Game Player/Buyer Types

Gamers come in many different shapes and sizes and although size and shape does not give any useful data we can utilise, there are other demographics which will enable us to target our market more effectively. This stems in general from the way different genders, races and ages think, react and interact with the world in general. For example Game consumer research company “Quantic Foundry” recently released a report on the Gender breakdown of various games https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/ and Witchita State University’s Software Usability Research Laboratory http://usabilitynews.org/video-games-males-prefer-violence-while-females-prefer-social/  gives more examples. Quantic Foundry (Reference above) shows that for games such as Match3 and Family / Farm simulation, 69% of players were female in 2017. These statistics tend to show that generally, most males are more interested in action killing and shooting whereas females are more interested in social and artistic pursuits such as cooking and decorating which is backed up by the previous references showing the type of games that have higher incidence of Females to males. We also find that culture is often important with gamers from each country reacting more strongly to their own countries values, for example East Asia, particularly Japan enjoy anime style games whereas Western European and American players tend to be more general in their cultural outlook.


According to (https://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/2017-video-game-trends-and-statistics-whos-playing-what-and-why/ ) which gives overviews of age, gender, country and previous experience, and also https://honeysanime.com/japanese-gaming-vs-western-gaming-whats-the-difference/ we have can deduce that we have 4 basic categories as follows:

1. Age – Most players tend to be between 18-35 and ages range from 3 to 50+.
2. Gender - 59% of game players are male while 41% are female.
3. Culture – Kenji Inafune said according to the link above that “He feels with Japanese residents, they are more accustomed to anime and manga”. This shows that culture also plays an important role into categorising game players.

Upon which we have further classifications which have been derived from a 1996 paper by Richard Bartle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types  on the player preferred actions within any game. These are classified as follows:

1. Achievers
2. Explorers
3.  Killers
4. Socialisers

In addition to this, Richard Bartle amended this derivation to include an axis of “Implicit/Explicit” which results in 2 versions of each type. Thus achievers are split into Planners and Opportunists, Explorers into Scientists and Hackers, Socialisers into Networkers and Friends, and Killers into Politicians and Grievers. https://kotaku.com/5938464/theyve-narrowed-gamers-down-to-eight-fundamental-types-which-are-you Gives statistics on all 8 of the types (although slightly differently named to Bartle’s original work they do follow in much the same vein).

In my opinion, categorisation of gamers is extremely useful to the marketing departments to be able to target the correct type of audience for their particular game and this is backed up for instance by https://www.gamesparks.com/blog/game-marketing-strategy/ who state similarly in their “Target Audience” section. Thus , for example if they design a first person shooter game, but they need to achieve more sales to females, it is then useful to be able to put some socialising aspects such as more interaction with other people, more customisation of characters, etc. in the game as more women will then be interested in playing.