how do you carry out market research

[Reanimated]

Hi
What do you consider to be "market research" and as an indie developer, how do you go about carrying it out? Ive looked around at popular downloads and things, but what do you do to find out how that particular type of product sells?

[Jason Colman]

I have considered writing to ask my existing customers. I may still do this, but on the other hand I would like to appeal to those people who are not yet my customers - there are a lot more of them :)

I have found that people like to play my games with their kids, which is why I decided to narrow my focus and call my games "games for kids".

Of course when you choose the game you have to take your own motivation into consideration, and do something that you are really into, or you won't be having much fun as the project drags on and on....

[dan]

Hi
What do you consider to be "market research" and as an indie developer, how do you go about carrying it out? Ive looked around at popular downloads and things, but what do you do to find out how that particular type of product sells?

There's a lot more to it than looking at sales figures... you might look at a couple of indie dev faqs on the topic.

Getting exact sales figures is difficult at best, and sometimes it has to be taken in context. I looked at one somewhat similar game to ours out there (there's aren't all that many in the niche) from an indie, and I managed to ascertain that they sold around 10K copies of it. That would be great for most download-only indies, but for them, it was a failure and the company basically dispersed -- several guys were in the company, and that wasn't enough to keep going full time, especially because half sold in stores, where their profit was 1/3 as much.

It just depends on your overhead and what you're trying to do. Even if you eliminate the crap games, most indie titles are like most commercial titles -- they fail in the marketplace. You'll find lots of good indie titles with a few hundred sold to a couple thou. I know one game that did well in a contest that didn't even sell 100 copies according to a source.

If you're doing puzzle games and can crank them out, selling a couple thou over a year may do you fine. Build up a catalog and away you go.

Your best bet is taking a close look at what the most successful indies do... that tells you far more than sales figures. What niches are they in, what do their websites look like, everything. I'm not saying clone their games of course, but cloning their business practices is a solid idea to start.

Analyzing your own games post mortem is a good idea. Not the game itself, necessarily, but what went right and what went wrong with every aspect of the project. If there were parts that stunk, but you're mystified about how to go about fixing the problem, that might indicate that you need to get resources to help in those areas. Or you need to educate yourself.

Finally, I'll put a plug in for thinking about marketing strategies and the like quite a bit right at the start of a project. It's quite possible to make good games that are difficult to market. One common mistake is for devs to make a game that is appealing to themselves, but not necessarily the marketplace.

[Mark Sheeky]

Hi
What do you consider to be "market research" and as an indie developer, how do you go about carrying it out? Ive looked around at popular downloads and things, but what do you do to find out how that particular type of product sells?

There are simple questions to answer: How much competition is there? Is your product better and if so how can you convince people? Is the genus of product popular?

Too much competition is bad, but zero might mean the idea is too obscure to catch on. In any business, if you make something better than your competitors and then make sure that everyone knows about it, you will succeed.

Mark
Cornutopia Games
http://www.cornutopia.net

[elund]

I posted some of the things I did for my initial market research in this thread (http://www.indiegamer.com/archives/t-446.html) from Dexterity.