Yesterday evening I attended an online masterclass about doing market analysis for your game. It was organized by Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds and delivered by Cassia Curran of Curran Games Agency.

Purpose of the session was to teach us how we can do some market analysis to determine the financial viability of our game.

Cassie illustrated how you can use a free site like GameDataCrunch to get statistics about specific types of game and make estimates about the sales for previously published games. It helps to build a competitor set, see how hard the competition is and which other games are selling well… in the end helping you get an idea of how your own game might perform and what budget you can think about for building it.

The concepts of market analysis were not very new but it was useful to get some more insights in the information available about games, as that’s still pretty much a black box to me.

All in all interesting session and definitely worth attending, thank you Cassia!

Q&A

During the Q&A session someone raised the question:

What if you don’t really care about the market but just want to make that specific game?

That resonated with me a lot as well. Obviously if I get serious with this I want a commercially viable game which requires a sound enough business approach with some idea about the market.

But I’m not interested in searching for any potentially successful game idea at the moment, I mostly want to see if I can realize the vision I’ve been having for a couple of years now. The one of a turn-based tactics game that plays a lot like X-COM but has much more of a story emphasis, like Call of Duty.

At the same time, I do think there is enough market potential to make a game like that worth it. But first I have to be able to actually build it 🙂

Oh btw, the expected answer to the question was: by all means go ahead, it all depends on what your needs and expectations are.

Makes sense.

Play other games

I also have to start playing more games again.

I had figured this out already but it was also discussed during the session yesterday. I need to play more games to know what makes them successful (or not), and I should at least play the games of my competitor set.

Well I’m sure there’s worse things to do…

Gamedev Diary Knock-On Effect