So last night at work during break I managed to get several tests out of the way for our game. Two of them I aimed at the younger crowd we were aiming for and the other three at my managers (which easily met the casual games target we're aiming for). The two younger folks found it pretty easy to pick up and play. The older group too found it difficult to understand right away. The older group found it confusing in general as to why there was the need to throw the die in a hat or some similar containing object (in my case, I used old soup cans since no one in my family are really hat people).
As far as the research goes, Sadly there still hasn't been any major breakthroughs as to what general audience enjoys gore in video games. However, I did take a trip to my local Blockbuster and asked several questions to customers that drifted to the video game sections. For instance an older looking woman walked through the games section, specifically checking out Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS titles. The woman ultimately picked up Professor Layton and The Diabolical Box on the DS. I asked her "Why would you rent this game over Gears of War 2 or Uncharted 2?" The woman's response was that Layton didn't rely on violence or gore to tell the story the game was trying to tell. Instead the game relied on a wide variety of puzzles that involved a simple control to solve be it touch and drag, write a number, etc. It didn't involve four different button presses just to change and reload your weapon while taking cover to aim and fire. Plus there was the unneeded amounts of gore that just wasn't needed.
Now when a group of high school students came through I posed the same question of why Gears of War 2 over Professor Layton. I got a completely different response this time. They liked Gears of War because of the killing sequences that they could initiate or the dismemberment. They also mentioned that there was a lot for the player to do over the course of the game. Then when it came to Layton, they said the game was okay but not great. They didn't like it because they weren't fighting anything and they never had the chance to kill anything during the course of the game.
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I guess that kind of explains what a huge differance a target market can be. Either way its a hit or miss you just need to pick the one that will make our game sell.
ReplyDeleteWe aren't even actually selling anything. We are just making a game. In fact, I'm willing to wager that this class isn't about the game we are making.
ReplyDeleteIt's about learning to work as a team and get the damn project done. We simply need to nail down our market to fit our game, not the other way around. We have a solid game prototype, the only problem is that half of our team is confused and everybody has their own ideas about what we should be doing. That's not how a team works.
In my opinion.. I wanna work on the niche market. The slapstick/gore type game! These "women" can take one for the team right!?
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