A look into video game sales in different regions and several other facets.
by Brennan James Donnell
Video games have been a part of my life. Old video came consoles are of particular interest to me. Both from a technical perspective and from a historical perspective. What made one console successful and another a failure? Was it the games? The company? The competition? The hardware? Or a combination of factors? Though I don't have as much time to play games as I used to, I still find it fascinating to look at how games consoles have changed over time.
- Rank: Position in the VGChartz GameDB, based on global sales.
- Name: Name of the game.
- Platform: System on which the game was released.
- Year: Year in which the game was first released.
- Genre: Genre in which the game was primarily placed.
- Publisher: Company that published the game.
- NA_Sales: Sales in North America in millions of units.
- EU_Sales: Sales in Europe in millions of units.
- JP_Sales: Sales in Japan in millions of units.
- Other_Sales: Sales in other parts of the world in millions.
- Global_Sales: Overall sales in millions of units.
- Series: What main series was the game a part of.
- data.table
- dplyr
- ggplot2
- lubridate
- markdown
- plotly
- rebus
- shiny
- stringr
- To highlight regional sales by series to see where a series performs best.
- To Visualize top-selling games in the lifespan of a system when compared to other systems
- To explore how what kinds of games publishers trend towards, as well as the sales of the games on different platforms.
- To discover more about video game consoles, both in terms of hardware, software, games, and the reasons why a console succeeded or why others failed.
- Series recognition and sorting is not perfect.
- It's entirely based on manually going through the list.
- Someday I would like to algorithmically go through and put similar titles together. For now though, it does okay because I told it to.
- I didn't have the time to modify the scraper to get the game developer information, which I really would have liked to have.
- The information I have is incredibly basic and nearly all of it can be found by reading through Wikipedia.
- Scrape developer and rating information
- Create a more algorithmic way to define a series
- Pull in more data from different sources, such as IGN on games not present in the chart to work towards a more complete setup of a console's library.
- Port the versioning from BitBucket to GitHub.
- Fork it on the Kaggle data page.
- Create a more robust Genre tag for cross-genre info.
- Continue to update the Console Information tab.
- Include information about consoles not present: CD-i, Virtual Boy
- Include info about add-ons and system variants: Sega 32x, Nintendo 64DD, etc.
- Look into having more historical information
- Console war between Sega and Nintendo
- Video Game Crash in North America.
- Images: Wikipedia
- Basic platform info: Wikipedia
- Dataset: Kaggle & VGChartz
- Series info: Personal information
- AVGN: YouTuber.
- Talks about a lot of old video games and lesser known systems, particularly ones that are bad.
- Console War: Novel.
- Written about the console war between Sega and Nintendo during the era of the SNES and the Genesis. I haven't finished it yet.
- DF Retro (Digital Foundry): Website & YouTuber.
- Good info about different versions of games that appear on different platforms, as well as game console architecture.
- GitHub
- Email: bjn82@wildcats.unh.edu