{"id":295,"date":"2019-02-21T15:48:49","date_gmt":"2019-02-21T21:48:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/?p=295"},"modified":"2019-02-21T15:48:50","modified_gmt":"2019-02-21T21:48:50","slug":"marketing-research-and-chasing-trends-in-video-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/2019\/02\/21\/marketing-research-and-chasing-trends-in-video-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketing, Research, and Chasing Trends in Video Games"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In a recent post<\/a> by Jerry Holkins, a.k.a. Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade fame, he talked about how some marketers of games may track how well a game is doing. He wrote of how Apex Legends is now dominating Twitch, and it has overtaken Fortnite in the top spot. Jerry notes how he once overheard a marketer say that, if you’re not near the top of Twitch’s list, you don’t exist. Jerry then wondered that, since viewers usually aren’t playing the game that they are watching, then should this really<\/em> be the main concern of a video game marketer? More of, should the number of viewers of a game be indicative of how well a game will generate revenue? He discusses how the “core metric” of advertising has changed from “page views” to “unique” views, and tracking these may not pay off. For media that’s found on the Internet, the Kindle, or even video games, these constant change-ups are less likely to pay off. As Jerry writes, “The best you can hope for in media is that a billionaire pays to keep you around as a pet, the same way a supervillain might deign to have a white cat close at hand.” And this is one of the tragedies of this sort of advertising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A marketer will collect all of this information (these “metrics”), hand it off to an analyst, and ask how those metrics transform into profit. The analyst will try their best, do some research, perform some careful analysis, and hopefully come up with a winning model. If it predicts how the market will go, then the analyst succeeds, the marketer succeeds, the firm succeeds, and everything is peachy. That doesn’t always work, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analysis is tough. The researcher doing the analysis must ensure that \nthey’ve had enough time to analyze the data, gain valuable insight, and \nhave explored it enough to know whether a change in one variable will actually<\/em>\n affect another variable (preferably the variable connected to profit). \nThis process could take weeks, months, or even years just to gain \nknowledge that describes the market. How should they approach analyzing \nit? What should be the methodology? Another problem could be with the \ndata collected. Was it tainted? Did the researcher have a large enough \nsample size? They don’t know until the analyst can make a good \nprediction of the entire trend of the target market. If that doesn’t \nwork, then the researcher has to collect more<\/em> data, and marketers don’t have that sort of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a potential market is found by a marketer, they must ensure \nthat, for their clients, they maximize the client’s profit. Usually, \ntime is of the essence; time wasted is money wasted. So when a \nresearcher finds a promising link between a “core metric” and the chance\n of profit, a marketer must<\/em> seize on it, or lose their job. So \nthey push on, hoping that the market research gained is a solid lead to \nprofit. Since market research is, presumably, an exact science, where \nconclusions are carefully derived from good data and unbiased \nobservations, the link that the marketer finds between the “core metric”\n and the gain in profit may be only as good as a roll of the dice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Market research, especially for markets pertaining to video games, \nmovies, digital books, and web advertisements, is difficult to pin down.\n While market research in the Internet age has matured over the past 25 \nyears, with research on which models work, and which trends could pay \noff, marketers are still chasing that dragon, that metric found in some \nmarket which will lead them to riches. Sadly, the research and analysis \nthey may do could be incomplete, either due to not enough research, a \nsmall sample size, poor data, or just incorrect observations. Since the \nmarketer has to advertise and push the product in a market, while the \nmarket still has profit to be gained, they cannot wait while the data is\n analyzed, trends are found, and facts are verified. And so, the public \nwill hear about another market force, a new “core metric”, every \nquarter, every year, when a researcher publishes a hot find about a new \nvideo game, a new book, a new Internet fad, or just a new source of \nentertainment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marketing trends change constantly, so can a marketer quickly find the best metrics for this trend? Turns out that it’s pretty hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,139,31],"tags":[141,140,142,23],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","category-marketing","category-video-games","tag-marketing","tag-penny-arcade","tag-twitch","tag-video-game"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonsblog.place\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}