"The line between what has traditionally been thought of as 'casual gamer' and 'hardcore gamer' has blurred considerably over the past few years, forcing developers to re-examine various gamer groups and their approach to marketing. Jon Radoff presents new behavioral gameplay data across multiple platforms and gamer groups, challenging the tired dichotomy of 'casual versus hardcore' and illustrating that gamers are more diverse than ever before. Providing analysis of current behavioral data, Jon will also help to answer the question of how to more effectively deliver and market a product to these various gamer groups."
While the info that the classification of games ("casual" versus "hardcore", etc.) isn't new news, Radoff had some great data, a la gamerDNA.com.
While not a hardcore user, I've been on gamerDNA since I think the beginning, and I have been continuously impressed with their broad scope of intelligent data collection and data mining, and what they do with it (have you seen their Twitter heatmap?).
Radoff separated gamers into different segments for discussion, like social gamers. Play time for guild members in an MMO, for example, is far far higher than non-guild members. In addition, social gaming shows up in unexpected places (like Rock Band, as opposed to, say, Guitar Hero 3).
This resonates with me, because I'm a very social gamer. If I'm not playing a single-player title, I'm playing a multiplayer title because I want to touch-base with people -- to reconnect.
He also suggested breaking games into thematic segments, rather than gameplay types. His example was Bioshock, which should essentially have been a core game, but had play trends more akin to Rock Band interest.
His follow-on was each game has its own segmentation (social versus non-social, thematic tastes, brand-loyal and genre-loyal, competitive).
Radoff showed some great data for Halo 3 that is gold for biz dev, community management, and marketing folks. For example, DLC caused measurable spikes in player interest, but not as much among genre or franchise fans.
Interesting side tidbit: of the top 10 games also played by World of Warcraft players were Fallout 3 and Warhammer Online. Interestingly, Left4Dead consistently charted as a highly also-played among MMO players
Since 5/31/2009, Twitter has had a 7.6% weekly compound growth in tweets about games. That is phenomenal data. Just think about the analogy of a mutual fund.
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