Market research

[electron]

You make it?
How you make it?
With friends, reading advertise?
Thanks in the advance

[PoV]

Well I don't think any of us actually have marketing departments with the funding and resources to survey many people (not that they even know what they want), so market research for most is done through other means and assumptions. The other side is many indies would rather do whatever game they want, rather that appealing to markets, or look for marketing ideas after they have a game. At a basic research level, simply noting what games are doing well and choosing to do one like that seems to be a popular tactic. That's why we seem to have so many matching games :D. Back to what I said before, making a game, and just jumping in and attempting to find your market later, through trial and error is the norm for many. Reading these and the Dexterity forums is a solid way to research as well, since there's no place on the net (other than the ASP, to a degree) where so many people openly share their findings.

[stan]

I think your minimum market research should be to look at existing games to see if the game you're planning to make already exists.

If it exists and is successful, can you make and/or market it better?

If it exists but isn't successul, is it because the game is bad, is badly marketed?

If it doesn't exist, is it because it's a bad idea? :) Perhaps make a prototype and experiment with a few friends to see if it works.

Not that I'm an expert on the matter of market research... When I started working on my first game, I thought it hadn't yet been done on computer. Now I have found 4 other implementations. (Maybe the fact that it took me around 2 years to finish the damn thing could explain that.)