#Abstract
The video game industry is a fascinating and growing industry forecasted to be worth $138 billion by end of year 2018. Thus, the importance of analytics in boardroom discussion in both publishers (game developers) and platform owners (video gaming consoles/gadgets) around which regions and game genres to target to maximize their profits cannot be discounted. In our study, we wanted to help answer some of these possible key questions which might be important in C-Suite discussion, like which genre/platform is most popular, which region to publish their game first. Our findings indicate that the integration of predictive models and the regression models into video game sale can help the publisher to predict a sale and can help him to make various decisions based on Genre and platform of the game. The genre of the games has found to have an impact on the sale.
[Keywords—growth rate; multiple linear regression; prediction; decision making]
#Introductory Research
The video game industry is a fascinating and growing industry forecasted to be worth $138 billion by end of year 2018. From a layman perspective there are three main players in this industry namely Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft who provide several tools/consoles/gadgets to get engaged in-sync with a growing number of publishers who develop games for these platforms. With the advent of mobile phones and the transition of game enthusiasts to these platforms (namely android, and iPhone) the incumbents may feel threatened, still one can’t really beat the experience and the depth and global reach of the video game industry in the current state of affairs.
In general, the gaming industry is global, still North America, Japan, and Europe are the most popular regions in the video gaming industry, but with growing prosperity the rest of the world is also not far behind. Thus, Game Publishers are in a constant effort mode to find the best games to capture the video game industry worldwide. This stress the importance of analytics in boardroom discussion in both publishers and platform owners around which regions and genres to target to maximize their profits in this competitive industry. In our study, we wanted to help answer the publisher to know the most popular game, genre and wanted to come up with a model to predict growth rate over years. Purpose of this study: The purpose of this case study is to understand the variation of popularity, and in-turn sales, of video games across different genres, platforms, publishers and markets. We hope to gain insights by identifying patterns in the data and by mapping trends over time.
Additionally, we summrise that the information presented in this data set is relevant for Video Game Developers and Publishers. In a partnership, Video Game Developers and Publishers care about developing games which can become popular among their audience and obtain high sales. Collectively, they need to make decisions on which platform to develop games on, which genre to pick for the game and which markets to release the game in.
In the reality of the above scenario, it was important that we tried to come up with a decision-making model to answer the following key questions (from the point of view of Video Game Developers):
a. Which criteria are more important than others, when considering genre and platform, with respect to the three big global
markets – Japan, Europe & North America?
b. Which publisher partnerships are more lucrative than others?
c. What can be a model to predict future sales – market wise?
The intent of this study is to present actionable insights to executives and provide ready to use decision making processes.