Link to Tableau Visuals

Background:

Metacritic is a popular review website that was released on the Internet in 2001. The website encourages both formal critics as well as casual customers to review movies, TV shows, albums, and video games. The scores of the critics are weighted based on the prestige of the critic, then averaged together to form what is known as a 'Metascore'. Customer reviews are unweighted and combined together under a typical average to form a user score. The games also will not get a 'Metascore' or user score until it has an adequate amount of trusted ratings to take an average from. The website has been a popular source of information for customers as they decide what content to choose.

Ask:

The director of marketing has assigned me to look into current and past trends in video game releases to answer the following questions:

• What time of year are video game releases most popular?
• What day are most video games released?
• Does the choice of console impact the receptiveness towards the video game

Prepare:

The dataset was found on Kaggle here. The data was scraped from the Metacritic website early in 2023 and had data on games released from 1995-2023. The dataset is pictured below.

Checking the data for bias, the data does not come from an original source and is not current due to the changing nature of review scores on Metacritic's website. Some user review scores were marked as TBD, but it was discovered that a minimum number of reviews are needed to generate a score on Metacritic. These games did not have the minimum number of reviews needed at the time the dataset was published.

Process:

Once the data was downloaded it was uploaded to Google Sheets where the actual analysis took place. The data was small enough that this was effective. Before the analysis started the data needed to be cleaned.

Below is a list of what was cleaned for the data:

• Deleted summary column because the information had no use for the analysis
• Checked strange video game names(found all games were real and verified), changed titles of games to reflect full titles or correct punctuation
• Check duplicates
• Removed blank rows
• Created columns for release month and year using DATE function titled it release_month and month_name_number to make analysis easier
• Created column for day name of release using WEEKDAY function release_day and day_name_number to make analysis easier
• Verified ID lengths are all same length
• Rename sort_no to meta_rank to better describe the column information
• Confirmed unique values across all columns
• Replaced tbd in user_score column with nulls
• Multiplied all user scores by 10 to have metascores and user scores be the same length of digits
• Removed data from before 2001 due to founding of website and after 2022 due to incomplete data

Analyze and Share:

After data was cleaned we created pivot table to help analyze specific trends. We then took the data into Tableau Public to visualize those trends.

What time of year are video game releases most popular?

Using this pivot table we were able to see that most of the releases happen during the fall months. As we talked about it we hypothesized that they are released at this time because of the holiday season. The lowest months were January and December which also backs up the holiday season hypothesis, because most gifts are bought before December and no one is wanting to buy another game after the holidays are over.

What day are most video games released?

We looked at which day was the most popular release day as well. We used our column day_name_number which has Sunday-Saturday equal a number 1-7 respectively. The table below shows the results.

Overall Tuesday's are the most popular release day of the week. The type of console had few differences within them but there were some. However we wanted to see if that trend is still going on presently. So we looked at the past 5 years of releases.

As we continued to look at the past 5 years (2018-2022) of data we could see a new pattern was emerging. We found that Tuesday releases are mainly a relic left behind from when video games were mainly released physically. Stores needed plenty of time to get shipments in for the weekend which is when most people buy games. However, since the prevalence of digital media and games the pattern looks to be slowly moving towards Thursday and Friday. Most likely because it is easier to get the game on release day and start playing immediately when you have time, which is the weekend for most people.

Does the choice of console impact the receptiveness towards the video game?

While looking at the data it was difficult to see any particular preference to one console vs another. This is especially true because of how many different generations of consoles there are. Releasing games on more than one console is another reason that picking one in particular is harder and can only really be solved with data about purchasing the same game on different system.

The pivot table does show a heavy release on PC followed by PS4 and Switch and lower on things like Nintendo 64 and Stadia, both of which are not having games made for them anymore. To have a clearer picture the data was filtered by the past 5 years (2018-2022).

Seeing the Switch take the top spot was a surprises. But, some of this can be attributed to Nintendo re-releasing older games on the Switch as 'new' releases, this can mean more releases without new games. Overall, the newer consoles and the generation right behind them make up most of the chart. Game development takes time, so many of these releases were games that were started before newer consoles were released to the public. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X were only released in 2020, so many developers did not have access to the development tools needed to release their games on those platforms. Also taking Covid into consideration can mean that some games meant to release on newer consoles had to be delayed a few years or even indefinitely.

Act:

Summary of findings

• Fall months are a popular standard in the industry because of the holiday bump
• Tuesdays have been the standard of release days but are slowly getting pushed out for days closer to the weekend like Thursday and Friday.
• Console does not really matter when releasing games especially if you can release on multiple.
• Based on these findings, I would recommend the following plans of action to the game development team:

Based on these finding, we would recommend the game development team...

• Plan to release the game towards the later part of the week if the game is primarily digital in nature. If the game is going to be sold physically, it may be best to release it on a Tuesday.
• Release the game somewhere between September to November to take advantage of the upcoming holiday season
• Platform choices do not seem to make a large difference in reception, so plan to release on the platform(s) that work best.

Thank you for reading my project, any feedback is welcomed. A huge thank you to John Anderton, it was a blast to work collaboratively with someone and was a fun project in general!