Now, they both might have similar demographic parameters (like “female gamers” mentioned before) — they’re mostly male, many in their late twenties, but they’re so different in their gaming and purchasing habits it makes no sense trying to fit them into one category. “Core gamer” is a nice term to flaunt around when talking about your personal habits, but it’s not a viable term for defining your audience. It’s too broad and too vague.

The rise of INSERT_TERM_HERE

I get it. It makes for a good headline “The rise of MOBA”. “The fall of core gamer”. “The rise of China”. And it’s usually an interesting read, filled with data. Data that’s both well-described and convincing, because if MOBA are on the rise and core gamers are no longer the majority, it makes sense to apply this knowledge somehow, right?

And of course you should, but don’t target any new market or new audience just because you’ve suddenly realized it exists. Dota 2 audience exists, there are around 55 million gamers that have tried it and 9.5 million gamers have played it in the last two weeks.

Does it mean they’re enjoying MOBA? Yes.

Does it mean they will even take a peek at yours? Nope, they’re too busy.

And same goes for the lucrative Chinese mobile market, by the way.

World of Warcraft market

A good example here would be the success of World of Warcraft that, as analysts explained to us ten years ago, has “vastly expanded MMORPG market beyond all expectations”.

Except it didn’t. It created a new market, World of Warcraft market, gathered new audience from other games in different genres, attracted quite a few people that haven’t played before, but haven’t expanded MMORPG market much. There were no big successful MMORPGs after World of Warcraft not because WoW took all the audience, but because there were never too many people in “MMORPG but not World of Warcraft” market to begin with.

I think when you start thinking in terms of audiences for individual games instead of broad vague “MMORPG crowd”, “MOBA crowd” you’ll start to realize that sometimes a huge success of one big title doesn’t mean much for everyone else. It doesn’t expand existing market or destroy it, it creates a new one.

What about “usual” games?

And here is the interesting thing — there is a market and audience for smaller games, otherwise Steam wouldn’t exist. Many people are trying many new games. They don’t spend hundreds of hours in one title, they’re, you know, your average gamers, you used to hear about a lot.

But there is a catch:

There aren’t many of them.

Classic “core gamers” — the ones that play most major hits or jump from indie game to indie game — are relatively rare when compared to overall gaming audience.

In fact, 1% of Steam gamers own 33% of all copies of games on Steam. 20% of Steam gamers own 88% of games. That’s even more than Pareto principle suggests.

So, to be a member of the “1% group” of Steam gamers you have to own 107 games or more. That’s not much considering how Steam is selling games at discount prices and how easy it is to obtain games in bundles.

We’re talking about 1.3M PC gamers that could fall into definition of “core gamer that buys several games per year”. And that’s including discounted games as well.

Of course we could extend it to, I don’t know, “softcore gamers” — the 20% that own 88% games. To be included you’d have to own 4 (FOUR) games or more on Steam — not exactly a huge number, right?

Let me repeat it once more, because it’s really important.

Various studies suggest that there are 700–800 million of PC gamers. It’s probably true, but it doesn’t mean much for your game. Because if you’re developing a downloadable game for Steam you’re not even fighting for 135M of its active users,

you’re fighting for the attention of 1.3 million gamers

that are actually buying lots of games.

The 1% group.

Consoles

I’m not including console audience here because I don’t have enough data to make any claims. I’d guess that console crowd has more gamers that buy several games per year instead of sticking to one hit title, but that’s just it — a guess.

TL;DR

Gamers are different. Don’t overgeneralize. Just because a gamer plays one game doesn’t mean he’ll try other games in this genre or on this platform. The core audience of PC games market that supports developers with smaller titles is rather tiny.

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