Video Game Data

Video games are interactive electronic experiences in which players engage with a user interface or device and receive visual feedback. Their popularity has skyrocketed as a form of enternatiment into an integral part of pop culture, with players across generations, genres, platforms and game studios fans.

With the growing popularity of video games comes an enormous amount of feedback from both professional critics and everyday players. Review scores provide insight into how a game was received, but with it comes a variety in opinions from critics and users as they don’t always agree. This raises an important question: what makes a game successful, and does commercial success necessarily mean players enjoyed it? This website uses data from the Kaggle Video Game Sales and Ratings dataset , which combines information about video game sales, critic scores, and user scores. The dataset allows an exploration of the relationship between a game's performance, critic reviews, and player reception.

One of the key takeaways from the data is that higher sales does not always correspond to higher user satisfaction. A game can sell millions of copies while receiving relatively mixed user scores, revealing that success and player enjoyment aren’t always connected. Critic and user scores also need to be interpreted carefully. The number of critics and user ratings contributing to a critic score both can vary considerably between games. As a result, each score independently doesn’t explain everything about the game’s success.

Through exploring and visualizing the data, the relationship between global sales, critic and user scores, as well as the number of reviews will be explored to see how different measures of video games’ success compare. Instead of one single aspect, which as mentioned earlier, that doesn’t tell the whole story, it’s better to compare multiple to truly understand what constitutes a “good” game and explore how games are evaluated.

I chose to look at video games specifically becuase they've always interested me. I grew up playing a lot of video games (and still do) so being able to explore something I care about was something I valued. It gave me a chance to combine one of my interests and data exploration, something I'm not as interested in. By combing the two, I'm able to learn more through something I'm excited about. Additionally, I always loved talking with my friends about the games I played and what they would/wouldn't recommend, and I can explore that interest furthur by looking at how user and critic reviews differ with reagrds to certain games. I'm curious to see if there is a trend regarding specific genres of video game for both user and critic reviews. With that being said, I understand that correlation does not equal causation, however I'm still interested to see what the general trends are.