Your target audience doesn’t exist

Why you shouldn’t talk about “MOBA audience”, “core gamers”, “female gamers” and instead think smaller.

Sergiy Galyonkin
Sergiy Galyonkin’s blog
6 min readAug 20, 2015

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One of the common misconceptions caused by publicly available research is the perceived popularity of certain game genres.

People unfamiliar with how games work, but familiar with marketing research in other industries assume that MOBA is like “cola-flavored soft drink” and MMORPG is “ions-enriched sports drink”.

When marketing research is talking about MOBA popularity and MMORPG decline they automatically assume it should work like in other industries — people switching from Gatorade to Coca-Cola, while there is plenty of space for smaller imitators and local brands.

Games aren’t products

But games, especially big ones, aren’t consumer products. I’d go as far as to say that each multiplayer game is a cultural self-reinforcing phenomenon, relying on its perceived popularity more than on its market share. It’s not enough to just offer a superior product with better marketing and brand recognition to convince people to switch from League of Legends to, say, Infinite Crisis. Yes, the latter has DC characters, TV series, comic books and even some movies. But the former was here first and didn’t just create the market — it is the market.

So we can’t really talk about genre’s popularity when one game has 50% of the audience and another one has 30%. Unlike in consumer goods market it’s not sustainable to hope for 1% of a huge market. Production costs aren’t scaling down when you have a smaller game, where in, say, soft drinks, you would just order less bottles, syrup and water.

Audiences are vastly different

I hear people talking about “female gamers” or “core gamers” a lot, but seldom do they realize that these categories don’t technically exist, at least not in any practical way.

The term “female gamers” includes both a woman in her fifties playing Candy Crush Saga on her phone and a college girl enjoying Call of Duty on her Xbox. They’re so far apart from each other, that it makes no sense to try and fit them into the same vaguely defined category. There are many female gamers, they’re different and there are probably dozens of categories you could divide them in.

The same goes for “core gamers”. Both Dota 2 and Torchlight 2 gamers spend a lot of time playing their favorite games. But while Dota 2 players only play Dota 2, Torchlight 2 audience gerenally tries a lot of games — ten times more on average.

Now, they both might have similar demographic parameters (like “female gamers” mentioned before) — they’re mostly male, many in their late twenties, but they’re so different in their gaming and purchasing habits it makes no sense trying to fit them into one category. “Core gamer” is a nice term to flaunt around when talking about your personal habits, but it’s not a viable term for defining your audience. It’s too broad and too vague.

The rise of INSERT_TERM_HERE

I get it. It makes for a good headline “The rise of MOBA”. “The fall of core gamer”. “The rise of China”. And it’s usually an interesting read, filled with data. Data that’s both well-described and convincing, because if MOBA are on the rise and core gamers are no longer the majority, it makes sense to apply this knowledge somehow, right?

And of course you should, but don’t target any new market or new audience just because you’ve suddenly realized it exists. Dota 2 audience exists, there are around 55 million gamers that have tried it and 9.5 million gamers have played it in the last two weeks.

Does it mean they’re enjoying MOBA? Yes.

Does it mean they will even take a peek at yours? Nope, they’re too busy.

And same goes for the lucrative Chinese mobile market, by the way.

World of Warcraft market

A good example here would be the success of World of Warcraft that, as analysts explained to us ten years ago, has “vastly expanded MMORPG market beyond all expectations”.

Except it didn’t. It created a new market, World of Warcraft market, gathered new audience from other games in different genres, attracted quite a few people that haven’t played before, but haven’t expanded MMORPG market much. There were no big successful MMORPGs after World of Warcraft not because WoW took all the audience, but because there were never too many people in “MMORPG but not World of Warcraft” market to begin with.

I think when you start thinking in terms of audiences for individual games instead of broad vague “MMORPG crowd”, “MOBA crowd” you’ll start to realize that sometimes a huge success of one big title doesn’t mean much for everyone else. It doesn’t expand existing market or destroy it, it creates a new one.

What about “usual” games?

And here is the interesting thing — there is a market and audience for smaller games, otherwise Steam wouldn’t exist. Many people are trying many new games. They don’t spend hundreds of hours in one title, they’re, you know, your average gamers, you used to hear about a lot.

But there is a catch:

There aren’t many of them.

Classic “core gamers” — the ones that play most major hits or jump from indie game to indie game — are relatively rare when compared to overall gaming audience.

In fact, 1% of Steam gamers own 33% of all copies of games on Steam. 20% of Steam gamers own 88% of games. That’s even more than Pareto principle suggests.

So, to be a member of the “1% group” of Steam gamers you have to own 107 games or more. That’s not much considering how Steam is selling games at discount prices and how easy it is to obtain games in bundles.

We’re talking about 1.3M PC gamers that could fall into definition of “core gamer that buys several games per year”. And that’s including discounted games as well.

Of course we could extend it to, I don’t know, “softcore gamers” — the 20% that own 88% games. To be included you’d have to own 4 (FOUR) games or more on Steam — not exactly a huge number, right?

Let me repeat it once more, because it’s really important.

Various studies suggest that there are 700–800 million of PC gamers. It’s probably true, but it doesn’t mean much for your game. Because if you’re developing a downloadable game for Steam you’re not even fighting for 135M of its active users,

you’re fighting for the attention of 1.3 million gamers
that are actually buying lots of games.

The 1% group.

Consoles

I’m not including console audience here because I don’t have enough data to make any claims. I’d guess that console crowd has more gamers that buy several games per year instead of sticking to one hit title, but that’s just it — a guess.

TL;DR

  1. Gamers are different. Don’t overgeneralize.
  2. Just because a gamer plays one game doesn’t mean he’ll try other games in this genre or on this platform.
  3. The core audience of PC games market that supports developers with smaller titles is rather tiny.

Do you want to know more?

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