2k8 gaming essential facts

[OssK]

Maybe some of you might want to have a look at that if you haven't already.

If it has nothing to do with nothing and does not interest anybody I guess I'll just go away and die :°)

But I won't go to hell.

I did not know at all that Halo 3 sold so well...

ESA_EF_2008.pdf

[soupface]

Lots of questions to be asked (How, when, and where was data collected? What counts as a game? How does this compare to TV, sports, boardgames, etc.?) about these facts.

I thought that it was interesting that they claim "women age 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33%) than boys age 17 or younger (18%)."

[OssK]

I think it was mentioned in the mail it came in that it was an ipsos of somehow over a thousand famillies it should be somewhere in the document

The thing is, woman lifetime being an average 75yo women that are 18yo and older is such a huge part of the population that average player's age being 30 I guess that makes sense. More sense than my sentence I guess....

[thorn]

They don't specify how they define 'gamer'. They're probably comparing a 40 year old woman playing Peggle once a week to a 15 year old who only leaves WoW to eat and wank.

[SignorSuperdouche]

The data included in 2008 Essential Facts was gathered in an annual study conducted by Ipsos-MediaCT for the ESA. The study is the most in-depth and targeted survey of its kind, gathering data from over 1,200 nationally representative households that have been identified as owning either or both a video game console or a personal computer used to run entertainment software.

1,200 sounds reasonable as a sample size and the data was gathered by an independent source so, although it would be nice to know more about how the the households were identified, the stats are probably kosher. Who is the intended audience for this btw?

They don't specify how they define 'gamer'. They're probably comparing a 40 year old woman playing Peggle once a week to a 15 year old who only leaves WoW to eat and wank.

Is the distinction important?

[OssK]

Audience is the european gaming industry particularly the game designer it seems, the AFJV (french association of video games (jeux vidéo)) sent it to me namely and a few of my colleagues.

Gamer is people who play video games, which means people who are equipped to play, as in "possible audience for a video game" be it casual or hardcore, or as I prefer it ludophiles and occasional players.

Now if you have a idea of how to make a game that both love, please go ahead I'm sure it could get you a 2 million dollar budget if you can reconcile them •^.^•

[thorn]

Is the distinction important?

Considering that they were comparing and contrasting the different demographics, yes. Sure, women over 18 were a higher percentage than boys under 18, but if you compare the number of hours each group play, you might find that teenage boys in total play more than women do in total. (If I'm not being clear: I mean that if you totalled up the hours that everyone played games, then the boys would probably be more than 18% of that total and the girls would probably be less than 33%).

Ultimately it depends on what you want to take out of this document. My vibe was that the authors wrote it to make people go "Gee, that's interesting" rather than "These are some important statistics that we can use to understand gaming demographics".

[SignorSuperdouche]

I suppose it depends on the business model. If you run an MMO where your comes from subscription fees then yes, you want to aim for customers who will put in lots of time. If, however, your income is purely from the sale of the disk/download then it doesn't matter how long the customer does/doesn't play the game.

The document doesn't give much information as to which games are being bought by whom and at what price point. I have to agree with your assessment that these aren't really useful to anyone beyond, say, a conversation down the pub.

[ThunderPeel2001]

They don't specify how they define 'gamer'. They're probably comparing a 40 year old woman playing Peggle once a week to a 15 year old who only leaves WoW to eat and wank.

Uhhh, unless I'm missing something, the whole thing is about Computer and Video Games (as referenced many times in the document itself and by the fact that it was compiled by the Entertainment Software Association).

I LOVE the fact that my generation, the initial gaming generation, now mark the average age of a gamer! There was a time about 10 years ago when gaming seemed to be for a "younger" audience because no-one older than my generation was gaming -- like "it's time to stop that now, only kids play games!".

But no! They were wrong. As I said at the time, we are the first generation to grow up with computer games, pushing the boundary and taking games with us. That's the reason why there wasn't older people playing them - and now games have actually crossed over into the older demographic (thanks, no doubt in some way to Nintendo) and we've won. Yay!

