The first thing I did was try to find some demographic statistic for Skyrim, but that proved quite difficult, I couldn't find any good quantitative statistics but I did find an interview with Todd Howard (Skyrim's Creator) by Game Informer.
What I got out of the interview was that the 'Core' market in video games is often overlooked by publishers and is really a much more marketable audience than people tend to think.
This is a section from the interview that I focused on:
Game Informer: As far as sales goes, Skyrim is the best-selling game in Bethesda history. Is there something about the game from a design standpoint that made it more popular and mainstream? The Elder Scrolls series has been typically thought of as very hardcore RPGs.
Todd Howard: The short answer is "I don’t know." I can give you my guess, which is people underestimate how many core gamers there are; people who want a lot of depth and will play a game for a long time. There are a lot of them. If you give them something unique and good, you don’t have to dumb it down.
There are things we changed to make the game better, but not to appeal to a wider audience. I think we always benefited in Elder Scrolls early on, the fact that it is first-person and kind of walks this action line sometimes. We’ve always benefited from that. Even our own lofty expectations for how the game would be received or sell, it’s way, way beyond that.
But what is the Core market? I was always familiar with the term 'Hardcore gamer' but whether Core and Hardcore were the same thing or not I didn't know, so I turned to wikipedia to get a definition of the term:
According to Wikipedia Core and Hardcore were separate terms:
Core gamer
A core or mid-core gamer is a player with a wider range of interests than a casual gamer and is more likely to enthusiastically play different types of games, but without the amount of time spent and sense of competition of a hardcore gamer. The mid-core gamer enjoys games but may not finish every game they buy, doesn't have time for long MMO quests, and is a target consumer. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata stated that they designed the Wii U to cater to core gamers who are in between the casual and hardcore categories.
A number of theories have been presented regarding the origins of mid-core gamers. James Hursthouse, the founder of Roadhouse Interactive credits the evolution of devices towards tablets and touch-screen interfaces, whereas Jon Radoff of Disruptor Beam compares the emergence of mid-core games to similar increases in media sophistication that have occurred in media such as television.
Hardcore gamer
Hardcore gamers extend gaming into their lifestyle and may represent the stereotypical “game geek”. They are frequent purchasers of games, prefer to expend significant time on games, and are more likely to try to "master" their games by completing as many objectives as possible. Hardcore gamers may take part in video game culture such as competitions, events and conventions. Competitions may involve organized tournaments, leagues, or ranked play integrated into the game. An example of this is Major League Gaming, an electronic sports organization that often holds events for first-person shooter games such as Quake. There are many subtypes of hardcore gamers based on the style of game, gameplay preference, hardware platform, and other preferences.
So I decided that Core/Hardcore was probably the way to go. Originally we had decided that the game was going to be aimed primarily at 'males' but that was mainly due to a problem with encountered with avoiding nudity which I'll get into a bit later. We decided that we had better at least do a bit of research into how large the demographic for female gamers actually was.
We found that actually a very large portion of the gaming market actually consists of females, almost half, so it would definitely be in our best interests to try and appeal to the female demographic, which meant adding a female player character and solving our potential nudity issue.
Finally we considered these statistics on the overall demographics of video games:
Statistics on Today's Gamer (2013)
The average age of today's gamer : 30
The average number of years gamers have been players : 13
68% of gamers are 18 or older
45% of gamers are female
62% of gamers play games with others
36% of gamers play games of their phones
25% of gamers play on their wireless device
Parents of gamers
89% of parents are present when games are purchased or rented
88% of parents feel that the rating board for games is helpful when choosing games
86% of parents believe that the parent controls in games a useful
71% of parents believe games provides mental stimulation or education
59% of parents believe games encourage their family to spend time together
We found that actually the average age of gamers today is 30 so now we have our age range for our game.
Target Audience
16-30, Male and Female, Core/Hardcore audience.
No comments:
Post a Comment