Categorizing Players and Buyers (again)

September 1, 2006 on 8:38 pm | In General Gaming, Playstyles, Reporting, Industry

In a new discussion at Grimwell Online, Tide posted a short overview of research he came across, from a company breaking down player types into a few new market targets.

This research is compelling not only because it's public but because it corrolates pretty closely to a bunch of other research as well.

Is this useful for game design? Absolutely. Don't think about it as "how do I design a better game" in general. Some continue to say "just make it fun". You can't say just that though. You need to extend it to "just make it fun for them".

And who is "them"?

Your target purchaser, player and account holder. Here's what Parks Associates identifies as them:

1. Power gamers represent 11 percent of the gamer market but account for 30 cents of every dollar spent on retail and online games.
2. Social gamers enjoy gaming as a way to interact with friends.
3. Leisure gamers spend 58 hours per month playing games but mainly on casual titles. Nevertheless they prefer challenging titles and show high interest in new gaming services.
4. Dormant gamers love gaming but spend little time because of family, work, or school. They like to play with friends and family and prefer complex and challenging games.
5. Incidental gamers lack motivation and play games mainly out of boredom. However, they spend more than 20 hours a month playing online games.
6. Occasional gamers play puzzle, word, and board games almost exclusively.

Not a bad breakdown in my opinion. But I see five of the categories cited as subsets of two higher level ones:

• Diversional gamer- Lots ofcasual games, may purchase some of them, sees these as fun things to do between other life activities or after the day is done.
• Immersive gamer- MMO gamers, clan-members for FPSes, dedicated ladder-tournament RTS, that sort of thing. They don't just get into the individual game experience for a temporary thrill. They want a deeper relationship with that and other experiences like it. It's more hobbiest than gamer because they do adjust their lives to maximize their ability to partake.

The reason I say "five of the above" and not all six is because I don't agree with the concept of Social gamers being separate from everyone else. "Social" can be part of all five, even incidental gamers. To me, it feels like this category emerged separate because of how the questions were framed.

This information can be (and is) used to help focus a publisher on identifying the needs of their playerbase.

Closer to home, it can provide insight into why, for the last six months, two or three of the top six games at the ultra-casual Miniclips.com were MMORPGs (Club Penguin, Runescape and, until recently, Puzzle Pirates). The insight there is that MMORPG is not defined as "either WoW or not WoW but with the same immersive properties".

In other words, there exists MMORPGs for folks not playing WoW. Those games just don't get talked about much because they don't make it to MMOGcharts. That's the sort of huge blind spot that could shortly result in the punditry being as surprised as they were when WoW smashed all conventional definitions of success and growth almost two years ago.

The next big MMORPG is not coming from SOE nor Blizzard. It's already here just waiting for the industry to take awares. Don't think Burning Crusade. Think Neopets, or Mapplestory. The times are a changin' because the companies coming onto the scene have not been talking to the folks who came from the house that Brad or Richard or Raph built.

And that's not a slight on them at all. It's more a testament to how turnkey (relatively speaking) creating games for this genre has become over the last few years. And, it's tradition for the MMORPG genre itself to have change come from the outside. After all, there's no clear "start" for the genre, which can be traced back through such things as Ultima, Doom, MUDs and even Space Wars.

New definitions are simply tradition.

Does this sort of categorization matter though? Depends on who you are.

• If you're looking to get into the industry through a non-traditional means, then maybe it matters.
• If you're here already, chances are you've read similar research and maybe even conducted some of it.
• If you're just looking for a good time though, well heck, what does it matter how many accounts a game has?

A Tale in the Desert, Eve Online, Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft, they're out there. They're fun for the thousands, hundreds of thousand or millions of people in them. In the moment of an experience, how many people playing is academic.

And in that moment is a target audience as well.