Our challenge for today was to connect to Giant Bomb‘s API which is the largest online gaming database and use the data to find a story!
The Data
What I chose to look at was how much brand new gaming platforms cost when they were initially released and see if there was a story to tell in that. To connect to the API we had to register and generate a key, and then use that in our call to retrieve the data from the endpoints we needed in Alteryx.
To enrich my visualisation I thought I would give the user the option to view the adjusted prices for 2021 using the US Consumer Price Index to make the costs more relative. I calculated the adjusted figures in Alteryx as well.
The Viz
The dashboard I created probably isn’t one of my best, but I at least tried to make it an immersive experience for the user as if they were controlling the Viz on a Gameboy.
The user can see a timeline of platform releases and plotted against their original release price and along the bottom the circles show which years saw the most platform releases. The user can then use the buttons the right to navigate to see average costs for each brand, categorised by decade.
The Insights
The main insight is that the relative price of new platforms has dropped considerably since the 1980s; the average cost peaking in 1987 at over $3k compared to more recent years of less than $500. Not only that, but the number of platforms being released each year has dropped too.
Check out the Viz yourself here.
