The ‘Player Motivations and Archetypes’ toolset now enables game developers, investors, and marketers to gain unique insight into their mobile gaming audience’s preferences and profiles, across demographics and genres for the US App Store
Helsinki, October 6, 2020 — Mobile game insight and analytics specialist GameRefinery today announced that it’s recently launched ‘Player Motivations and Archetypes’ feature has received a huge update to provide market-level analysis of players on the US App Store. Whereas the tool had previously analysed individual games, this new upgrade can now look across entire genres and demographics to spot broader trends in the mobile games market. Some of the key market-level findings unearthed by the new ‘Player Motivations and Archetypes’ tool include (see included graphs in links for all these data points):
- How games mostly played by females (games with +80% of players being female) appeal to motivations such as escapism, expression and mastery (e.g. Farm Saga Heroes, Hollywood U: Rising Stars, etc.)
- How games mostly played by males (games with +80% of players being male) fare better if they include social and competitive features (e.g. Gods and Glory: War of Thrones, Strike of Nations: Army Battle, etc.), followed by excitement and thrill features (e.g. Survival Heroes, Modern Combat 5, etc.)
- Players over 44 years-old tend to gravitate towards casino games and are very highly motivated by collecting treasure (e.g. Slots: Pharaoh’s Way)
- Younger generations (25-44 years old) in comparison, are motivated by a much more comprehensive range of drivers, such as escapism, mastery and social features (e.g. HayDay, CyberHunter, Transformers: Earth Wars, etc.)
- We know women like puzzle games, but why exactly? Our overlay of puzzles and women here shows you exactly why puzzle games match what women want
“Knowing what features, motivations and drivers are behind the success, or failure, of different games across markets, will equip game publishers with new vital information during game-development stages,” said Markus Råmark, Co-Founder and CEO at GameRefinery. “Expanding our motivations feature to cover market-level insights, as well as game features and genres, was the next logical step in terms of evolving our data set.”
GameRefinery originally developed its motivations feature by interviewing over 10,000 gamers in different countries and then linked the insight with its existing data as well as applying data science and statistical modelling. The depth of insight generated means that GameRefinery can estimate which motivational drivers are behind a game’s specific performance and audience. For example, GameRefinery’s data suggests that Fortnite caters to “Thrill Seekers”, “Skill Masters”, “Kings of the Hill”, but is not likely to appeal as much to players who are motivated by “Thinking”.
This updated version of ‘Player Motivations and Archetypes’ is currently available to all GameRefinery customers who purchase motivations as part of their plan and will enable users to research player motivations across markets, categories, genres and subgenres, including all games within the database. GameRefinery plans to roll out insights across more territories in the very near future.
GameRefinery has also produced the following infographic providing a visual representation of the tool and the data insights it provides – it is also available on their website. More information can be found here.
——– Ends ———
About GameRefinery
Based in Finland, GameRefinery is the leading provider of feature-level data in the mobile games market, with an ever-growing database covering hundreds of thousands of games. GameRefinery’s customers include leading mobile games companies such as Zynga, SquareEnix, King and FunPlus. The GameRefinery platform uses unique algorithms and a team of expert analysts to help developers, investors and publishers delve into the very building blocks of mobile games to uncover the drivers behind success, to understand why games are successful and how to achieve the same from pre-production to LiveOps.