70-year-old gamers FTW!

(I wonder, incidentally, what type of games we're going to be playing when we're 70? I started playing games that used ASCII characters for graphics... Now I play GTA for too long, go outside, think about ramming other cars and wonder why no-one else is doing it. By my calculations, in 2040 we'll be in The Matrix )

Edited March 5, 2009 by ThunderPeel2001

[OssK]

you want to aim for customers who will put in lots of time

Yep, that's not what BLizzard did and look how it turned out... Them and their 12 million players... In fact if you make an MMO you just need to be sure to translate it in german.

Why? Because kids in germany finish school at 1pm most of the time and have the whole afternoon free say... For sports. And the parents come back from work around 7pm so... Guees what, you can have kids at home for a whole 6hours a day and without any parents telling them to stop... Gaming addiction is really becoming a problem in germany, last stats I had 10% on 13 or younger spend more than 4h a day for more than 3 days a week.

TO go back to the "useless documents" that just depends but we kind of learned to fear these documents nowdays: "Hey look!" says your boss "40% of people play action game, stop working on your strategy 4% and get on with the market"

"oh and by the way, the hero'll have to be the chosen one."

[SignorSuperdouche]

If there's one thing we can say for sure about games in the future it's that they'll have a ton of sweet guns.

On reflection I don't know it's fair to say the data is useless. Whilst it doesn't help developers much right now, it does provide a starting point for further investigation. Since we now know, for example, that lots of adult women play games we can look into what sort of games they play in more depth. Does that make sense?

[OssK]

. Does that make sense?

Yes, surely.... as long as you don't get stuck in today's standards

[ThunderPeel2001]

If there's one thing we can say for sure about games in the future it's that they'll have a ton of sweet guns.

On reflection I don't know it's fair to say the data is useless. Whilst it doesn't help developers much right now, it does provide a starting point for further investigation. Since we now know, for example, that lots of adult women play games we can look into what sort of games they play in more depth. Does that make sense?

It shows a huge amount if you're trying to figure out who to aim your game at. I never would have thought, for example, that family games had become such a huge market. I really had no idea. It's pretty cool!

[OssK]

Yes it is, no it's not.

I gave the example of Wow, you could give the wii or a thousand others but point is: you give people something they never played with and is sweet, they'll go along with it. Don't need tp follow the trend or the market, just do things, fuck what's working, progress is all about that. Which is something most people don't get.

"just do the same as them or them, innovation not cost effective enough." Fuck you !

[SignorSuperdouche]

It shows a huge amount if you're trying to figure out who to aim your game at. I never would have thought, for example, that family games had become such a huge market. I really had no idea. It's pretty cool!

Yeah I get that it shows you what the audiences are, but it doesn't tell you what they want. If I made a game and tried to aim at a demographic that's not me I'd probably be end up tailoring the game for some imaginary stereotype that doesn't exist in the real world (See Gamer Grub for an example of this). I'm not in marketing, but if I wanted to sell a game to, say, a family audience, I'd want to look at what that audience is already buying. This document doesn't go into any detail on that.

[OssK]

I'm not in marketing, but if I wanted to sell a game to, say, a family audience, I'd want to look at what that audience is already buying. This document doesn't go into any detail on that.

My interpretation would be that thankfuly, this is not something we know.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Yeah I get that it shows you what the audiences are, but it doesn't tell you what they want. If I made a game and tried to aim at a demographic that's not me I'd probably be end up tailoring the game for some imaginary stereotype that doesn't exist in the real world (See Gamer Grub for an example of this). I'm not in marketing, but if I wanted to sell a game to, say, a family audience, I'd want to look at what that audience is already buying. This document doesn't go into any detail on that.

True, but it's only an overview. You'd do a hell of a lot more research before trying to find funding/spending a shitload of money on developing something.