Edward Hunter, comScore<\/p>\n
Some useful stats, and some interesting issues raised in terms of privacy and practicalities of gathering stats.<\/p>\n
A lot of good advice on how to select a target market for an online game that’s better than “any hardcore RPG players” – both better as in more precise and usable, and also better as in bigger and worth more money.<\/p>\n
LOTS of questions afterwards; read to the bottom to see them all.
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The same month that Blizzard announced 10 million players, comScore<\/a> reported 9.8 million players.<\/p>\n You can’t categorize online gamers as any particular single genre.<\/p>\n March 2007: 771 million people browsing the web<\/p>\n 216 million play online games<\/p>\n march 2007 – web is 840 million users<\/p>\n US online gamers outnumber all other individual countries (although europe: 82 million)<\/p>\n global online gamer audience has increased 27% 2007 – 2008<\/p>\n online gamers age: 25% 25-34 ,35-44, 45-54 A: I’ll get to that later. It’s an important point, thank you for spoiling it)<\/p>\n heavy online gamers: online 57 hours a motn, 24% is online gaming heavy: leans towards social networking, gaming info sites<\/p>\n light – consumes more traditional entertainment and retail content<\/p>\n heavy favs – mmo, fps, rts lights rank \u00a31 for visitors to retail computer hardware sits<\/p>\n heavy gamers rank it number 4, placing books and department stores above that<\/p>\n (this was obvious because he’d said that the light gamers spent all their time visiting websites)<\/p>\n light come in first for online music consumption – both paid and free medium online gamers spend 7% of their time in XXX adult, whereas heavy dont have any.<\/p>\n medium – 8% genealogy<\/p>\n heavy – 9 percent fmaily<\/p>\n light spends 23% on portals, compared to 10% for heavy \/ medium (similar)<\/p>\n “online gamers” is far too broad, generic and meaningless a target to go after<\/p>\n Players’ behaviours change a lot over time, so it’s necessary to track that way so you can change it during dev years in line with the changing themselves.<\/p>\n Try to match up the underlying behaviours of your players with the core fundamental elements of your game<\/p>\n Compare:<\/p>\n Once you’ve established their behaviours, you now need to work out who they actually are – age\/gender\/location\/net worth\/etc. [ADAM: all the standard traditional marketing demographic stuff]<\/p>\n Then, you can work out where they hang out, and then market\/advertise in those locations.<\/p>\n Signal user actions:<\/p>\n Because the market needs to know independently measured numbers about who is using what – internal data that you keep private for business reasons are not valid as evidence when negotiating with advertisers etc<\/p>\n [ADAM: he recommends put in fine-grained metrics and making them PUBLIC to be used by advertisers. Of course, advertisers are currently refusing to use this data, and are being pushed through lowest-common-denominator services by the middlemen agencies. So … I’m not sure it’s as simple as he implies]<\/p>\n Analytics are also essential to be looked at side-by-side with reading the philosophical \/ essay post-mortems.<\/p>\n [ADAM: this is interesting. I’ve not seen such a subtly disguised yet selfish sales pitch for a while ;). Not that I mind, it was a good talk, but really it’s comScore<\/a> et al who “need” this more than anyone else. Ironically, I think a lot of this stuff SHOULD be given away for less altruistic reasons than he tries to map out]<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.comscore.com\/request\/gamers.asp<\/a><\/p>\n People operate under the misconception that this can’t be measured. For most of the popular MMOs this is already being done (e.g. our own WoW analyst record).<\/p>\n We do it by looking at calls made out to the internet by the game, and use that to infer how many people etc – e.g. people clicking links from the game client and going to a webpage.<\/p>\n [ADAM: or, IMHO better, go the Thottbot<\/a> \/ Curse<\/a> route: write a custom client that sits there and scrapes]<\/p>\n Yes, that’s how ISP’s do it, we aggregate it all etc.<\/p>\n How many people have deleted the cookies in their browser this month? (about 60% of audience)<\/p>\n Many people ONLY use cookies to track unique users.<\/p>\n ISP routers are dynamically changing the IP address even in-between successive requests while browing the same site<\/p>\n
\n – 70 million US players; china 15 m, canada 12 m
\n – but 206 million non-US<\/p>\n
\n10%: 18-24, 55-64
\nunder-18? immeasurable<\/p>\n(Q: what do you mean by online games?)<\/h4>\n
Defining Online Gamers: “Heavy”, “Medium”, and “Light”<\/h4>\n
\nlight – 36 hr \/ month – 1% of that is online gaming<\/p>\n
\nlight favs – puzzle, card, strategy<\/p>\n
\nheavy come second
\nand medium come third<\/p>\nThe new way to target<\/h4>\n
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Build your games to be measured<\/h4>\n
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Why?<\/h4>\n
Link to download the slides<\/h4>\n
Q: we have nothing like the Nielsens<\/a>, no independent sources of how many people are playing concurrently. This has plagued me throughout my MMO dev career. Do you think that that’s on the way in the future? I’d argue its essential to make good investment decisions<\/h4>\n
Q: do I just make artificial calls to pages \/ sites – even ones that don’t exist – just to cause them to be tracked?<\/h4>\n
Caveat: this is an emerging technology. Some phenomena to be aware of<\/h4>\n