Uncovering Market Trends in the Gaming Industry

The Goal: Analyzing Video Game Sales Data

For this project, I wanted to do a full, deep-dive analysis of a video game sales dataset. The main goal was to practice the entire data analysis process, from cleaning the raw data all the way to providing strategic recommendations for a business.

I set a few key objectives for my analysis:

• Find the top-performing games, genres, and consoles.
• Understand what types of games are popular in different regions, like North America vs. Japan.
• See how critic scores impact sales.

My Process: From Messy Data to Clean Insights

The first big challenge was cleaning the data. The game names were very inconsistent (like "King Kong" vs "KingKong"), so I used SQL and OpenRefine to clean and normalize everything. The "Clustering Facet" in OpenRefine was especially helpful for grouping all the different name variations together, which was critical for accurate analysis.

After cleaning the data, I used Tableau to create a lot of visualizations. This helped me to easily see the key trends in platform preferences, genre popularity, and regional sales performance.

The Outcome: Strategic Recommendations

Based on all my findings, I put together a full PDF report. It doesn't just show the data; it also includes strategic recommendations that a real gaming company could use. For example, I recommended focusing on high-quality Shooter and Action games for the holiday season and adapting marketing strategies for different regions.