I decided to try my tests on the people that make up over 70% of the total casual market, 30+ Women. I had slightly mixed results, but all of them dissliked the idea of gore.
testResults.txt
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I decided to try my tests on the people that make up over 70% of the total casual market, 30+ Women. I had slightly mixed results, but all of them dissliked the idea of gore.
It looks like from your testing, that women around 30 like this kind of game. So I think our target market should be women around age 30 based on your testing.
ReplyDeleteWell the potential problem with this specific group of women is that they were attending MY wedding shower with MY fiancee... so they were a little bias. They would have loved ANYTHING I put infront of them and asked them to play. Today, Phil, Paul and I tested a bunch of people up at the school and have some results that we have to go over, but none of the test subjects were 30+ women. All of the test subjects LOVED the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" part of the game though.
ReplyDeleteI knew the Rock Paper Scissors would be fun to most people.
ReplyDeleteAnd... it's not that women around 30 like "this kind of game." Our kind of game is not the prototype they are playing. They may like some of the physical game play aspects, but when it comes to our digital version, I am willing to wager that these women we are talking about would not spend very long playing it. The only person from his research that really "got it" was Jake's fiancee, and that's because she's been exposed to a lot of games and probably has played more games than most casual gamers. She is also younger than the rest of them.
I don't know. I think we are just backtracking and wasting more time. If I'm alone on this, then maybe we really should just go after the women. But I think that would require more work on our part.
Based on the research:
ReplyDeleteWell, I find this very enlightening, or at least CONFIRMING in the fact that:
Yes, we do have gameplay (at least in our prototype) that can appeal to casual gamers.
Our themes and more complicated rules will NOT appeal to the majority of casual gamers. Since we are NOT changing anything about our game at this point, then this reveals to us that:
We must change our target market. Our target market is NOT the majority of casual gamers, which happen to be middle-aged women.
This means we are NOT targeting anything besides younger people who may or may not be hardcore gamers. I consider myself a hardcore gamer, and yet, I am also a casual gamer. I have spent both my money and my time on casual games, but I have also done so with hardcore games. I realize that people like me are a very small market, and probably consist mostly of people who are interested in games as a career of some form.
This, in turn, means that we are not targeting people like ourselves. We might not even be targeting other people our age. This only further convinces me that we should be looking at 15-20 years of age as our market, if not YOUNGER. If we can keep the gore to a minimum, we might be best off targeting adolescents and taking the "Maplestory" route. Although that game is flooded with children of all ages, it also manages to capture people like me and even established men with families. How? Because of the addicting yet relaxing gameplay, and because it is a time sink where we can play at our own pace.
NOTE: I think some of our team members haven't gotten over the fact that we are NOT aiming our game toward the 30+ female bracket.