Who is this toy for or how to identify the target audience

Many developers find it difficult to answer the question “for whom do you create it?”. As surveys and rich personal experience show, most of the answers to such questions are too vague or even conjecture.



First of all, you create a game for a specific target audience. If, at an early stage of development, you have incorrectly identified your target audience, then the whole process will go along the curve in the wrong direction. When the games do not meet the expectations of the players, you can safely blame the game designers, who from the very beginning made the wrong choice of Central Asia or even scored on this process.
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With the flourishing of the mobile market, the gaming audience has grown significantly, which led to an even greater division of players into categories. Most often, players are divided into casual, midkorny and hardcore.

You, probably, often hear such a characterization of players and you are no exception. Now these are almost the most popular and at the same time the most complicated terms in the gaming industry.



Many developers, and even marketers, should have recognized that they do not quite understand the meaning of these concepts. And yet, developers reassure themselves that their superficial or erroneous knowledge should be enough, for this is at least some definition. In most cases, such vague concepts are more likely to have a negative effect on product creation than help to make it perfect. Even more confusing, some particularly intelligent individuals equate these concepts with the player's skill. Kazuali mole noobs, and hardcore progamers. But then how to deal with players who fit into all three categories and play radically different games?



With the advent of in-game purchases, players began to be divided by the level of financial opportunities.



I would like to stop a little more on this issue. Let's try to revive users.





The most famous problem today is the confidence of developers that their game is suitable for everyone. You can find a lot of games that have gained popularity among game critics, but have not been able to bite off a large piece of the cake of popularity among the players. A toy can be made as wonderful as you like, only for whom? A conclusion that suggests itself - everyone can play your game, but it’s not at all necessary that everyone will like it. “My game will suit absolutely all types of players” - a phrase that gives absolutely no useful information in terms of making the right design decisions.

Persons

But how to make decisions that directly affect the experience of the player, without understanding for whom you actually make them? To solve this problem, you need to address the needs of users. For the past 20 years, one tool has been effectively used in the software industry. His name is PERSONS.

Software design pioneer and programmer Alan Cooper has always strived to get an easy-to-use product at the output. He was shaken by the mere thought that users would consider his software too complicated and confusing.

At the time, when creating software, first of all they thought about technical efficiency. Alan realized that in order to get suitable software you need to break this pattern and start taking into account the needs of users. So it turned out that at first he asked potential users what they want, and then he proceeded to design. As a result, after endless interviews and tons of information gathered, he divided users into groups with similar meanings. He called each group a PERSON * name of the person *.



Cooper realized that PERSONS is the perfect tool for creating truly user-friendly software. With such amounts of information on hand, you can move mountains. It became clear what functions users need, why they want them, in what form to present them, the difficulties they may encounter. It is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of decisions in relation to each person, and then it will be clear which of them is closest to the concept of “our Central Asian Organization”.

Now designers do not need to make subjective decisions and doubt their correctness. Thanks to the collected and verified data, we get undeniable facts. You can forget about team holivars, because we rely on statistically objective information obtained from our potential users.

Persons are very helpful in limiting the flow of fantasy to the project team. If we reason from the point of view of the benefits of each idea for a particular person, we get rid of a lot of headaches and spam in the process of generating ideas.

The guys at our key person have little free time for the game, maybe we won't show a 5 minute trailer every time we enter the game?

Person creation is a very laborious process. Do not try to deceive yourself - collect data from real people, and do not invent it yourself.



The devil is not so terrible as he is painted. You have already understood about the most difficult and time-consuming process - interviewing potential users to create people. But there are ways to achieve a good result easier. One of such methods is analytics of existing data. Another way is to watch players who are similar to your target audience. See if they play your game like you expected. The only drawback is that a more or less working product is needed to work with analytics or watching players.

If you still think that your game is suitable for everyone, try adding some extreme people who will make you doubt. What if the user has never played games before, can he play your game? What if he is blind or deaf? Try now to assess the availability of your game.

Playtest - product testing by real users similar to your Central Asian with receiving feedback. Allows you to adequately look at your product from the side and fix shoals at the initial stage of development. Another advantage of the person - you know exactly who you need to attract for playasting. If you are accepting non-conforming people to playasting, then what design solutions can you expect in the end?

Let's look at the situation that you held a playtest and included 3 people in it, each person consisted of ten people who looked like your target audience. In the end, you realized that two people used your product as expected and made useful remarks, while the third person was completely different from your expectations. Now you can decide whether to refine the product to satisfy all 3 people or throw out the excess and focus on two people. In any case, you will have real evidence of any of your actions.

Person Creation Example

1. Demographic information.

- location
- floor
- what education
- income level
- family size
- what are the needs

2. Lifestyle.

- income level
- how they decide to spend their money
- Spans or conservatives

3. Interests.

- how to spend your free time
- having a hobby
- preferences in sports

4. Influence.

- independent or influenced
- based on what makes decisions

5. Personal goals.

- what they want to achieve in life
- what needs are not sufficiently satisfied

6. Emotions.

- reaction to positive events
- reaction to negative events

7. Behavior.

- How and when are they willing to spend money
- What does this have to do with my project?
- Attitude to discounts

8. What they want to get from your project.

- do they need a tutorial
- do they need additional services
- you need to communicate with other players

...............

Conclusion

For more than 20 years, the creation of persons is an effective working tool in software development, I think it will not be difficult to adapt it to games. After all, they will help not only to make the right design decisions and understand the whole team for whom they create the game, but also significantly reduce the marketing budget. Your task is to attract only those who are really interested in your product, those who will pay and will be quite active.

You should be ashamed if after reading this article you will not create persons. Obviously, this will help make your product better, reduce development time and reduce the risk of failing in such a competitive market.