Trevor Target Market Research

Since we have been issued a yellow light on our last presentation, we were all given words that we used in our presentation. With these words, we were to go and research them to help narrow our target market. I took the word casual, as we are attempting to make a casual game.

In my research, I found that a casual game must be suitable for all ages. However, a majority of casual players are women ages 30 and over. With that type of market, our game cannot have any gore or blood at all.

Also, a casual game must have a low difficulty level, positive fiction, and a low level of time investment to the game.

One thing that we have to remember in making our game is that we are NOT making the game for ourselves. I remember at an Interfaces conference, a speaker asked the audience if they would like to make the next Resident Evil game. With out a doubt, the audience said yes, and with much enthusiasm. The speaker then told that crowd that we would be making My Little Pony instead.

I say that we take to that advice to heart and make the My Little Pony game instead. We have to present our game at Interfaces, so I say we prove to the industry professionals that are willing to make a game for an audience, not ourselves.

I say that we leave out the gore aspect of our game, and make a game for all ages. We have a solid game mechanic. All we need to do is apply an art style that will appeal to a broad audience, and leave out all the gore and blood aspects. Let's keep our game with a cartoony art style, like what we have seen in Looney Toons, and Tom and Jerry. In both of those shows, no one got killed nor was there any blood.

Let's make this game appeal to women ages 30 and older. The reason I say that is because these these women most likely spend a lot of time with their kids, so they are not going to play a game with zombies or a game that has blood and violence.

All we need to do is take our game mechanic and add an art style to it that will appeal to women 30 and older.

I have posted a web document on box.net in a folder called Target market Research. I hope that helps better support my decision.