Week 2: Moving Along

Hello, and welcome back to Week 2 of my Senior Project!
There isn’t anything new this week, so this post is probably going to be a short one. For starters, I’ve made some more headway in my quantitative data-gathering. Specifically, this week consisted of creating an tweaking formulas to accurately estimate the financial portion of my project. Taking into account regional pricing, various editions, and discount sales, I can reasonably surmise a range of gross revenue a game has made based on the most recent sales data. One neat thing about looking at more modern games is that they are more likely to release milestone announcements that I can then use to ground my estimates. For example, the official Metal Gear account recently posted on social media that Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater has officially sold 2 Million units, allowing me to construct a lower bound for my estimations. Furthermore, I’ve also been using aggregate sources like MobyGames as a credible compiler of some of the information I need, which includes the amount of people credited on working on the game.

In other news, I have contact with VFX artist David Hulin of Free Range VFX, and we’ve been discussing parallels between the Video Game Industry and that of film and other digital media.

With most of my quantitative data-gathering complete, I will be moving on to fully working on the qualitative portion (that is, the polling) in Week 3. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m already an established member of these communities (at least on Discord), and so I have preexisting insight on the controversy, general consensus, and overall reputation of each game I’m covering.