Effective talk: Determining your game audience
Year of Talk: 2023
Video Link: Define Your Audience Now, Not Later
Takeaways:
Analyze games with similar mechanics or systems and see what type of audience likes/plays them.
Define the audience
Steps to define the audience.
What does “Define your audience” mean?
Who are the most likely people interested in the game?
What platforms will be published?
Any other games that might cause competition. Either directly or indirectly. CoD vs Battlefield and CoD vs Starfield
Any unique features in your game that might make the game more interesting
Expecting to get lucky with your game will likely not work. Steam has had over 12k game releases in 2022 and over 14k in 2023. This means you have a massive amount of competition for players' attention and if you dont target it correctly then you may not have as much of an audience as you'd expect.
Marketing to the correct audience is important.
The following ven-diagram provided by the presenter is meant to represent one example of the possible sweet spots for a game. The game that best lands here according to the presenter is Hades
Steam/Community tags:
RPG, Action RPG, Action Rouge-Like, Rouge-Like, Story Rich, Atmospheric, Hand Drawn, Isometric
Developer keywords:
Rouge-Like, Action, Rich atmosphere, Depth, Character Driven storytelling
By having the developer refine what type of game it is and be able to put appropriate descriptors it allows them to better know the type of players that can be targeted.
Having the correct audience allows for a higher chance to be so successful a sequel can be announced and released.
Actionable steps:
Proper GDD: It helps better plan out game features, plot, art style, and how you plan on publishing. This means that you will have a better understanding of what makes the game unique or better refine the game if necessary.
Market Research: Being able to see what are the popular games you'd be competing against. What makes them better than others and so on. This allows you to know what you need to do to stand out or what not to do when working on the game.
Tone and Voice: You need to determine what are the best ways to communicate with the audience. Maybe you have a younger audience which means they won't use something like Facebook to communicate and prefer to use TikTok. Or maybe realize a large portion of the audience is from a specific region or country so it might be a good idea to hire someone from there to communicate easier with them. Also having layers will help. Insagram → Youtube → Discord. The deeper they go the more loyal the users are and more invested in the game.
Active marketing:
Where to spend your marketing budget.
Things like targeted ads and influencers.
This will give you a higher conversions of users as they are more likely to be interested in the game/product.
If during research you find a game or community that has a similar overlap to your game then you can try to target them to also get more users to try your game.
Learn over time:
As you do this more often you should try to document what's happening and what was done. This way you can track what actions might correlate with certain changes. This allows you to see what actions might be the most useful ones.
It might even improve your understanding of your audience or discover a new area you didn't originally see. Helps future projects to make better assessments of what the audience might expect or hope for.
The presenter recommended the following links to help with GDD creation and learning about market research.
The speaker emphasized the fact that Blizzard doesn't endorse the resources. They are principally the ones used by the speaker.
GDD:
‘The Craft and Science of Game Design,’ Phil O` Connor
Market Research:
Tone & Voice:
Udemy: Business Branding with personality, Steve Houraghan
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