(upbeat music)
Hi everyone. My name is Hyun.
I'm a senior user experience researcher here at Google Play.
Growing up, I loved playing games
and even now, I play games to stay connected with my friends.
Especially nowadays, it’s a main method of staying connected
with my brother who lives over 2000 miles apart from me.
So after work, we’ll hop onto a Discord chat,
while either pretending to be Vikings sailing the seas of Valheim
or playing our favorite childhood games like Age of Empires.
Now, not everyone plays games like me.
I tend to play games to socialize.
However, others play games to wind down for the night,
like playing a relaxing game of Solitaire.
Others, use games as a way to be someone completely different,
detach from their everyday lives, and use it as a private getaway.
As a UX researcher,
I study all different types of people who play games
and help our team understand mobile gamers around the world.
And today, I wanted to share some of these research insights
and stories about different players with you.
I share our approach,
how we have looked at different types of mobile gamers around the world,
how you could look at your players.
As I share our approach, I’ll also share some insight about these gamers
and their behaviors so that you can picture the ecosystem
of mobile gamers around the world,
so that wherever you are in the development process,
whether you're starting out creating your game
or creating a new event for your game or creating a marketing strategy,
you can better tailor it to your audience.
What we’ll share today is from user research from our interviews and surveys
of over 20,000 adults who play games on various devices around the world.
I want to start us off with an example.
Let's say that we're interested in the overall satisfaction
of playing games on a mobile device.
Now, when we look at aggregated data and say something like,
93% of mobile gamers are satisfied playing games on their mobile device,
it’s interesting, but only with this one data point,
it may not be as super useful,
because there are so many mobile gamers around the world.
Who are the 7% that are not satisfied?
Are there differences in satisfaction depending on the game you play?
How about depending on the type of device they use to play?
There are many ways to dig into this.
As an example, let's choose one aspect.
Let’s say country and look at satisfaction differences per country.
Then now we start to see some interesting stories.
Now, you can see that mobile gamers from certain countries,
like from Japan and South Korea,
show lower rate of satisfaction compared to others.
When we dig a bit deeper and separate overall satisfaction
by some metric we care about, like country in this example,
it can help you hone in and dive into these differences.
For instance, we did additional analysis
and saw that all of those who are not satisfied
with mobile gaming in South Korea and Japan,
more than 1 in 10 respondents said that was due to in-app purchases,
especially those that affect the gameplay.
And you can connect these data points to qualitative data as well.
The topic of micro-transaction that will affect gameplay
came up often during our interview with mobile gamers as well.
During the interviews, gamers talked about micro-transaction
that give advantages to the gameplay, rather than aesthetic changes.
And this has actually discouraged
some of the most competitive players to play the game,
since they felt like they could not separate the skill and the money spent.
In addition, when we dug into the drivers of satisfaction,
we learned that different countries had different reasons
for liking to play games on their mobile devices.
For example, one of the top drivers of satisfaction with mobile games
in survey respondents from United States and Japan was the content of the game.
They cared most about how enjoyable or fun the game was above all else.
Now that might not be too surprising.
However, in Korean and India, what they valued most
were the games that can be played on the go, the games they can play anywhere and any time
in addition to the content of the game.
And in Germany, respondents noted that games with good performance
that run smoothly on their devices, as well as nice graphics,
were the top reasons they’re satisfied with mobile gaming.
Now, these country differences can highlight different expectations and cultural norms
and help you create a marketing strategy unique to these countries.
However, there are many unique mobile gamers
within each country to classify all of them as just gamers
in the United States or gamers in Korea.
For example, when we did an in-depth research in South Korea and talked to 21 people,
we saw a huge difference in how each of them thought about gaming.
For some, games were something that they wanted to avoid
or it's just an activity to fill in the time.
But for some, gaming was a core part of their self-identity.
They cannot imagine a life without gaming.
Like this, even among the 21 people we chatted with,
there were huge differences on how people played games and thought about games.
Then, what is a good way to look at your audience?
I talked a bit about the approach we’ve taken to look at mobile gamers.
You can take this similar approach and dissect your game’s audience as well.
My recommendation is to try to get a holistic understanding of your audience.
In our case, this was mobile gamers.
So, not just what they do inside of the game,
but what do they do outside of the game?
What do they think and feel about the games that they play?
In order to get this holistic understanding of mobile gamers,
during our research, we looked at the following factors:
First, the gameplay behavior.
How often and how much did they play games on mobile
and other platforms, and what type of games do they play?
Then, monetary investment they made in games.
How much do they spend on mobile gaming?
And peripheral activities. When they’re not actively playing the game,
what type of game gaming related activities do they partake in?
Do they watch videos or streams on YouTube or look up and read blog articles?
