Market Research

   Companies that do the most market research in the interactive media industry are often the most successful because they know what their target audience wants and what they would buy. Market research is crucial and must be done by interactive media industry companies to give them a very good images of what potential buyers like, dislike and what they would spend money on. Companies who don't undertake research, often primary research, are not so successful because they are pretty much running blind and hoping somebody is actually going to buy their product even though they don't know what people want to play and what they would buy so quite often they don't sell much at all.

   There are two types of research that people can use, Secondary and Primary. Secondary research is information and statistics taken from another source from books or online for example. Primary research is done directly by the person(s) themselves. Primary research is better because the information is fresh and directly from potential buyers whereas secondary research could be out of date, out of context and may not have all the information the company needs to reach full potential.

Types of primary research:
Questionairres
interviews
surveys


Types of secondary research:
Internet
books
newspapers
magazines

   Both methods of research are useful in different ways. Primary research is often done to find out information on their own products whereas secondary is done to find out about the market and what they should be aiming to do with their product.

   The companies in the interactive media industry should use surveys or questionnaires to conduct their primary research. Potential buyers should be directly interviewed or it should be done online on the companies website so people looking for their products can tell the company directly what they want.

   An interview often produces qualitative data which is opinions and words from the interviewees. This data is useful because the company can get into the minds of the target audience and know what they like and dislike and what they want to see in future products whereas quantitative data (numbers data), often taken from surveys only gives a rough idea of what the audience wants unless the questions give good results. Quantitative data shows how many people dislike or like things but doesn't say why. Qualitative data gives answers and reasons but the data is hard to keep track of.

Some secondary research we did included looking at apps for the Apple and Android phones. Below is a graph showing how Android's sales passed Apple's and is still rising. Although android started off small they suddenly grew in 2011.

Android was predicted to become almost level with Apple looking at the graph below but they were not expected to overtake them so drastically.

In these two graphs it shows that Apple and Android are the two leading competitors far ahead of all other competition. The bar chart below shows this the best. It is interesting to see the percentage of free apps on Android is much higher than apple in March 2011. Maybe this is why Android overtook Apple? It is hard to tell because these graphs are old and from separate sources.

   Our research on what makes a good flash game included a quick questionnaire including questions like:

What do you like and dislike about these games? - Qualitative data

What would you change about these games? - Qualitative data

How much are you willing to pay for a small flash game? - Quantitative data

What platform would you play on? - Quantitative data

   We asked these questions to get a good idea of what people think about the game and quick data on what people use and what they would pay for such games. A good balance of quantitative and qualitative data is always good. This data is primary research.

   The results we got from these questions gave us the impression most people like simple, challenging, fun and colourful uniques art styles. Qualitative data like this gives us an idea of what people want to see in our game and how much they would pay for it. Without this primary research  we could have made an overpriced game nobody wanted. Secondary research would not have helped here because that data would have been targeted at another company who may not be making a similar product and it may old data that is not relevant anymore.

   With this information we improved our game by making it more colourful with different backgrounds, better characters and obstacles were easier to avoid and more obvious because of the colour scheme.

This presentation shows our progress:

http://prezi.com/xbtopt6zx7wf/our-reskinned-game/