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
Global Hardware Totals Source: www.vgchartz.com	Pros: There is a grid line across the chart for easier comparison Icons are used instead of plain text for easier recognition Text values are shown in contrasting color for greater readability Cons: The graph is misleading as the height of the PS4 and 3DS bars are the same although the values are different by about 25 Million. The lack of Y axis causes confusion The percentage in the graph does not make sense as they add up to above 100% The graph is not sorted in descending order, making it unintuitive to compare.
PlayStation 4 Becomes Second Best-Selling Console Ever https://www.statista.com/chart/18903/video-game-console-sales/	Pros: The chart is sorted in descending order, which allows reader to compare fields easily There are values labelled on the chart which allows reader to reference to it easily Icon are used instead of words for easier recognition Cons: The legends does not show the gradient range or what it means The choice of colors to differentiate between current and past is not distinct which makes it difficult to read.
Console Gaming https://www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/	Pros: There is a clear distinction between each platform which allows readers to identify each one easily The chart is sorted according to year, allowing readers to see the trends over the years Cons: Some segments are too small causing the values to be hidden The chart does not have a total above each segment.

Proposed Storyboard

Storyboard	Insights/Comments
	Provide insights on the trends on the performance of the publisher over the years. It allows interactivity to allow users to narrow down their search by filtering through genre, platform, region, publisher and years.
	Provide insights on the total sales gained through the consoles. It allows interactivity to allow users to narrow down their search by filtering through publisher and region.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 platform.
	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.
	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.

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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