THE CONSOLE WARS
Image source: gamerant.com
Who won the "The Console Wars"?
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It should be noted that the term "The Console Wars" is my own.
It describes the period of the mid-80's to the present. It exemplifies the interactive entertainment battles between Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
The war is ongoing, yet the battlefield has been shifting. Over the past decade game sales have been replaced with micro-transactions and subscription churn rates.
As new contenders have come and gone, the major players have remained the same...
I wanted to visualize the answer to this question using the engaging and illustrative power of the bar chart race. I wanted to practice preparing data pipelines for use in the Python library .
Inspired by Ted Patrou, Founder of Dunder Data and creator of the 'bar_chart_race' python package itself.
*This project uses a Kaggle dataset with data from 1980-2016.
Load & Tidy
Import necessary libraries and load dataset from Kaggle to a dataframe. Check for completeness, consistency, and accuracy of data. Summarize numerical and categorical data.
python
pandas
The dataset contains over 16,000 rows.
Now all the missing and anomalous data is cleaned up.
Exploratory Data Analysis
Making sense of the data and making sure the data makes sense.
matplotlib
feature engineering
Data Preparation
Cleaning and manipulating the data was critical as there were a number of missing years, which required reindexing using pandas pivot table.
pandas
pivot table
cumulative summation
Testing BCR
Experimentation with the bar chart race package parameters to correctly display the visualization. The pipeline to create new bar chart races.
matplotlib
"bcr" package
