I’ve recently been pondering a question after it was brought up in another topic:
I think this is a great question.
How do you find your game’s target audience? When should you consider it? And any other insight is much appreciated.
I’m asking because I’m thinking about the audience of my personal passion project, Monkanics.
I’ve already earned a small community via the release and failure of version 0.1. Since I marketed Monkanics in the Godot Forum, we have mostly Godot Forum goblins like myself in the Monkanics discord.
I think this is one of those questions like SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The answer keeps changing. I’ve seen some crazy things over the years when it comes to marketing.
I hate to say it, but targeted ads are a good choice. They’re cheap and you get charged for clickthrough often. Which means you can use them to find your target audience.
I think another way these days is to put your game up on Steam. People who play it and like it will populate the Steam recommendation algorithm. I get recommendations all the time for games that have only 50 to 200 reviews. Occasionally some that have no reviews. “We think you’ll like this because…”
So if you don’t know your audience, get it out there and see what happens.
If this was a few years ago, I would tell you to post tasty little video dev updates on Twitter and your audience might find you. But most of the people at least in my circle have since abandoned ship, and I myself haven’t been on there in over a year, so no idea what the temperature is like these days.
I just tossed it out there to see what happens. Finding a target audience (if you even want to have one, that is) can be difficult, especially when making something that doesn’t really fit into any category.
I think for games where you can just look at a screenshot or a short video and you know pretty much what kind of game it is, it may be easier to establish a connection to potential players (like, you can look at a screenshot of WoW and you’ll probably know what kind of gameplay to expect).
If people look at what you’ve made and don’t know what they’re looking at or what to expect, it may take longer for your game to gain an audience.
But to be honest, I do have little experience, so I don’t know if any of what I said is even how it works. It is just something I’ve been thinking about after putting my work out there.
For example if you are making an RPG, there are many types, JRPGs, MMOs. CRPGs, WRPGs, turn based etc. And then advertise your game on forums, discord etc where those people hang out. (you seem to be already doing that anyway)
Whereas lets say you were making a Roguelike, the mechanics would be mostly the same and its more about the actual style of the game and the setting. In which case it might be less about finding the target audience, and more about why your game is different from other Roguelikes.
In reality the ‘target’ audience is already found (unless its a completely new genre) , its not about finding them, its about engaging with them, which you already seem to understand and have in hand I would say.