Market Research

[mindwanders]

Hi all,

After the results of the survey of larpers published by Nina on various places accross the net
(I've posted it again in this thread http://www.pagga.net/cgi-bin/vBulletin_v3/showthread.php?p=153910#post153910). I've been thinking more and more about market research for LARPs and RPG's.

The only thing that I'm aware of is the market research done by WoTC on table top RPG's back in 1999. The results of that are rather interesting and show that the US (the only country they got meaningful results for) has a lot more regular roleplayers than I thought. You can read the summary here:

http://www.thegpa.org/wotc_demo.shtml

So my question to all of you RPG writers out there is what do you think you need to know about your market(potential players rather than existing ones)? I'd also be interested to hear if any of the players on this list have questions they would refuse to answer?

I had a think and came up with some basic ones:

Demographics:
Age
Sex
Country
Nearest City
Have you ever played a roleplaying game?
Do you roleplay at least once a month?

Behaviour:

How much would you be willing to pay to play for an RPG rule book?
How much would you be willing to pay to play for an RPG rule suppliment?
Why do you normally buy an RPG?
Where do you normally buy your RPG's?

Preferences

What are your top 3 favourite time periods?
What are your top 3 favourite genre?


Other:

I've been considering adding some questions that might allow me to work out what player type a player is using the GNS system. But this is mostly sincy I am considering designing a LARP targetted at Gamists and I'd love to know how many I have in my area.

So the question is, what would you like to know?

Gordon McDonald
Edinburgh

[jdagna]

I would want to know household income as part of the demographics information.  Education level wouldn't hurt either.

Instead of asking what people are willing to pay, ask them what they do pay.  Many gamers will gripe about books costing more than $20, but they're the first ones to pick up a $40 to $50 hardcover like Conan, Buffy or Nobilis.  In addition to asking how much they spend on individual games, ask how much they spend total.

Ask how many systems people have played, and how willing they are to pick up new ones.

Ask how people learn about new games (that's sort of including in the where/why they buy question, but I think it's important).

You'll also want to make sure there's a clear definition of what "RPGs" are.  Are you including computer games, murder mystery dinners and LARPS?  You want to make sure the questions are being read in the same way by everyone.

I wouldn't try to survey for GNS issues.  While many people have a preference, there's too much thought going into classifying people when GNS should be classifying actual play.

[mindwanders]

I wouldn't try to survey for GNS issues. While many people have a preference, there's too much thought going into classifying people when GNS should be classifying actual play.

Yeah, it's one of the problems of GNS though, it implies that we should somehow be able to determine which style of game there is the most demand for and allow us to satisfy that need. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to actually determine what style a person fits into without thurough empirical testing.

I was just thinking about something that Ron Edwards said in Gamism: Step On Up.

Discussing why such an overt, accessible, and functional brand of play did not act as a solid demand on the marketplace of game design must await more discussion of game-industry economics.

To me this implies that either people will drift much more easily than I'd imagined or that there is much less demand than I imagined for what I had considered to be the most common form of roleplaying.

[jdagna]

I wouldn't try to survey for GNS issues. While many people have a preference, there's too much thought going into classifying people when GNS should be classifying actual play.

Yeah, it's one of the problems of GNS though, it implies that we should somehow be able to determine which style of game there is the most demand for and allow us to satisfy that need. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to actually determine what style a person fits into without thurough empirical testing.

You might try to find out what kinds of play they prefer, but also don't forget that there is no one form of Gamism.  There are two specific dials within Gamsism and a fair number of "flavors".  Even if you knew that 75% of players preferred Gamist styles, how many of those enjoy player vs. player conflict as opposed to cooperative players vs the GM?  Will a Gamist player who likes pawn stance or fortune mechanics appreciate a Gamist system that encourages director stance or drama mechanics?

MJ Young made a pretty decent survey for GNS/FDK preferences as an Excel spreadsheet, but he'll be the first to admit it has plenty of limitations.  I wish I could find the current link to it...

[mindwanders]

It's here:

http://www.mjyoung.net/rpg/gametype.html

I found it while I was looking to see if anyone else had posted a similar topic. To be perfectly honest the whole "should there be a test to determine what type of player you are?" subject was covered just fine in this thread along with the problems with the questionaire.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12048&highlight=gns+survey

We should really get back on topic of marketing.

You would probably want to know about people's feelings about pdf format books, seeing as that seems to be a major form of publishing around here.

You'd probably also want to find out how many people are actually running games, seeing as the people running spend the most money.

hmmm...

It's starting to sound more and more like what we really want is access to the most recent WotC data :-)[/url]