Yes, but that’s implied when you mentioned Nick Yee’s work. The strength of his work is that it was based on feedback collected from players. The weakness is that the data comes from a very specific game at a very specific time in its lifecycle. (I think the main reason he didn’t find an equivalent of the Explorer archetype from Bartle was because EQ was pretty well explored-out by the time he did his research.)

Most of the readily-available data is going to come from other games. This means that your data is going to be feedback collected from other games. So, that’s why I brought up feedback as an issue. If you relied too heavily on either Bartle’s or Yee’s work, you might miss another type of player that hasn’t shown up in our games yet.

Again, I think in practical terms that you really can’t apply this lesson until after you launch. You can try to tailor your game to a specific audience (“hardcore PvPers”), but if another audience shows up you have to roll with the punches. I think it also takes a considerable amount of experience to really understand what a particular audience wants (not just what they *say* they want), and the easiest path for a less experienced designer is to focus an audience type that he or she would be part of. Developers also shouldn’t be surprised if people from an unexpected demographic, like M59′s women players in a hardcore PvP game.

Lots of subtlety here for the unwary designer. People who have quite a few years under our belts understand this better, I think.

There’s a difference, though, between asking for feedback and gathering hard data. You’ll notice I didn’t mention ‘feedback’ anywhere in my post, and for good reason. *grin* Of course, getting info on motivations usually means asking your players why they do things and any survey like that is going to rely on their perception of what they want just like simple feedback does. But you can tailor a motivation survey to try to get at deeper motivations instead of surface feedback on a particular feature. The phrase “market research” conjures up focus groups, which in my experience are pretty useless, but if you strip it down to its actual meaning — doing research on your market — I think that it’s a more useful concept.

And you have a very good point about the difficulty of collecting data before launch. Expensive market research, even if it’s carefully tailored to get at underlying motivations and not just feedback on a feature set, is just not as good as being able to gather real data on what your real players are doing. But you’ve got to have something to help narrow down on your core features during early delevopment. Hmm …

I wonder if established MMO companies that run their own games but also publish outside games — I’m thinking SOE especially — would be amenable to sharing habit data with the teams they are publishing. Habit data feels less trade-secrety to me than, say, subscription numbers, but would be a lot more useful for a new project. And if it helps the published game, it helps the publisher. It seems unlikely, but if I had a game that SOE was publishing (that was reasonably similar to an existing SOE game) it might be worth asking about.

Really, it’s almost impossible to tell what your audience wants, even if you do a lot of expensive market research. Many designers I respect have said that the designer’s job is to give the players things they didn’t even know they wanted. Relying on feedback too heavily is a sure way only do what’s been done before. At some point the designers need to trust that they know what’s fun for a wide (enough) selection of people and go with it. Maybe that means “designing for oneself” since this is the market the designer knows well, but if it turns out to be a great game then mission accomplished.

I think the important thing to do is once you have an audience, that you do try to understand them. As you pointed out, you can’t swap them for a new audience, so you need to understand your current audience if you want your game to succeed. In my opinion, your advice applies more for after you’ve launched and found your audience. But, again, don’t focus on your existing audience too heavily, but don’t ignore them, either!

My thoughts,

~Cyndre