Why Targeting Audience Must be Your First Step in Game Development?

It can be challenging to decide on the target market for your game. But isn’t it crucial to know who will play your game? What every developer should seek is an approach to game development where you decide and build the target audience for your game before anything else.

Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Let’s dive deeper into it.

Experts say that understanding your audience is the key to designing a successful game. If you have the intended use and target market of your game in mind, you are more likely to succeed than those that try to find an audience after releasing it. Audience demographics are not just limited to the age, gender, and genre of liking, but it stretches far beyond that (You’ll know what we mean, keep reading).

The Game Literacy Paradox

A game designer, through careful target audience research, can predict user behavior easily by which he can deliver the best game in the market. By observing player behavior and the concept behind gaming purchases, any gaming company can make new games, apply effective marketing efforts, and eventually increase revenue.

The Game Literacy paradox lies on the foundation of understanding the different kinds of games your players have enjoyed before, and the systems they’ve encountered in those games. What games people have enjoyed before makes way more difference in their engagement than how old they are, their gender, or even the genre of the game.

Game Promise As Market

Now that you’ve understood what Game Literacy Paradox is, let’s understand Game Promise and how to use it as a market. What promise is your game offering? A promise can be anything from an emotion to a USP. It is a string that you pull to sell your game to the audience; simply put it’s your marketing campaign.

For example, if a company is building a competitive game, they would sell that emotion of competitiveness to the market. The way to go about it is to look at the promise of the games the audience loves, and either offer them more of that or even better, what they want next.

The Game Development approach to prioritizing your audience uses game promise as a market so it is important to know and not divert from the promise of the game yourself. Post that you factor the game literacy into that promise. It will help you align on the design but would also help you in marketing that emotion to sell the game.

How Do You Build A Game Promise?

Building a game is not just about coding and deploying it for gamers to play, it is about building an unforgettable gameplay experience that is either new for them, or an advanced version of the games that they’ve already been playing.

Nobody wants to or intends to build a game that the audience wouldn’t enjoy. In the world of blockchain and DeFi, the gaming industry has evolved so much that finding a game promise or a selling point for the intended audience, can be difficult. But let’s have a look at some points that can help you in the process:

1. Test various Promises of your game before you start coding
2. Test different art styles and genres.
3. Don’t look for hit indicators, you won’t find them. Passionately look for evidence to prove yourself wrong.
4. Build anti-personas. You need a game design strong enough that some players hate it.

Everything lies based on understanding user behavior. If you understand your gaming audience well enough, you would know the Unique point that would sell your game.

Conclusion

The approach of building a specific audience before a popular game might sound obscure at first but makes a lot of sense. And your analytics don’t end with the deployment. Studying user behavior is still important even if you have released your game. You cannot enhance anything if you cannot measure it. Knowing whether or not your efforts are being useful is crucial. So, if you’re building your game today, establish and know your audience well. Because at the end of the day, It is more important to consider what your audience wants and how to satisfy them, than what you have to offer. For everything else in your game development journey, metaENGINE is here!