Free Player Retention Guide Get Now
You have a killer idea for a game and you are super-excited to play the finished product. However, when you run the idea by your publishing company, it is not as enthusiastic. Your publisher thinks that while people like you may be just as excited to play your game as you are to make it, there may not be enough people like you to make the game profitable.
How do you convince the publisher that a market for your game exists? Start by identifying who your game’s target audience is and then tweak your ideas to ensure the finished game appeals to and can capitalize on that audience.
Key Takeaways:
Your target audience is the types of people who are most likely to want to play your game. Most developers define their target audience by common characteristics, such as demographic information, interests, and habits. For example, if your game is a traditional RPG, your target audience may be males aged 30-40 who watch anime and value games with long, complex stories.
It is easy for developers to fall in love with an idea for a game and to develop that game based on their personal interests and preferences. However, if those interests and preferences do not align with a large enough audience, the game is unlikely to be financially successful. Therefore, before you invest any resources into developing a game, it is important to identify who the likely players will be.
The target audience for your game will guide your development decisions and your marketing strategy. It impacts meta-decisions, such as the genre and overall difficulty of your game, and more granular decisions, such as the specific game mechanics that your target audience finds most engaging.
Knowing your audience also helps you decide the best way to invest your marketing resources. For example, if most of your target audience frequently uses TikTok but rarely uses Facebook, you probably want to focus on advertising on the former and avoid potential wasteful spending on Facebook.
The data you gather about your game’s target audience will also inform your decisions about your engagement, retention, and monetization strategies. To identify what will make your game engaging for your audience, it is critical to understand what makes your audience tick.
The more engaging your game is, the easier it will be to retain players. Additionally, the characteristics of your audience will drive which monetization methods you choose based on what is most likely to result in increased revenue and which monetization methods may drive your audience away from your game.
The target audience for your game impacts nearly every aspect of development. Your players’ preferences affect which platforms you release the game on, the genre of your game, the types of visuals you use, your game’s content, how difficult the game will be, the planned session length, and the length of the game. For example, the audience for your classic RPG may prefer old-school or anime-style graphics over the ultra-realistic graphics found in many modern RPGs.
There are many strategies you can employ to identify your target audience. These are a few of the options to start with.
Building a persona involves creating a fictional person who shares the characteristics and interests of your target audience. You can then create scenarios that expose this persona to various marketing strategies and versions of the game and create assumptions about how this person would respond.
A SWOT analysis is a classic market research technique that examines internal and external factors that are likely to help or harm your ability to reach your objectives.
SWOT stands for:
This analysis is most useful during the preliminary stages of your decision-making processes.
Some developers choose to start with the game’s target audience and then develop a monetization strategy based on that target audience. However, many games already have a monetization strategy in place. If that is the case for you, identifying the players most likely to respond to that strategy should inform your decision-making about other aspects of your game.
Competitors’ games that are similar to the game you plan to make are a good source of data you can use to identify the likely market for your game. To utilize this method, start by identifying the three top competitors for your game.
Next, research the audiences for those games and document their demographic information, interests, and habits. Finally, compare the data from the three competitors and make note of the areas that overlap. Those overlapping areas are the characteristics of your likely target audience.
Chances are you already have an idea about where you want to distribute your game. However, if your target audience is not using those channels, your game may struggle to attract players. If this is the case, you must either identify the audience that uses those channels and tailor your game to that audience or consider other distribution channels.
Sonamine’s monetization, user engagement, and user retention services can help you gather the data you need about your game’s target audience and effectively develop strategies that capitalize on the characteristics, interests, and habits of your players. Our packages include advanced analysis, creative services, hands-on testing, campaign setup, reporting, and ongoing tweaks. Contact us today to get started.
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For a limited time until December 2024, Sonamine is offering a 60 day money back guarantee to OneSignal customers. Come experience the ease and simplicity of the First Time Spender Nudge package and watch your conversions soar.
