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When Was the
Golden Age of Video Games?
Overview
I still remember those days when kids would surround that one kid with a Nintendo Game Boy in their hand. A couple of years later, I would be logging on to my Counter-Strike account and defusing bombs or saving hostages. Fast forward, everyone would be talking about Halo and its awesome theme music. Nowadays, it’s NBA 2K on my Xbox One that does it for me.
Every decade seems to have its represented game. Some games come and go, some game last till today. As technology advances: increase usage of smartphones and a growing market in the virtual reality world, the video games business is projected to be worth more than $300 billion by 2027 according to Mordor Intelligence. But are games getting better, or have we already passed the golden age of video games?
The main goal of this project is to explore the top 400 best-selling video games made between 1977 and 2020. By using SQL to join tables, I’ll compare one dataset on game sales with another dataset with critics and user reviews to determine if video games have improved as the gaming market has grown.
I'll be using MySQL on Juypter Notebook. The database includes two tables (game_sales and reviews). The complete dataset can be found on Kaggle.
Examining the Ten Best-Selling Video Games
Let's examine the original data first:
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Game_sales
Reviews
Missing Review Scores
Some games on the game_sales table do not have any reviews data, therefore, I would like to examine these games with missing data and also see the amount of missing data we are dealing with first.
We have 31 games without reviews data, which is less than ten percent of games on the game_sales table—that is a small percentage that we can continue our exploration for now.
Which Years Do Video Game Critics Love?
Was 1982 Really that Great?
Everything looks good, but looking carefully, the year 1982 seems a bit off—perhaps, there were not a lot of games released, causing the average to be high.
The next step is to update the query for clarification: the query is set to only return games with more than 4 games released in that year.
After that query, we can see that the years that has more than four games are displayed, while years such as 1982 are not shown.
Years Video Game Players Loved
This query is similar to the previous one where we looked at critics rating, instead, we now look at players favorite games based on their ratings.
Combining Both Critics and Players Favorite Years
Finally, Sales in the Best Video Game Years
I'll use the previous query as a subquery to add in the sales record for each year.
As we can see, 2008, 1998, and 2002 were all years where both the critics and players favored; on top of that, the corresponding sales of those years also reflected the sales performance.