Group05 proposal

No Game No Life

ABOUT US

PROPOSAL

POSTER

APPLICATION

RESEARCH PAPER

PROBLEM & MOTIVATION

PROBLEM

The video game industry has grown massively over the years, with $2.3 billion in sales in the US alone in 2019. However, the industry has also shown signs of stagnation, with a 19% decline in sales from the previous year. One issue game developers face is the disconnect between console and game sales. Even though there are plenty of visualisations on console sales, there is a lack of visualisation and insight on games sales themselves, especially across genres and platforms. This is crucial as console sales figures are meaningless without any insights on the games played on those consoles.

MOTIVATION

With an increasingly saturated market and disruption caused by mobile and VR games, we aim to create an interactive platform to understand game sales trends in order to validate console sales trends and to identify the best performing games, regions and genres across the different consoles.

SELECTED DATASET

The datasets used for this project:

1. Video Game Sales analyzse sales data from more than 16,500 games. This dataset contains a list of video games with sales greater than 100,000 copies. It was generated by a scrape of vgchartz.com.

Data Source	Data Attribute	Data Description	Rationale of Usage
Video Game Sales (https://www.kaggle.com/gregorut/videogamesales)	Rank	Global Sales Ranking	To attain valuable insights on video games sales which can be classified by the following: Regional sales Platform sales Sales over time Genre performance
	Name	Video game name
	Platform	Platform game was released on
	Year	Year of release
	Genre	Genre of game
	Publisher	Publisher of game
	NA_Sales	Sales in North America (in millions)
	EU_Sales	Sales in Europe (in millions)
	JP_Sales	Sales in Japan (in millions)
	Other_Sales	Sales in all other regions (in millions)
	Global_Sales	Total Worldwide Sales (in millions)

BACKGROUND SURVEY OF RELATED WORK

Related Work	Description
gamesindustry.biz 2019 Year in Numbers Source: www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-12-17-gamesindustry-biz-presents-the-year-in-numbers-2019	Pros: Gives a good breakdown of sales by console in 2019 Cons: It only has data on 2019, rather than data over multiple years It is difficult to understand and compare the 3 pie charts at once There is no information on actual games sales, only those of consoles
The Business of Video Games Impressive Hardware Sales in 2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinanderton/2018/01/31/the-business-of-video-games-impressive-hardware-sales-in-2017-infographic/#13c4dcdb104e/	Pros: Gives the best platform for each of the two years Cons: It only has information on 2016 and 2017 It does not compare with other modern consoles that are available in the market It also does not have information on games sales themselves
The Rebirth of the Video Game Home Console http://www.visualinformation.info/the-rebirth-of-video-game-consoles/	Pros: It uses dual bar charts to show the top selling consoles and the best selling video games. Statistical summary to help viewer understand the chart better It uses different sizes of the circle to indicate the sales for the consoles, which aids comparison across fields Cons: No indication of which year the data is from

Proposed Storyboard

Storyboard	Insights/Comments
	Dashboard 1: Games Sales Trends Over Time Provide insights on the total sales earned over the years by genre. It allows interactivity to allow users to narrow down their search by filtering through genre by clicking on the data table or the year filter by year. With response to the action of the user, the charts will update itself with the new average line over the years.This result can be used to understand which platform is more profitable and allows game developers to plan their strategies before developing games on the respective genre.
	Dashboard 1: Games Sales Trends Over Time The line graph with tooltips shows the trends of the various consoles since 1980. It can also be narrowed down to show specific consoles and time periods.
	Dashboard 2: Sales per console per region Provide insights on the total sales per year within each individual region and allows users to understand which platform contributed the most to sales. Publishers can use these insights to make adjustments to their marketing strategies depending on each region. This idea was changed to a treemap instead.
	Dashboard 2: Sales per console per publisher The pareto chart shows the top publishers over a year for each console. The maps will highlight the top genres, publishers and sales numbers within each region as well as globally for a specific console. (story board 2- % of sales against % of publisher) regional( map to zoom in) This idea was dropped due to time constraints.
	The first visual of dashboard 2 was changed to treemap, as we felt it was is the best way to visualize this type of data. This is because a tree map allows you to visualize the hierarchical amount of sales that leave each region.

KEY CHALLENGES

Key Technical Challenges	Solution
Unfamiliarity in Programming using R especially on R-Shiny	Peer Learning Search external sites for tutorials Complete R and R shiny courses in DataCamp Refer to relevant documentation
Limited knowledge in storyboard designing	Watch Youtube for tutorial Refer to relevant documentation Read online articles and forums for guidance
Unfamiliarity in implementing Interaction and Animated activities in the Visualisation	Peer Learning Search external sites for tutorials Complete R and R shiny courses in DataCamp Refer to relevant documentation

TIMELINE

COMMENTS

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