Video Game Development Cost vs. Units Sold

Introduction Topic: Video games Why: Fun Question: Does the cost of video game development affect the sales of the video game?

Background Information Development cost – the money spent to create, advertise and ship the video game Units sold – number of copies sold during first ten weeks after release The video game industry made $10.5 billion in revenue in 2009

Hypothesis As the development cost increases, the number of sales increase Makes sense This much revenue would require profit in the majority of video games sold

Data Obtained using convenience sampling Hard to find data on both variables 100 video games used

One-Variable Statistics (Development Cost) Total of 5 outliers in development cost All video games with very high development costs Outstanding outliers are Destiny at $500 million and Grand Theft Auto V at $265 million These include: Destiny, Grand Theft Auto V, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Final Fantasy VII

One-Variable Statistics (Units Sold) Total of 27 outliers in development cost Initially only 10 outliers Not all video games had very high development costs The removal of outliers changed the statistics and created more outliers Outstanding outliers are Grand Theft Auto V at units sold and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 at units sold

Two-Variable Statistics (before outliers)

Outliers A total of 2 outliers were removed Destiny was and Grand Theft Auto V were huge outliers y=0.0366x Destiny ( ) = units Grand Theft Auto V =0.0366x , x=$

Two-Variable Statistics (after outliers)

Console Sales 2013

Video Game Sales for Each Console (2013)

Bias Website used recorded video games with extremely low sales as 0

Extraneous Variables Country first released in Sales of a sequel Console(s) released for

Conclusion Increase in development cost has positive effect on sales of the video game Moderately strong correlation Cause and effect relationship

Next Steps More data More accurate data

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