Market Research

As I am designing a mobile game, I began my research by first looking into the demographic for people who play other mobile games. I used Statista to view this information and determine ages and genders that I should target more.

The data suggests that I should equally spread my efforts between male and female mobile users, with slightly more marketing aimed at the female audience, who are between the ages of 14 and 49. I chose to initially focus in the UK, as there is a substantial interest in action and arcade games here, and I plan to then expand out to other countries.

I also researched companies who make similar games: Halfbrick, who make Jetpack Joyride, and Ketchapp, who make quick arcade games that are designed to be replayed. When researching the demographics using their websites, I found the following data.

This is global data, so is not as useful as the data from Statista, but from the charts we can clearly see that my target audience would most likely be under 35. We can also see that more than half of that audience is over 24.

I reviewed more data from Statista that explored mobile user’s activity when using the internet.

Not all of these users play mobile games, only 40% do, however, we can still extrapolate some useful data here. To begin, we can say that this data shows that it is likely the demographic for mobile games also use their phones to: use search engines, visit social networking and write/read emails. This means that, when marketing, it would be a good idea to put out ads on search engines and social media; the chart below shows that most of Halfbrick’s traffic goes through Facebook and Galaxy Attack: Alien Shooter, another similar game, also uses Facebook as their only social media platform. Therefore, Facebook would be the best choice for most of these ads.

It is also reasonable to expect, from the Statista data, that the demographic might be people who are regularly on the move and use maps/route planners; as well as this they may chat and send messages, listen to music and watch videos, shop online and use online banking.

It is unlikely that they make internet calls, or sell items online.

More data from Statista shows popular mobile games in the UK, the most popular of which is Subway Surfers. This is a similar game to Propulsion, in that it has simple predictable patterns that players can adapt to and, utilising a high score system, it encourages players to return and beat previous runs.

Subway Surfers has the highest daily active users

Another survey (below) from Statista shows that 72% of mobile gamers spend 5 or more hours a week playing mobile games. This suggests that another good place to put ads would be in these mobile games, as free games often have ad breaks, as they would quickly reach this audience.

The data above also shows that arcade games produce most of their revenue from ads, when compared to other genres, so placing ads in games would reach the correct target audience, out of the larger mobile gaming audience, even faster.

I also used data from the social accounts of Halfbrick, Ketchapp and Galaxy Attack to find out common interests in their audiences. I discovered that Galaxy Attack uses regular competitions in their social media. Jetpack Joyride uses gameplay videos and gifs, as well as crossover events with other IPs. Ketchapp uses videos of gameplay and teases their audience with quotes like, “beat this high score!”