I’m trying to work out the target audience for a 3D platformer I’m going to make in Unity for my Final Major Project at college (high school). I’ve already spent a while researching this and so far I haven’t found much useful information.
If you’ve got 3-4 minutes: https://forms.gle/19QY8edr4EddRerx9
Since I need to analyse the results anyway, I’ll post my findings here once I’ve closed the form.
Thanks.
Edit: here’s the analysis.
I would take any responses you get here with a huge grain of salt. While you can generalize that most developers are also players, developers views are representative of gamers in general. You will get more useful information at place like steam or another gamer-centric forum.
I hadn’t considered Steam actually. I’ve sent this out in a number of different places so it’ll hopefully be somewhat representative. But yeah, it’s not going to be able to be super accurate, but that’s something I can write about and it’s better than nothing. I’m probably only going to use the age stats since I’ve found some data on gender from a more proper survey.
Good point either way though
If you’re interested, the analysis is now done.
Your results are deeply flawed, in large part due to the places where you attempted polling.
These three bolded areas are going to skew heavily towards 3D platformers because you are asking in places that are dedicated either exclusively to the genre or dedicated to a specific entry in that genre. To get more into the weeds a little, here’s something that uses sales data for entries in the Mario series:
Be sure to pay attention to the numbers on the lower axis.
This demographic breakdown also suffers because of the communities you asked in, which will skew heavily towards certain age ranges and genres. You mention this in the limitations section at the bottom of the post, but I don’t think you’re really considering how severe this is going to be.
Also also, do you have any suggestions on what I could do differently if I was to try and do something like this again?
This isn’t true, at least not for the reasons you think. The New Super Mario Bros 2 isn’t true at all as it’s literally the fifth best selling game on the 3DS. New Super Mario Bros. U’s sales figures can be attributed to something else.
This doesn’t account for the year long period where the Wii U had overlap with the PS3 and Xbox 360 either. NSMB U’s sales can be pretty directly attributed to the fact that the Wii U barely sold in the first place, being the lowest selling Nintendo console outside of the Virtual Boy.
I’m not sure why you think this proves your point here. It actually does the opposite. A rerelease of a game that, at that point, is 6+ years selling 15.41m units at all is pretty substantially weighting in the favour of the popularity of 2D platformers. Consider how that same list has Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury selling only 11.38m.
Yes, especially considering how your response still fails to properly account for very important context.
it’s a great effort and write up.
there is probably a lot of research on the subject, but it would be behind locked doors as it’s competitive business, and the data gathering needed to actually make useful analysis would require significant manpower (e.g. money). If you know a lot about the market you can make better guesses at things like murgilod is able to but it’s important to still draw a distinction between what can be proven, what can’t, and what the practical limits of educated guesses can be.
i think what you did really well was, in summary, basically said you didn’t have enough data to make proper analysis, which is the only intelligent thing to say pretty much. That’s proper science - not letting ego or insecurities drive things.
It’s a school assignment so there is probably pressure to say something, as if without some answers the exercise was a failure, but if that’s the way the thing is graded then it’s a shame because that would be stupid.
There seems to be a fallacy that experience and skill is displayed in the ability to make accurate guesses. That seems like an idiots idea to me. Professional problem solvers tend to ask a lot more questions and spend a lot more time figuring out what the problem is before they start tossing around “answers”.
Just having the discipline to stick with the scientific method and do the work to gather more data when it’s insufficient to answer your current question makes you as smart as possible. Almost anybody can do that, don’t need any particular talent, it’s just a matter of work ethic and discipline.
And it is fine to to realize that the work to actually answer some question won’t be possible so your best guess will just have to do, but understand difference between knowing and guessing so you don’t get in habit of deluding self.
