Previously discovering that female millennials are the most effected by stress, I initially selected them to be the target audience for my game, as it would benefit them the most, teaching them how to cope with stress.
Knowing who and why I wanted to target the game at I just needed to learn what appeals to them, in terms of gaming.
- What platform is most appealing?
- What genre is appealing?
- What types of gamers are they? – Casual, hardcore etc
- How long do they play for?
- How difficult or complicated to they like mechanics
- Are they social gamers or indiviual ones?
Its time to find out what these women want in a game!
Target Audience Research – What is appealing?
What type of gamers are they?
The graphs below use an example of casual, mid-core and hard-core games and then its breaks down the target audience for that game in terms of gender and age.
Description of the gaming levels
“(1) Hardcore arranges their schedules around their gaming.
(2) Mid-core arranges their gaming around their daily schedule.
(3) Casual entertains self with games when time presents itself.”
LEARNT
- Females millennials are definitely casual gamers who enjoy playing games in short bursts throughout the game – Shown within the comparison of all the 3 gamer types, with females between the ages of 25-31 playing Bejewelled more than any of the others.
- With Bejewelled being a popular game with my target audience, its beginning to suggest that they enjoy, mobile friendly, puzzle games, that have simply mechanics and are more of an indiviual experience with have social media aspects to them.
What other games are females into?
Learnt
- Candy Crush is very popular with women, with 81% of those who play it are females. Which suggests women prefer a puzzle based, mobile game, with simple mechanics that can be played within short periods through-out the day.
- Second life was the other game that was also more popular for females though this was more an older age range, with the medium age playing it being 48. Therefore I don’t believe it would be suitable to use to identify what appeals to female millennials.
Thoughts
From the research I think it is clear to me that the game ideas I have been coming up with won’t appeal to this female millennial target audience, due to my ideas and the games that appeal to them being greatly different in pace, genre and game-play.
With my main idea currently revolving around a fast-paced, team-based experience that focuses heavily on action and skills to create stressful situations for players to learn from.
However from my research above it shows that females like games that are completely opposite to this, preferring very simplistic, puzzle games that are played in short bursts due to them being on easily to pick up and put down when being on mobile. Along with this the games are all solo experiences with no connection to a team. So this makes me realise that my games definitely won’t suit or appeal to this audience. Meaning it won’t sell well and will be a waste of time to create.
Currently this makes me feel very lost about my project, as what do I do? What can I do? Why did I do this to myself?
I think the options I have are to either keep the female millennial audience and redesign the game ideas, or keep the ideas and find a new audience and purpose for the project.
I’m trapped in this dilemma, I don’t want to waste all my work by having to redesign my game ideas, but at the same time changing the purpose and audience for my project is also a lot of work.
I was really pleased with my current game ideas as I found them to be well developed using all my research to inform the designs. Also I felt they were unique and brought something original to the industry by using healing as a main mechanic which isn’t seen often in games. So I feel if I redesign the games I will lose that originality.
Reflection
In the future I really need to think about who my project is aimed at before I start producing any ideas. As like I’ve seen here my ideas are basically useless if I am to stick with the same audience, because I haven’t taken into consideration what appeals to them when designing and so my designs appeal more to me than them. Therefore resulting in me wasting a lot of time, which will set my project back, causing me to feel I need to rush the next phase, which could lead to poor work and poor ideas.
I suppose I have realised this better late than never and I do have time to solve this issue, whether that is through changing the audience or purpose of the game, but it is not something I wanted to solve. To prevent this from happening within future projects I feel I need to ensure I have solidified the purpose and target audience for my game before I start producing ideas, to ensure can design with the audience in mind guaranteeing the idea will appeal to them.
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