Leland M @Collins, New York: Comments and reviews.

This post contains edited, non-confidential feedback given by Leland Maschmeyer for the answers received by him on GapJumpers.

Question:

Imagine you’ve been hired by EA to help them discover new types of games to develop. What innovative and creative ways would you determine new game development territories attractive to 18-30 year old males?

Feedback:

So you’ve done a good job outlining the “positive” approach – i.e. finding what is already happening in gaming and do it too or do it with a slight tweak. This refers to your strategic approach of: “Some companies in this space may be willing to share aggregate data with EA – such as how many people spend time on particular tasks in Farmville, or how many times people return to different types of raids in World of Warcraft?”
You then go into talking about finding narratives and characters. While this seems like a good approach, it’s more of a decision for the game designers. At this point in the client relationship, we are trying to define a new gaming space and own it. We are looking for the next game-changing idea in video gaming. What we’re not interested in is the next biggest narrative.

The approach you should think about outlining is how to do find the hidden opportunity that no one is paying attention to or is nascent. Where is no one looking? Where is no one fighting for dominance? What do gamers want that they don’t know how to ask for? What do gamers want to do that that no one is giving them a chance to do? That’s the question that needs to be answered. I would love to see an analysis of types of games on the market. Genre types. Sales distributions. An examination of the indie-game market. A analysis and trends of gaming on consoles v mobile phones v tablets. Where is consumer spend moving? If there is more frequency and and increased spend in mobile, then that would be an important point to know. That will give a big hint as to where they want to be playing games. Also, which market of gamers is a growth market? Some are saturated. Others aren’t. Identifying that target audience will be critical to identifying and designing new games.

In short, helping EA discover new games to develop means helping them finding the opportunity (and the market needs) that no one is paying attention to.

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