Short answer: no, you don’t need expensive market research to have a pretty good idea who’s going to be playing your game. A good game concept has an obvious audience, be it a gamers’ game or a causal puzzle game. Licensed games have a really-obvious audience, and even with games that genre-blend you can make assumptions about which players of each genre will be interested in your new game.

Long answer: you can make an educated guess who your player is based on a couple assumptions. I always assume that the person playing the game has played at least one game in the same genre before. MobyGames lists about 500 action games released last year. What are the chances that mine is the first one they’ve ever played? Not to mention, modern 3D action games have had roughly the same formula for at least the last 10 years.

Secondly, I assume that the player has probably played at least one of the hit action games in the last year or two. Simple fact: if a game sells well, more people have played it. The player is more likely to have played God of War or Gears of War than Stubbs the Zombie. So the player is going to have some expectations based on his prior experience with all these other games.

Then I can consider those expectations during each design decision. I think it’s particularly important when designing controls and core mechanics. If I released an FPS that had movement on the triggers, aiming on the dpad, and firing on the left analog stick, I’d be shooting myself in the foot. Or another good example, with Gears of War and Rainbow Six Vegas both emphasizing cover as a core mechanic, we had to really think about how much we wanted to promote and reward cover use in Stranglehold (there will be an entire post on this topic shortly).

Now, this might sound like I take a look at all of the best-selling games in the genre and start stealing features. This is only half true. I steal all the ones that I as a player like, I dump the ones I don’t like, and I try to simplify the mechanics that I thought had promise but were too complicated. For every feature that you add to a game you have to remove something else. For one, controllers only have so many buttons (and I loath “press and hold” mechanics). But secondly, the player can only think about so much stuff at once.

And that’s just to get to the starting point. Then you have to constantly question and challenge yourself during the creation of the game. You have to listen to player feedback from playtests, and press feedback when they get their hands on the game. You really have to try to be ego-less and selfless during the process, and never be afraid to dump one of your “genius ideas” for the idea that some random kid throws out during his playtest. It happens all the time, and it really can make your game better.

So yes, I do use gut instinct and draw from my personal experience as a player, but I also consider what’s going on in the marketplace, and I try to listen to the player when he’s able to tell me what he thinks. Perhaps some day I’ll work on a game that doesn’t fit into any genre at all, that doesn’t have a license, and can’t be compared to any game that’s ever been created before. That would be rad.

In order to be the players advocate dont you have to do serious market research to know what demographics buy your games, and how they play them? Or do you purely go off your gut instinct and draw from your personal experiences as a player?