Three ways to do market research for your video game
My biggest frustration with indie game developers is that they do very few market research. I get it. Video games are art. Yet, people will see your promotional stuff and decide if they’re interested or not in buying your game.
Market research is the process of looking at the game market with numbers, facts and opinions. It’s about finding the equation between what people want and what you want to do. It will provide you insights about what people like to play nowadays, what you can produce and why people would buy your game.
Tons of people have done market research and failed tremendously. It’s ok. This step will give you ideas about what you can expect while making your game. You’ll discover core challenges you’ll encounter in production and marketing.
Let’s say you want to make a platformer. You deeply love pixel art, Super Meat Boy and the old school classics. So you hurry up and take a look at Owlboy’s sales on Steamspy.
“WOW! 76k people have bought it! So I can make the game I’m passionate about AND make a living with it?! Let’s spend all my savings on this!”
Take a few days to think about it. Start being a professional and do some market research. Yes, Owlboy sold a lot of copies, but it took 10 years to make. 76k for, let’s say 5 years of production, might not be this interesting. Also, very few people have the graphic skills of people from Owlboy.
Let’s take a look at some techniques to do market research.
Compile stats with Steamspy and Steam
I did this for my blog post about the HTC Vive market.
The idea is simple. Take games on Steam that look like your game. It can be the same theme, genre, target market.
Write down the numbers of reviews and the review ratio.
Then, you go check out their page on SteamSpy and note their sales, their price.
Put everything in an excel and do some basic math formulas.
- Gross estimate : Price * Owners
- Revenue Estimate : Price * Owners
- Average revenue estimate
- Average number of reviews
- Average number of owners
You’ll never get the real revenue but that’ll be a start. You’ll also be able to know how much games of your genre there is on Steam.
Try to take big hits but also games who failed to sell. For roughly accurate data, try to get 100 games in the spreadsheet. Feel free to explore my VR market spreadsheet for reference.
Stats are important, because they give you other points of views. As a passionate game developer, you grow in a bubble. You want to make your dream game.
But I’m sorry, platformers are in a really bad place right now. There are so much platformers on the market that the median of owners has dropped tremendously.
Check for Kickstarter projects
Kickstarter is a great market research platform. When you launch a Kickstarter, your community pushes an effort and takes new players in the wave.
The amount of new players is what you really need to push your Kickstarter forward. Those campaigns are a mix of existing community, opportunities and social media campaigns.
Go on Kickstarter’s video games category and check out the current projects. Try to take a look at which market they’re targeting and how they’re speaking to those markets. What is the core focus of their trailers? What are the art styles? There is no truth about why a Kickstarter fails. But maybe you’ll see a game that looks exactly like yours, and will start to ask yourself some questions.
Take a look at Narita boy for instance. It’s a pixel art cinematic platformer that looks like Another World or Heart of Darkness. People who played those games as kids are now in their 30’s with jobs and nostalgia.
When there’s a void, there might be something to do
Like any industry, video game market has trends. There were trends about Tower Defense games, Idle games, 2048 style games, Flappy Bird copies. But that’s when everyone is doing the same thing that customers want something that feels new, fresh, unique.
Lately, Shiro Games published Northgard, a mix between Age of Mythology and Settlers. The game is original, finely tuned, beautiful. But it’s success heavily relies in the death of RTS games. In the 2000’s, there was a shit tons of RTS. Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Age of Empires…
There are still many strategy game. But some people, like me, still feel their is a place for slow paced RTS. Shiro games decided to use the Viking lore and try new mechanics. They just didn’t make a classic RTS, they did something new, on a theme many people love.
Maybe you have a secret card to play. It can be a mix of two genre and themes that could revive a trend? Look at what type of games people don’t do today, and ask yourself why.
I hope this blog post will help you make better games that sell more. I don’t want to crush your dream game project. I just want you to know what you’re getting into before spending all your money and energy in it. This market research won’t tell you the truth. It will just give you another point of view than yours.
I’m making a game called Neurodeck! Check out the steampage!
