Nintendo Switch Sales Units

James Strachan | Data Visualisation | #MakeoverMonday | 2020 | Week 45

Introduction
Oh what a fun week! The theme this week was Dedicated Video Game Unit Sales and the data was Nintendo Switch hardware and software unit sales over the last 4 years, across 4 Regions (The Americas, Japan, Europe, and the Rest of the World). I really enjoyed participating this week because I was a big fan of Nintendo growing up, and also because the topic lent itself to some really creative visualisations from analysts which were fun to see.

The Nintendo Original
The Nintendo investor relations web-site has an interactive charting tool. Built presumably in native Java in is very slick and animates very smoothly and instantaneously at the touch of a button. The chart choice however leaves quite a lot of room for improvement, as it shows hardware sales units as a stacked bar chart, with software sales units overlaid on a dual axis as a line graph. The axes are not synchronised, so that two unit types look roughly equivalent in performance to the naked eye. And the colours used are pretty garish too.

My #Vizabit Redesign

The Nintendo Switch (like so many Nintendo consoles before it) is itself a piece of iconic design, with it's unmistakable blue and red colours and its curved corners. As such, I knew I wanted to incorporate this into my viz. In the end I decided to create a simple graphical representation of the Switch and use this to frame a single dynamic chart in the centre of the screen. I resisted the temptation to turn my bar chart into a Super Mario level (although that would have been lots of fun too) instead focussing on a simpler (hopefully more mature) design aesthetic.

I then used a simple parameter to 'switch' (get it!) between sales units, YoY change in sales units, and YoY % change in sales units. I deliberately made the axes independent, so that software didn't dwarf hardware (making it hard to read the hardware trend). I think this was fair, as one unit of hardware is worth more than 5 units of software in revenue terms, so a direct comparison of unit sales isn't really valid in any case. I hid the axes for a cleaner look, but showed all the labels so as not to deceiver the viewer.

I then used Index() of Year in place of Year in the view in order to pack the bars more closely together within each Region. I then had to create 'fake' year axes and add these back into the view. (It's a shame Tableau makes you go to such lengths to achieve this look, something that is so simple to do in Excel). Lastly, I

animated the chart, and deleted the mobile version (as it wasn't possible on mobile with floating objects, as phone sizes differ which means floating objects are likely to move out of place). In the end I was very happy with the result.

Try it for yourself...

Just the main desktop view this week, regardless of which device you use, so if you're on a mobile you made need to rotate to a horizontal position, and do a bit of pinching to get it to fill your screen. Hopefully you enjoy it!