I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for
accountability on actually releasing a game. To that end, I'm
going to go through the development process to release a game. Here is
the transcript from the seventeenth episode on starting market research for your game:
Hello and welcome to The Adventure Mechanics, this is another side quest. I'm Chandler. Today I wanted to talk about doing market research for your game. I know it's not the sexiest thing, but it will mean the difference between your game being moderately successful and an utter failure. After all, there are thousands of games being made right now and I'm willing to bet that you don't know about the vast majority of them. Let's talk about doing your research before diving into that next game design, so you don't end up disappointed when it comes to release.
So, how do you do market research? It starts with knowing what your game is. Are you making a puzzle-based metroidvania? Then you should look at both puzzle games and metroidvanias. Is your game harder to define the genre for? Then you'll want to spend time nailing down what, exactly, genre your game falls under. You want to make sure that you are casting your net to be as broad as possible at this point to cover the most potential audience that you can. Why do it this way? Because it gives you most optimistic picture as you go about defining your audience. And that's important because if your game is requiring a certain number of people, and your market research says that your audience is smaller than that, it's a pretty good indicator that you shouldn't be building your game. At least not in the way that you have it currently.
That's not to say that you should define your game so broadly that you're not going to get useful information out of research for it. If your game falls into the genre of survival crafting, for instance, try to narrow it down a little bit further. Yes, there are a lot of games that fit that genre, but you're not going to get a whole lot of useful information out of your research if your delta is so large that it can be anywhere from zero to infinity in terms of audience. In the instance of survival crafting, think about what theme you have for it. Is this an environmentalist survival crafting game? Then include the environmentalist tag in your search. Is it zombie themed? Put that zombie tag in your game search. The idea is to get as many tags that can apply to your game as possible and still properly define it. Once you have that, then we can move on to the next step.
The next step being looking at other games with the same tags and seeing how they perform. You can use resources like steam spy or steam charts if you're planning on making a PC game and releasing it on steam. Note the top selling games from your search results and note their sales numbers. This is going to be your market ceiling. Also, if you can, take a look at the average price of the game and use that to estimate about how much that game has made. It's not going to be a perfect number, but that will give you at least a general idea of what a breakout game can make when it's similarly tagged. This is how much you would potentially, and I stress potentially, make if your game happens to repeat that same lightning in a bottle.
Don't just look at the top performing games, however. Likely your game is not going to be the breakout hit that you're hoping it will be. It would be nice if it was, but statistically speaking it's not going to live up to your expectations. Look down at the mid and a few of the bottom tier games that match all of your tags, or most of your tags. Do the same calculations with these games, too. This will give you the medium and low range for what a game in your genre could potentially make. Obviously, the floor for any game sales could potentially be zero, but hopefully you're putting enough effort into it to at least make a few sales.
These games are also useful for looking at for other reasons. They will be more informative of your likely audience. People who buy these games are looking for your game, specifically. This is where you'll find feedback on what your audience enjoys about the genre or similarly tagged games and what they don't like about them. You can use these pieces of information to inform your game design. Did you plan on copying something that one of these games already implemented? If yes, what did the audience say about it? Was it positive, negative, neutral? Use that information to guide your decision making. Remember, all of this is to reach your goal of making a successful game, however you define successful.
Let's use Cartogratour as an example here. The most successful game as a reference point I can use would be stardew valley. That game has a huge audience and countless fans. It's also a farming simulator, not a cartography game. That means it's not going to be the best reference point for what I'm making. What other games come to mind? Well, taking a look at the steam charts for casual sim games isn't really going to help me. I could put pixel art and map in as tags, and that might actually help narrow down other games that match it. I kind of already know a moderately successful game that matches Cartogratour better, though. It's a game called Carto. Carto is a much better reference point, since it also focuses on cartography as one of the main mechanics and will likely have more audience in common with mine.
Let's take a quick look at the steam spy estimates for Carto. The list price for it is $20. The range of people who own it on steam is between 200,000 and 500,000. That's a lot. And a wide range as well. This is probably going to be my top performing reference point. To get a rough estimate of how much they made from selling this game on steam will half the price of the list price, because nobody buys a game full price, and multiply that by the lowest bound and highest bound. That gets us between $2,000,000 and $5,000,000 in sales. That seems like a pretty high upper bound, honestly. Far more than I would expect, or dream of, Cartogratour to make. Keep in mind that number is not the end profit they made off the game, but rather the raw funds they will get. Steam has a thirty percent fee for the average game, which means that two to five million figure is cut down to 1.4 to 3.5 million, to say nothing of game returns and other issues. It's not strictly relevant, but I wanted to mention it nonetheless.
Now that we have the upper bound of our research, let's narrow down the tags that we can use to find other game options that would match Cartogratour. I'm going to choose five that I think will attract the most audience to my game: Exploration, Casual, Indie, Relaxing and Adventure. This covers the vast majority of the features that I would use to describe my game. When I searched Steam in preparation for this talk, these tags narrowed the results from the absolute firehose on Steam down to 47 games. That's a lot more manageable. There are a number of irrelevant games in the results (I'm looking at you, Euro Truck Simulator), so I can't really use those. So, to narrow it down further, I'm going to eliminate games released in the last month, along with games that have over a thousand reviews or less than one hundred. When I did this, the results matched better the games that I see Cartogratour competing with. I ended up with the following three games: Teacup by Smarto Club released in 2021, Miner: Dig Deep by Substance Games released in 2020 and Time on Frog Island by Half Past Yellow released in 2022. When I do the same analysis on these games, I get the following: Teacup: $0-$100,000, Miner: Dig Deep: $0-$90,000, Time on Frog Island: $0-$200,000. All of these titles have anywhere between no and 20,000 owners for the game estimated on Steam. I took a quick look at the titles on steamcharts and this seems reasonable to me. If I release Cartogratour on Steam, I now have at least a rough idea of what I can potentially expect in terms of income.
So, what does that mean for Cartogratour? If I wanted to release it on Steam, I can only reasonably expect roughly $60,000 to $140,000 over the next two years. That may sound like a lot, but if I have to solely rely on that to fund my next game, that only gives me a short runway. I need to be able to keep my next game to less than a year of development to just make it. It's not a rosy picture, but that's game development, I suppose. This is why you want to take a look at the existing games, both the blockbusters and less successful ones, to see what to expect. Sometimes your game just won't have the audience needed to keep you in business. It's that information that you need if you plan on having game development be your main job, or not. Like all information, it's up to you to decide what to do after getting it. For me, knowing this basic market research, it's not going to stop development on Cartogratour. I'm not necessarily building it to make money. I'm making Cartogratour to scratch an itch for game design, and that's enough for me.
Whew! That was a lot, wasn't it? And that's not even the really crunchy parts of market research that you may end up doing. I'm not going to go through these three games and their reviews today. I know I mentioned that it's an important part of market research, and it is, but I don't want to overload this side quest just to fit it in. I may do a second side quest on breaking down reviews specifically in the future. If that sounds interesting to you, let me know! I want to make side quests that are useful for others as well as myself. Needless to say, but I'm not an expert in the field, only a solo developer looking at the potential market for one of my games. Take anything I'm saying with a grain of salt. As always, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, reach out to me on either Twitter as @jcsirron or in the comments section of this episode. This has been another side quest for the Adventure Mechanics and I'm Chandler. I'll talk to you next time.
