, I decided to figure out how the marketing budget should be distributed across sales regions. I also wanted to determine what the budget should focus on: genre, platform, or individual games.
Conclusion
This was a relatively simple project, technically speaking. However, it was a great teaching experience about how easy it is to misinterpret data due to assumptions and common thinking. It is also important to double-check the thinking behind an analysis, if possible.
Recommendations
It’s recommended to review in depth the investment in marketing for the following year (2017), focused on more genres and videos games platforms that are more attractive to consumers. Marketing should be focused more on the most preferred market genres such as Shooter, Action and Sports, as well as for platforms, such as X360 for the NA and European market, and DS platform for Japan. The budget must be maintained in the NA market and promote more marketing, put more effort into this. Budget for Japan and other countries should be increased due to the increase in the proportion of sales.