WII 2. Know the regulatory, ethical and legal requirements applicable to the games, animation and VFX industries.
WII 3. Understand how products in the games, animation and VFX industries are taken to market.
Market Research is a task that is relatable to the target audience, generally speaking it would be a good idea to have this figured out before you even plan for a target audience. Market Research allows you to find out what is currently trending at the moment, what platforms would be suitable for your game, a general idea of player base and player types as well as what kind of genre you could make whilst making your game.
This is important as this in eventual time, will result in what kind of money is made for the studio. Launching a product into a market that you know nothing about is like expecting a blind person to cross a busy road without getting hit. You need to have a strong understanding of what is currently out there and how those products have been perceived by the public. What do they like about it, what don’t they like about it, who’s currently playing it, what demographic should we be looking for, is it suitable for this platform or that platform are all questions that can be answered when market research is conducted.
Market research doesn’t particularly have a timescale within the development of the product however it is at its strongest before the product has started to be developed. research may be conducted during and after development. Market research in the games industry might have been researched during development as players are playing a beta version of the game. It allows you to gather feedback of the game at this stage of development.
There are many ways to research the market after development such as questionnaires and surveys that might get sent out to current players of existing games. The surveys might include questions about the current game to hook the audience in before asking varying questions in regards to other games or post launch content.
failure to do any kind of market research could result in the loss of time and money and as the saying goes, time is money. If you blindly launch a product to market and it fails miserably, you haven’t got time to go back and re-do the whole product into something that matters. In relation to this, EA’s attempt at a live service game, known as Anthem, fell victim to this. Without a doubt, EA done their market research but they didn’t do it extensively and I believe with this game it is evident.
The game was released at a time when Destiny was at its peak and another live service game, The Division 2, just came to fruition. Anthem was supposed to compete with these games however failed because EA or Bioware didn’t understand their target audience, why? because their market research wasn’t strong enough. After the games release, only then did they get true player feedback and the game was ridiculed with bugs and the replay ability was almost non-existent. They shortly followed up this controversy by saying hey, we’re going to fix this with Anthem 2.0, Anthem Next. Only for that project to be scrapped later on the down the line because it was too little, too late. The player base grew tired of waiting and moved on to other products.
In terms of researching genre’s, developers and/or publishers will look at what is currently trending and will then try to make their mark within that space, most recently for larger publishers such as EA, Ubisoft, Activision and Epic, this was the battle royale market. People may argue that Fortnite (Epic Games) was the biggest battle royale and Activision then followed suit with Call of Duty Warzone. EA then got involved with Apex Legends and Ubisoft came out with Hyperspace. They all follow the same business model such as free to play, a battle-pass system that includes currencies and cosmetics that changes within a certain timeframe, also known as seasons.
The reason for this is that currently the battle royale genre is dominating the market with a large player base, the large player base comes from fans of a past franchise such as Titanfall for Apex Legends and Call of Duty Multiplayer for Warzone, but also the attraction of free to play. Free to Play for Battle Royale’s is a business model that works because the audience is massive, with the addition of a battle-pass it allows players to purchase a progression system to grind out so that they don’t get bored of the game and have something to play for. That, and the competition of being better than the rest.
New developers or smaller developers should rely heavily on market research if they are looking to make a profitable product, having a basic understanding trends and player numbers on certain platforms or within certain genre’s will certainly help, especially when it comes to narrowing down or focusing on a target audience. As an example, if a developer wanted to have a global reach, they could research what kind of games are popular on mobile devices at the moment. Almost everyone has a mobile device, but how many people play games on their mobile device.
Also could that be compensated by developing a game for a platform with relatable technology? The perfect example of this is Pokemon Unite, a MOBA featuring Pokemon, previously the characters were an Nintendo-platform exclusive, is now available on Mobile Devices and with similar performance and gameplay mechanics, however adapted for mobile devices. It is also worth noting that relating to the previous point, this game is also FREE TO PLAY and features a BATTLEPASS system however, is not a battle royale.
Furthermore, research can also be conducted based on influencers such as Twitch Streamers and current sales charts. For streamers, a developer may look at how many subscribers or viewers the streamer currently has and what kind of game they are playing, also looking at what numbers are currently peaking on stream platforms as a result. This gives developers a rough idea as to what games people like playing and what games people like watching people play. This is also a sticky situation as an audience sometimes doesn’t tune in to watch the gameplay, but more because they feel they can relate to the streamer or they like their personality or behaviours whilst streaming.
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