Krank

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Target Group Analysis Methods

Created on 13th April 2022

Know Your Market: Making Indie Games That Sell

  • Do people actually want to buy this game?
  • Steam
    • Filter game reviews by "Steam Purchasers" and "Other"
    • Steam Spy only tells you the "owners" of a game -- but a "owner" is not necessarily a buyer.
    • Many stats on Steam Spy get inflated by bundles or gifted games.
    • Simple Heuristic: Boxleiter Method
      • Player Count = Review Count * 50 (a rough estimate)
    • Data sources
      • store.steampowered.com
      • steamspy.com
      • isthereanydeal.com
      • steamcharts.com
      • steamdb.info
    • "Should you make a puzzle plattformer in 2018?"
      • no
    • Analyze, how much money each genre roughly makes on steam
      • Typical indie genres like "Puzzle Plattformer", "Rogue-like" and "Metroidvania" make very little money.
      • Median Revenue for "City Builder" and "FPS".
      • High revenue for "Action RPG"
    • Visuals
      • Very important for potential buyers
      • Visual Distinctiveness of the game is very important
      • Examples for games with a unique style:
        • Super Hot (clean, low poly, cool bullet traces)
        • Cuphead (30s cartoon)
        • Darkest Dungeon (dark, grunge, illustrative)
    • ESRB
      • As the age rating goes up, so does the revenue.
      • The correlation factor of rho = 0.45
      • It seems that its better to appeal to adult players, because they can actually make purchases on steam
      • "Family Friendly" is actually 23x worse than "Crime" as tag on Steam.
      • That means Steam as platform is generally really bad for family friendly games.
    • Playtime
      • Longer playtime is very important on steam
      • Maybe?? Steam gives an algorithm bonus on the storefront
      • But more important, when having Steam open and messages shows up "XYZ is playing Spelunky", it provides an incentive: "huh maybe I should also play Spelunky".
    • Streaming
      • When a Streamer plays a game, viewers can go like "huh maybe I also want to play that"
      • Short, narrative games or puzzle games are hurt by streaming, because they have consumable content.
    • Community
      • Can the community get involved?
      • Level editors
      • Mod support
      • Leaderboards
      • Estimated Median Revenue for categories:
        • 4 Player Local -- almost nothing
        • Level Editor -- almost nothing
        • Online Co-Op -- Mittelviel
        • Team-Based -- Mittelviel
        • Moddable -- Sehr viel
    • Takeaways
      • These are broad trends to consider
      • Keep the rends for success in mind
      • Of course you can also make it, if you find a particular niche and supply it (but the niche has to be big enough to support your game)
      • Are you making something that people want?
      • Is it a fit for the marketplace?
    • Questions to ask
      • Are there recent examples of successful games in your genre?
      • Have you looked at unsuccessful games in your genre?
    • More to learn
      • Clark Tank on YouTube (Ryan Clark, creator of "Crypt of the Necro Dancer")
      • StreamProphet.com (Lars Decet?)
      • Co-Optional Podcast (they have a segment where they react to upcoming releases on steam and that can be helpful)
    • Feedback & Questions
      • Both from live audience at the time of the talk and the YouTube comments.
      • The correlations should be taken with a grain of salt. Correlation =/= Causation
      • The talk does not address market saturation in the correlations. E.g. "Puzzle Platformer" is not very popular, because there simply are so many indie puzzle platformers.
      • To get a feeling how well a newly released game on steam does, check weekly for releases and the revenue they generated on steamspy.