There are a range of commercial companies who will carry out this research on behalf of games developers and publishers, for example, Enzyme and VG Market. They use a range of research techniques to support games development projects.
There are a range of techniques that you can use to define audiences:
The quantitative researcher asks a specific, narrow (closed) question and collects numerical data from participants who answer the question. The researcher analyses the data with the help of statistics. The researcher is hoping the numbers will yield an unbiased result that can be generalised to some larger population. Quantitative methods are ideally suited for finding out who, what, when and where.
A good example of this type of research is the Gaming Britain report from IAB, The Internet Advisory Bureau. IAB is the UK trade association for digital advertising, representing most of the UK’s leading brands, media owners and agencies.
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A recent article in the Guardian's Games Blog discusses the increasing importance of the female gamer:
More Women Play Games Than Men
Qualitative Research
More Women Play Games Than Men
Qualitative Research
Qualitative research, on the other hand, asks broad (open) questions and collects opinions as word data from participants. The researcher looks for themes and describes the information in themes and patterns exclusive to that set of participants, which could be applied to the whole population. In contrast to quantitative data, qualitative data answers the 'why?' questions.
This technique tends to be subjective, which means they tell us peoples's opinions. Researchers often conduct face-to-face or 1-to-1 phone interviews. Focus groups are another way of getting feedback, with the participants either in the same room or connected via a video link. The problem with the results is that they are often hard to collate and summarise, but can result in findings that other techniques cannot produce.
For example,
Electronic Arts carried out a form of qualitative research using mothers ho were asked to respond to the then new Dead Space 2 in 2011. This was really a form of innovative marketing, as EA thought that their game would sell even more if mums hated it. Here is the website analysing the campaign.
This example is of a focus group discussing why they are hooked on Candy Crush Saga:
This example is of the R&D department set up by Atari in the late 1970s:
The British Academy Children's Awards in association with Electronic Arts took place on 25th November 2007. The short-listed games were judged by the children who play them.
This focus group is working on TERA: Rising, an action MMORPG.
This very large focus group is working on Counter-Strike 2.
Audience Profiling
This allows the researcher to find out the profile (a snapshot) of the audience before hand so that you can put across your message to the right people in the most effective way to produce the best result. Your target audience is those individuals who would most likely buy or subscribe to your game. Taking the time to carefully profile your target audience will improve the likelihood of success.
It might include details like age, sex, educational qualification, work experience, financial background, field of work, interests, mood, orientation, bias, food habits, religious background, physique, health condition etc.
Audience Profiling is a task all games publishers need to perform when creating a new product to launch onto the market. When defining an audience, factors that must be considered include:
Age, Gender, Race and Sexuality
Education
Occupation
Annual Income
Disposable Income
Current Lifestyle / Aspirational or Desired Lifestyle
Culture
Media Interests
Buying Habits
Loyalty to Brands
Demographics
A common and traditional method of audience profiling is known as demographics. This defines the adult population largely by the work that they do.
The NRS Social Grade breaks the population down into 6 groups, and labels them by using a letter code to describe the income and status of the members of each group.
Psychographics
This is a way of describing an audience by looking at their behaviour and personality traits. Psychographics labels a particular type of person and makes an assessment about their viewing and spending habits. The advertising agency Young and Rubican invented a successful psychographic profile known as their Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation, based on Abraham Maslow's, Hierarchy of Needs theory.
They put the audience into groups with labels that suggest their position in society.
Geodemographics
Geodemographic segmentation is based on two simple principles:
People who live in the same neighbourhood are more likely to have similar characteristics than are two people chosen at random.
Neighbourhoods can be categorized in terms of the characteristics of the population which they contain. Any two neighbourhoods can be placed in the same category, i.e. they contain similar types of people, even though they are widely separated.
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