Social Economic status

Concept of social class, defined by amount of money earned.

Social grade

A – Upper Middle Class

B – Middle Class

C1 – Lower Middle Class

C2 – Skilled Working Class

D – Working Class

E – Lowest Level of Subsistence

This system is flawed, and results in stereotypes .

Psychographics

Includes the way people choose to live, spend their time and money on what they see as important. Closely linked to occupation.

Sexual Orientation & Gender

LGBT: Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Transgender.

Male and Female.

Age Group

Is seen as the easiest way to categorise people.

With the gaming industry thriving as much as it is today how do game developers know what their audience want and how do they get that information, in this assignment I’m going to show you how that is achieved, in different ways.

1. Interviews

This is an interview I did with a classmate from my development course, now interviews are a way of conducting primary research that being getting information that no one else has acquired. I asked him what was the current game he is playing at the moment, Gears Of War 3 was his answer a fairly new game but apart of a massive franchise, companies do these interview to us the general public to see the impact their game has, when I asked what his favourite genre was he answered Stealth/Action a completely different genre to that of Gears Of War 3 and his favourite game Tenchu Z goes under that category as well, I asked why he enjoyed it and I could tell the story had a massive part in that and its unique gaming style also appealed to him.

So if I was a market researcher for a game company, I’d use this research to show that a unique gaming style and in-depth story is what draws in some

gamers and categories him into age, gender and nationality, I’d then send what statistic I gathered to my superiors.

Here’s the original recording of my interview with my classmate apologies about the quality and language.

2.Surveys/ Questionaires

I’m going to use the game mentioned by the person I interviewed Tenchu Z released June 2007, it’s a stealth orientated game so games interested in first person shooters (FPS) might not be as interested as people who play titles like Splinter Cell another stealth orientated game. Surveys are a great source of feedback from us the general public, not only do you get a broad view of people who play games you also get a minority of people with families who don’t play games as much. Here’s a link to a survey website which use thousands of peoples results for companies like Microsoft and Sony.

http://vgstrategies.about.com/gi/pages/poll.htm?linkback=http://vgstrategies.about.com/od/videogamesurveyspolls/&poll_id=3184139045

But with me, unfortunately i dont have the finicial support like these companies, and so instead I have to create my own survey and give it out to people on the street or post it on blogging sites and hope people respond to it, in any case im still not going to have the amount of results they do so, my demographic is very selective and probably less general. For games like Tenchu Z they hired companies such as the one i used in the link, to find out what gamers wanted in a stealth orientated game.