Who is it for? Market research

"It's for everyone!"

Kai is drafting the Garden Defense store page and types: "A game for everyone!" Remy frowns. "Then which screenshot goes first? What price? Where do we tell people about it?"

"Everyone" answers none of those questions. Real studios start with market research: finding out who the players are, what they already play, what they love, and what they are missing. Every later choice, from the trailer to the price, depends on it.

A clear player picture

A target player is the kind of person a game is really made for. Describe them by what they do and want, not just their age:

• Garden DefensePlays on a phone in short breaks, likes planning defences and collecting plants, prefers free games, and quits when ads get pushy.
• Hyper ShardsLoves arcade shooters and chasing high scores, plays on a computer or in the browser, and will pay once for a polished game with no ads.
• Everyone elseOther people will play too, and they are welcome. The game just isn't designed around them.

Bolt says: Some studios turn each picture into a made-up person with a name and habits, called a player persona. It makes design arguments shorter: "Would our persona enjoy this?"

How big is the market?

The market is all the people who might want a game like ours. The US Small Business Administration puts the key question simply: how many people would be interested? Studios often think in three circles:

• Everyone who plays the genre, like all tower defence players.
• The ones we can reach, on our platforms and in our languages.
• The slice we can realistically win in our first year.

Bigger is not automatically better: a huge genre has huge competitors. Write each number as an estimate, with its source.

Study the competition

• Play themNote what feels great in the first five minutes, and the moment you got bored.
• Read the store pageWhat does it promise? Which screenshot comes first? What does it cost, and how does it earn?
• Read the reviewsThe glowing ones and the angry ones. Players say exactly what they love and what they wish were different.
• Check the updatesGoogle Play shows when a game was last updated, the App Store keeps a version history, and Steam pages show recent news. Regular updates mean an active team.

Competitors are the games our target players already choose. Pick three to five, study them, and look for the gap: something players want that no game gives them well.

Free research tools

• Steam tags and chartsPlayers and developers tag games. Steam uses a game's top 20 tags to decide which similar games it shows on "More like this" lists. Its charts page shows top sellers and most played games.
• Store chartsGoogle Play and the App Store show charts of popular games in each category.
• Google TrendsCompares how much people search for words over time, like "tower defense". It scores interest from 0 to 100 as a share of all searches, not as a count of searches.
• Communitiesitch.io comments and devlogs, and game forums, where players say what they want. Many communities are 13+, so a parent joins in or posts for the studio.

Ask real players

Charts and reviews show what strangers think. Talking to our own target players tells us why. Use a short survey (a few questions, many people) or a short interview (more questions, a few people).

• Ask what people really did, not what they might do.
• Listen, don't pitch. Being polite to the studio is not data.
• Collect no names or contact details unless truly needed. If they are, a parent runs the sign-up, because children's data has strict rules (the Keeping player data safe lesson in Stage 4 explains them).

One page, and no copying

The team writes it all on one page, kept in the repo and updated after every playtest: the player picture, the market estimate and its sources, three to five competitors, what players love and hate about them, our gap, and what players told us.

Research is for learning, not copying. We study why a rival is fun, then build our own version of the idea with our own art, code and twist. The Fan games, remixes and derivative works lesson in Stage 5 shows where the line is.

Bolt says: Next: the go-to-market plan, which turns this research into a launch plan on one page.