2. The Players (Data Description)

In this blog, we will further describe our project data. The mobile game data which was extracted from https://www.appannie.com/en/, listed information (15 features) about the top 100 income-generating mobile games in five major regions (China; US; Japan; South Korea; Taiwan) from 2018.01 to 2019.12. Specifically, the data was collected on a monthly basis in the aforementioned regions, consequently, there are in total 100*5*24=12,000 data points. Before implementing data analysis and visualization, we will first take a look at 15 Features.

Table 1: List of Features

At the beginning of the blog, we already talked about the first three features. In the following part, I will go through the remaining features of the data. Firstly, the overall number of game types was summarized in Figure 1. As can be seen, the two major game types in all five regions are action real-time massively online multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) and turn-based role-playing game (RPG). In general, role-playing games are welcomed in the industry. We will explore the reasons why in our further study.

Figure 1: Count of Game Type in All Five Regions

In terms of the following two features, namely "ios_income" and "ios_download", unfortunately, due to the Chinese internet policy restriction, it is not possible for us to get accurate records of game income and download for Google Store. We therefore only take the game income and downloads records from Apple Store into account. In Figure 2, the total income and downloads of all top 100 mobile games for five regions were shown for each month during 2018 and 2019. This graph gives us a general overview of the current economic scale and development of the mobile game industry. Meanwhile, we can see from the barplot that this industry is prosperous and vibrant with a monthly income of more than 1750M dollars.

Figure 2: Total Income and Downloads Trends

Figure 3. Games with Top 20 Total Incomes

To have an idea of what mobile game contributes the most to the total monthly income, we listed the top 20 mobiles games in Figure 3. We can observe that "Honour of Kings" possesses both high economic capacity and popularity.

Here is just a brief illustration of what games are included in our data. Further analysis and visualization of those games will be implemented in our further design.

The following feature we would like to present is "star_rating", which quantifies player satisfaction in mobile games, ranging from 0 to 5, with a higher score meaning greater player satisfaction. Figure 4 shows the distribution of these ratings.

Figure 4: Game Star Ratings (0-5)

Furthermore, the general information about the game publishers and manufacturers is shown below. We can see that China, Japan, and South Korea play an important role in publishing and manufacturing mobile games. Among all the publishers and manufacturers, Tencent Game, Netmarble Corporation, and NetEase Games are the top players.

Intellectual Property (IP) is a crucial factor in generating more value for a certain mobile game. As is shown in Figure 5, there are around 46% of games with IP.

Hopefully, after reading this blog, you will have a general idea of our data, facilitating your understanding of our further project development.

In the next blog, we will discuss how we implemented visual design for our data.