New Audience Model

We have our first new audience model in a while thanks to Parks Associates (via King Lud IC, from Next Gen and ultimately from here). It appears to focus chiefly upon the amount of time and money spent on games, however, making it largely useless for game designers - but still, every new model tells us something. (This one seems to tells us that some people are too busy to play games. Not exactly a surprise.) Still, the message that the market is more diverse than presumed is useful, even if this research adds very little to our understanding of the diversity of players. Patrick has more discussion of the topic for those who are interested.

Comments

[chico]

Trackback:
http://nongames.blogspot.com/2006/08/new-audience-model-no-audience-model.html

[Darius K.]

Well, the "time" aspect is very important to designers, at least those working on MMOs.

[Patrick]

I agree, that is a key factor, along with social dynamic complexity. I believe in the latter case more is actually better for a casual audience, and worse for a "power" gamer audience.

But time is probably primary, and can be controlled with the right verb design in pre-prod and the right kind of balancing in post-prod.

[Chris]

I take your point.

I think my hackles were raised by this line in the Next Gen article:

He added, "I think the gaming industry kind of acknowledges the existence of gamers besides casual and hardcore. It's just that no one has put out good non-proprietary research on this subject yet."

Followed by this line in the press release:

For more information about Electronic Gaming in the Digital Home, contact sales@parksassociates.com.

So, basically:

1. They completely ignore both of the non-propriety audience models (Nicole's Four Keys and our DGD1 - both of which were distributed for free)
2. They want you to pay for their report, making it proprietory.

That annoyed me. Especially since this report looks like a basic clustering solution applied to some general data.

But I admit my obvious bias in this regard. :)

[Dan Boutros]

I don't buy this crap at all. I really don't see any value in this.

The Ihobo model trounces this completely.

P.S. Glad to see you back dude. :)