How Video Game Audience Research Builds Lasting Communities

Connecting with your audience is essential to  any game’s success, whether it’s a new release or an ongoing title. Careful attention goes into messaging, asset creation, event planning, and timing announcements  to ensure the right audiences receive a lasting impression that leaves them eagerly awaiting additional updates.

Making an impact starts with identifying the right audience. A cute animal adventure with a cozy aesthetic would find little success by sponsoring content creators who focus on FPS titles. And the next big thing in the extraction shooter genre likewise isn’t going to resonate with people who see it while browsing their favorite Stardew Valley modding site. Luckily, in today’s world there are countless avenues marketing agencies utilize to ensure all efforts go towards reaching the right gamers. There are social media groups dedicated to different genres. Press outlets have a wide reach that there are websites purely dedicated to the top news in any genre you can think of. Paid advertising has been boiled down to such a science that spends can be directed to users that trigger certain keyword interests. Everything has become streamlined so if there’s an audience that can be identified, there is a way to reach them.

Maintaining and Cultivating

The most successful games put effort into not only finding their communities, but maintaining and cultivating them. This is especially apparent for online games. Something as simple as a balancing update serves to re-enforce what a community sees as a developer’s true vision for how their game is meant to be played. One thing that many don’t often think too hard about are the communities that end up finding a game and taking it to be their own playground. One of the most obvious examples of this are games that their communities took upon themselves to mod.

Successful game marketing doesn’t stop once you identify an audience, it requires listening to how that audience evolves and supporting the communities players create, and to prove this it’s good to look at games that successfully pull this off. With Grand Theft Auto VI on the horizon, it’s interesting to look at the last title in the series Grand Theft Auto V as an example. To simplify, we can look at two of the audiences that had to be found for the launch. These audiences can be boiled down to those who would resonate with the singleplayer experience and story of the game, and those that were going to connect with the game because of the online play launched shortly after the release of the base singleplayer experience. Now obviously there was going to be some overlap with these audiences, and Rockstar did an incredible job with their marketing and brand as a whole leading GTA V to becoming the second most bought game in history (third if you count all of Tetris as one game). What couldn’t have been planned for was the shift in the community of the game years after its release.

Look at Grand Theft Auto V on Twitch and what do you see? Almost every stream up at any given moment is dedicated to GTA V RP on the modded client FiveM. These gamers are people who took a game they love and dove deeper into customizing it to be an even more immersive and social experience. Rockstar took full advantage of this opportunity by not only acknowledging this growing community, but actually beginning to support this community directly. They bought the company, Cfx.re, that actually developed the mod platform and have been supporting them as a subsidiary, further establishing that they are in-tune with what people are enjoying out of their games over a decade after it was released. 

Now not everyone can be Rockstar and GTA, but these ideas are essential still in reaching an audience that will not only play your games, but that will love your games for years after they release. For that to happen though it’s important to not only be attentive, but also reactive. When modders come in and create something cool in your game, shout them out. When players form communities of their own and play in ways you didn’t develop for, pay attention to them in your next patch. Little things go a long way in not only connecting with a community, but also in getting players to turn your game into something bigger than you could on their own. Because of this, at Reverb, audience research informs everything from media targeting and creator selection to campaign messaging and post-launch community engagement. To get the greatest impact out of all marketing efforts, real-time audience monitoring is essential when allocating what marketing dollars go where.

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