Why you should use Genre Maps before launching a new game

And how they can help identify market opportunities and inform the design of your game

One of the most pertinent questions asked by developers when creating a new game is: how do I ensure it’s going to appeal to the audience I’m targeting? Answering this with 100% certainty is near impossible, but a surefire method to reduce uncertainty and help you make informed decisions is using Game Maps (AKA Genre Maps), which show how different game studios have specialized within the genre according to the gamer motivations they’re leveraging. As we shall see, numerous valuable insights can consequently be gleaned from this information.

In this article, we’ll explain how Game Maps can be important tools for directing a new game’s design and narrative, looking at specific examples across three genres: Shooter, Strategy, and Open World.

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Shooting for the stars

For the Shooter genre, we wanted to find out how to best differentiate the most popular games and the gamers playing them. This research provides insights into the key features other studios in that space are prioritizing (based on the motivations they’re leveraging), and where potential opportunities lie.

Most modern Shooter games combine team-work and competition in different proportions, so we decided to plot out the games on a map of Competition and Community (teams, working together, chatting). There are 2 striking outliers on this map. First is Counter-Strike which sits on its own among the popular Shooter titles in terms of how strongly it appeals to gamers’ desire for Competition, suggesting there is room for other highly competitive titles in this unsaturated space. If you’re a developer looking to emphasize competitive gameplay in your game, look at Counter-Strike’s key game features and seek to emulate them.

Second, there is only one game on the right half of the map with a very high emphasis on Community — Squad. This suggests Squad has found a niche in the market — a Shooter game with a strong focus on community features — which represents an opportunity for other developers to take a piece of the pie.

What does ‘community’ here mean? We’ve defined players who are motivated by community as driven by shared experiences with others: they tend to be more collaborative and dependent on others within gameplay. In Squad, players operate in, well, squads, with the core gameplay focusing on the combined effort of the group. Think about implementing similar mechanics in your Shooter game to target this niche audience.

Mapping the Strategy genre

Our mapping of the Strategy genre revealed a pertinent finding: gamer motivations can work against each other. Often, developers looking at our model assume that if they add as many motivations as possible, they can maximize their game’s appeal. However, gaming motivations aren’t additive because sometimes, combining multiple in one game creates a cognitive threshold of what humans find fun. The trade-off between Excitement and Strategy as motivations is one good example of this.

On the bottom axis of the Strategy genre game map is Strategy (measured by analytical complexity) and on the vertical axis is Excitement (measured by speed or tempo). As you can see, adding high excitement and high strategy motivations in the same strategy game doesn’t work because there is a point when making complex decisions under time pressure takes the fun out of the game, and exceeds the cognitive threshold of the gamer.

This is an example of the psychological Flow Channel theory, which posits that Flow is the state of mind that keeps us focused on an activity, and is the sweet spot between Boredom and Anxiety. The chart suggests that in games, maintaining Flow requires a trade-off between high excitement and high strategy — an important point to keep in mind when designing your strategy game.

Taking this map one step further, we were able to uncover the relationship of these two motivations with age. For developers targeting a specific age demographic for a new Strategy game, this provides interesting insights.

One overall trend in the chart below is that the lighter dots — AKA younger gamers — tend to be in the upper portion of the map, and the dots tend to darken as you move downwards. In our data, fast-paced competitive games like Counter-Strike, League of Legends, and DotA have the youngest audiences. With the cognitive threshold between Excitement and Strategy in mind, if you’re a developer targeting gamers in their early twenties, focus on creating high thrill gameplay with less of an emphasis on Strategy-based play, like making complex decisions.

On the other hand, turn-based or pause-able games like SimCity, Transport Tycoon, and Civilization have the oldest audiences. As the map below indicates, if you’re making a game in this niche you should prioritize gameplay that emphasizes low-thrill, relatively complex and strategic decision making.

On another age-related note, it’s equally important to bear in mind the decline of the appeal of Competition with age: from our data, competition falls from being the number one primary motivation for gamers aged 13–25, to the ninth most common among 36+ gamers. So, don’t devote much time or attention on developing leaderboards and duals in your pause-able, turn-based Strategy game. We’ve written in greater detail about the impact of age on gamer motivations on LevelUp.

The Open World genre

Our journey to finding the best visual representation of the Open World genre was a case of trial and error. The winning approach was using factor analysis to identify the primary motivation axes, allowing us to essentially “flatten” a large number of motivations into the most concise 2D map possible.

Let’s unpack the data above before exploring the different ways this Genre Map can provide valuable insights for developers looking to enter the Open World market.

Starting with the x-axis, the factor analysis found that, among Open World games, Story is strongly negatively correlated with Power (leveling up, getting powerful gear), Challenge (practice, high difficulty), and Competition (matches, high ranking). In fact, this relationship is so strong that it can be considered its own spectrum.

On the left of the spectrum are the games that emphasize power accumulation and skill-based mastery over elaborate narratives, while on the right are the games that emphasize interesting stories and characters at the expense of power accumulation and challenging missions.

Now, let’s turn to the y-axis. The factor analysis found that Excitement (fast-paced action, thrills) and Destruction (guns, mayhem) were strongly negatively correlated with Design (expression, customization), Fantasy (being someone else, somewhere else), and Discovery (explore, tinker, experiment). Thus, games like GTA and Far Cry on the lower end of the axis emphasize fast-paced mayhem, rather than customization and exploration, while games at the upper end of the axis, such as The Elder Scrolls, emphasize discovery and immersion, rather than guns and thrills.

This analysis provided insight into how these games vary across 9 motivations simultaneously, which in turn led us to identify four interesting quadrants in this map.

This all sounds interesting, but how can I apply this information in reality?

You can take the information provided here to inform your game’s design, identify market opportunities, and evaluate competition. Let’s take a hypothetical example: you’re creating a new Open World genre game and want to find a market niche that has the least saturation. The map shows that the Deep Story quadrant is least crowded, with just Mass Effect and Dragon Age occupying this space (bear in mind the data above covers only the most popular games, based on data collected from our survey). So, you decide to build a game that emphasizes deep storylines, and can research these two game franchises for inspiration in terms of key design features, concepts, and number of users to set KPI benchmarks.

You can also glean from the map that the best motivations to leverage in combination with Deep Story are Design, Fantasy and Discovery. In terms of gameplay, this means emphasizing elaborate narratives, character customization, open exploration, and a rich alternate world, rather than motivations like Destruction and Competition. Finally, you can evaluate the viability of executing on this based on your studio’s expertise.

Summing up

While this article has focused on console and PC games, the same concepts can be applied to mobile games to guide game design and help identify and evaluate market opportunities for new products. Doing this can complement other methods, like testing marketability by measuring CPIs of soft launches, to reduce uncertainty about your product and give you a more holistic understanding of the genre you’re entering.