I’d like to start by saying that market research is your friend, not your enemy. It might even become your best friend. Perhaps you think that market research is too time consuming and you’re just going to make the game and worry about whether there’s an audience for it later.

Or maybe you know that market research is important, but you don’t quite understand what it is and what exactly you should be doing.

Let’s start right at the beginning.

What Does Market Research Even Mean?

The "market" in market research just means a place where buyers and sellers interact. In the context of game development, this just means a place where game developers sell their games to players. Steam is a market, in fact, it has evolved to become the biggest PC gaming market in the world. If Steam were a physical market, market research would be the equivalent of walking around each Steam store page and looking at what games developers are selling. 

You might call this nosy, but when we visit these store pages, we can start to understand who is buying games (the audience), who and what is competing with you for players attention (competitors), what is selling well and what isn’t (trends) and what other developers are doing to get the attention of players (marketing).

If we were to walk around the whole of Steam, we’d be there for potentially millions of years, so we only really want to look at store pages that are selling similar games to us. The group of similar games is called a market segment.

This means that we can gather more relevant information about who our competitors are, the types of people who play those specific games, and the successes and failures in both the game design and the ways that developers have attracted players to their game. We don’t want to look at just successful games, we want to dig out games that didn't fly off the shelves and figure out what went wrong so we don’t make the same mistakes.

Researching similar games in your market segment will also help you to set realistic expectations about the number of games you’ll sell. For example, if the 100 most similar games to you have only sold a maximum of 1,000 copies each, you’re unlikely to sell more than that because maybe there just aren’t enough people who enjoy playing those types of games, or maybe there are too many similar games diluting the player base.

So that’s what market research is.; a process where you find similar games to yours so that you can get information about the people that play them, what they like and don’t like and set targets for wishlists and sales based on what the other games in the market segment have achieved.

You don’t even need to be making a game to research the market. On Data Explorer, you can just type in an idea you have and find similar games and what they’ve achieved. Or search for a game that’s inspired you to find what the market looks like around it.

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Where Did Market Research Come From?

To an extent, market research has always been a thing, but before the 1900s there wasn’t really a term for it. Businesses were doing simple surveys, observations, gathering information about prices and products, but there was no formal process. That is until a man called Charles Coolridge Parlin came along. He was hired by a publishing company to systematically study consumer behaviour.^1,2

In the 1920s, consumers were getting tired of aggressive, generalised sales tactics and businesses realised they needed to get to know their customers better in order to reach them. Then radio advertising came along and kicked it up a notch, signalling the start of modern advertising and a need for understanding your market in order to succeed.^3,4,5

In the same era, a psychologist called Daniel Starch developed a theory that advertising was only effective when it was seen, believed, remembered and inspired the viewer to act. Starch then opened his own market research company and conducted studies measuring whether people could recall seeing advertisements in magazines.^4,5,6

What Market Research Can Give You

Firstly, right at the start before you’ve built anything, it can help you discover whether an idea is worth pursuing or not. As you’ll know very well, building a game takes a lot of your time and market research can tell you whether an idea is worth your time and commitment.

Secondly, when you’ve got an idea, market research can really guide your creativity and give you inspiration for features that help you stand out from similar games and uncover what players want from the type of game you’re making.

Thirdly, when you’ve found your closest competitors, you can look at how they spread the word about their games to players. What social media they used, whether they used streamers, what content and messages they put out about their game and whether it all worked or not.

Finally, you can use the wishlist and sales figures of similar games to find out whether people are actually buying and playing these types of games, i.e whether there is an audience for them. If you find that there is, you can use the figures from similar games to set your own targets.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to set realistic targets. By that, I mean wishlist and sales numbers that you could actually achieve because they’re based on the market segment that your game is in.

How Do You Actually Do Market Research?

It’s a great question, and the specific market research process might differ depending on which platform or tool you use, but overall you want to do these five things:

1. Make a list of games that are the most similar to yours, your idea or a game that inspired you - this is your market and these are your competitors. Knowing your competitors is the starting point for everything in market research.
2. Look at which games were successful and which games were not so successful to investigate why that might be. You could use player reviews to find out what people liked and disliked about games that are similar to yours so that you can think about whether key features that players enjoy fit in your game. Avoiding things that players dislike means you don’t end up making the same mistakes as your competitors.
3. Take a look the social media, streamers, press and events that the games featured in to get an idea of what types of marketing tactics work and don’t work with your target players. You could even reach out to the same or similar streamers who were successful in promoting other games in your market segment.
4. Gather information about the wishlists and sales each game achieved to set your own targets if you decide that this is the type of game you want to make. This will help with many things, like deciding how much time you spend on a game based on how much demand there is for it. Setting targets can also help you stay motivated while you’re promoting your game and stops you feeling disappointed that you didn’t get thousands of wishlists, because there might not be thousands of players looking for a game like yours!
5. Continuously refer to your market research to help you avoid feature creep and update it if you update the scope of your game so that your targets remain relevant and representative of the market you’re in.

So that’s it. Hopefully you now know exactly what market research is, what you can get out of it and how to start going about it. Of course, this is the part where I’m going to recommend Game Oracle’s tools for getting you started on your market research and you can find out more about them via the link in the description.

References

1. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Market_research)
2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-market-research-has-evolved-over-years-dataqolo-qf9af
3. https://www.materialplus.io/perspectives/a-brief-history-of-market-research)
4. https://www.driveresearch.com/market-research-company-blog/the-evolution-of-market-research-from-the-1920-s-to-today/
5. https://vault.com/industries/market-research/background)
6. https://facefactsresearch.com/market-research-history/