Excel Project
GameCo, Video Game Company
Games Co’s, a new video game company, understanding of sales is that the various geographic regions have stayed the same over time. Whether this is the case or not, the marketing budget needs to be redistributed among the regions in order to maximize return on investment.
Objective
As a Data Analyst studying at Career Foundry, working with GameCo data, I performed a descriptive analysis of a video game data set to give a recommendation of how budget should be allocated.
Goal
Create a presentation that includes visualizations telling the analytical story.
Dataset
Historical sales of video games (for games that sold more than 100,000 copies) spanning different platforms, genres, and publishing studios. Source: Local and Global Sales for GameCo 2016
First step- Data Exploration and Data Cleaning
Getting acquainted with the data by doing aggregations through pivot tables, identifying data limitations, performing data quality and accuracy checks (inconsistent formatting, duplicates, missing values).
Second step- Data Analytics
Perform histograms, bar charts, box and whisker plots, and scatter plots to compare data and discard outliers that affect the main statistics.
Third Step- Insights and Data Visualization
As opposed to what the company was expecting, sales across the main regions (North America, European Union, and Japan) have not remained the same. Overall, the industry’s sales have been declining since year 2009. It is important to bear in mind that the data is biased towards retail sales and does not accurately capture the market of software sales, which in turn could depict a different behavior.
Final Recommendations
Given that the Marketing Budget should aim to maximize return on Investment (ROI), GameCo should also perform an analysis that includes variables such as profit by genre, profit by region and cost structure of games per genre before defining the final budget. On the same line, this suggested budget should be aligned to the Sales Forescast for year 2017. It is advisable to investigate the competitive landscape before setting the final budget. For example, in North America the Shooter genre concentrates 70% of its sales in just two companies. Therefore, any efforts to allocate budget in that region for Shooter games could be offset by fierce competition. Whether this is true, is better to revise if new genres may well be more attractive to compete in.