I picked a stacked bar chart because it answers both questions of which genres dominate overall, and the color segments reveal which platforms drive the most sales in each genre. One thing I was conscious of was to make sure that each title is counted once regardless of how many platforms it appeared on for the average sales chart to avoid counting the same game multiple times to ensure that the data was accurate.
I picked a line chart because it answers both questions of which platforms saw the sharpest rise and fall in global sales over their lifespan, and how do the peak sales years compare across different gaming platforms. Each platform gets its own colored line, making it easy to compare lifecycles side by side. However with the large number of platforms it gets difficult to distinguish with the human eye between the different lines.
I decided to break down the dataset into smaller panels, arranged in a grid, with each panel depicting a horizontal bar chart with their own respective region. I felt this would make it easier to compare between different regions. I picked horizontal bars here because if the labels of the platform names were on the X-axis, the names would be long and overlap. I also sorted each panel by sales descending to make it easier to identify the popular platforms of a region within a glance.
I was wondering whether the quantity of games published means higher total sales, which is why I chose the scatter plot. I placed the number of games on the X-axis and total global sales on the Y-axis to visually see this information and see if there’s a relationship between these variables. I color-coded the 7 publishers with the most games and decided not to show all publishers because it would’ve made the data difficult to parse, and I was more concerned about Nintendo’s position in the chart.