If so, what type?
Review of the best games in 2020 or looking up new builds for a speed run?
And finally, how do they feel about gaming?
Do they consider gaming as a critical part of their daily routine
or is it something to spend time while waiting in a line at a DMV?
Why do we do that?
Why do we increase the length of our survey to look at all of these factors
rather than looking at one factor, like country or genre, to segment gamers?
In many cases, when we look at one factor at a time,
it’s harder to see a full story.
If we take genre as an example, in a most recent survey,
we saw that about half of mobile gamers played puzzle or word games.
When you hear that, you might expect these gamers
to be casual players who are not really into gaming.
However, in our analysis and other reports,
we found that all types of gamers play puzzle or word games on mobile,
even the most dedicated, hardcore PC or console gamers
who are very enthusiastic about gaming.
So, when we take this type of holistic approach
to look at many of these factors together,
we start to see meaningful, distinct groups emerge.
In our case, we saw four types of mobile gamers:
enthusiasts, busy hobbyists, persistent puzzlers, and dabblers.
I’ll share a little bit of these with you, their characteristics and their behavior.
Enthusiasts are passionate mobile gamers
who spend a lot of time and money on gaming across platforms,
particularly in action role-playing games
as well as partaking in gaming peripheral activities,
such as reading blog articles or watching gameplay videos.
Busy hobbyists are proud and engaged mobile gamers
who participate in peripheral activities and spend money on games,
but they do not partake much time in actually playing the game.
Persistent puzzlers invest a lot of time in playing the game,
but they're not as emotionally invested nor spend much money in gaming.
Finally, we have the dabblers who’re not as invested in gaming
and they’re more indifferent.
They spend little time or money on mobile gaming.
What’s really interesting about these groups is that there are distinct differences
that we would have missed if we did not look at all the factors together.
If we only looked at gameplay time,
we would have treated enthusiasts and persistent puzzlers the same.
However, these two groups have very different attitudes towards gaming
and play different type of games,
so how you would market to these two groups would be different.
Similarly, we would not have been able to tease apart these busy hobbyists.
And busy hobbyist is a very interesting group because in terms of gameplay time,
they're very similar to dabblers with low gaming hours per week.
However, in terms of their spending and sentiment towards gaming,
they were more similar to the enthusiasts.
What happened was that this captures a group of gamers
who are dedicated and still love playing games,
but certain circumstances happen.
The most common ones I’ve heard was marriage and kids,
and they were not able to invest much of their time in playing the game.
One of the gamers I’ve interviewed has captured this sentiment.
They said, “During college days, we used to meet four to five times a week
and play together. Now it’s hard to meet up.
Many of my friends have moved away for their jobs
or got busy starting their own family.”
So, instead, they try to optimize their gameplay time
by either spending money or looking up gameplay videos or reading up blog articles.
So, why is it important to distinguish these groups?
It's because how they interact with your game will be different.
For instance, let’s say that you’re planning to launch a new in-game event
to celebrate the New Year’s.
Who do you think will engaged most with your content?
Would it be enthusiasts and persistent puzzlers
who spend the most time playing your games?
What we saw in our survey was that
an in-game event will be much more likely to be engaged
by enthusiasts and busy hobbyists rather than persistent puzzlers and dabblers.
Nearly half of the enthusiasts
reported participating weekly or more in an in-game event,
while the majority of the persistent puzzlers
and dabblers say that they have never participated in an in-game event.
Similarly, there is a significant impact
on how you should reach your target audience when marketing your game as well.
To set some context here, year over year, gamers tell us
that they learn about new games through word of mouth,
followed by in-game ads, gaming videos, direct search, and social media.
This year, we decided to deep dive into social media.
Ehile a third of surveyed mobile gamers
learn about new mobile games through social media or online forums,
about half of enthusiasts learn about new mobile games through these methods.
This means that when a new in-game event is launching,
one of the effective ways to reach these enthusiasts
may be through social media or online forums.
Now, there are so many ways
you can learn about your audience who play your games.
Your marketing strategy and your in-game events
will be much more successful if you understand your audience
and create a targeted strategy for them.
And to understand your audience,
I encourage you to take a holistic approach of looking at your data,
look at their behavior, sentiment,
and even more about their context outside of gaming.
I want to leave you with a couple of thoughts.
Mobile gaming ecosystem has grown dramatically over the past couple of years
and it’s really encouraging to see how excited mobile gamers are for the future.
Over half of the surveyed mobile gamers noted that the quality as well as innovation
and creativity of mobile gaming is changing for the better.
And games play a big role in people's lives.
This gamer from Denver told us, "Gaming is very important to me.
It’s helpful emotionally, and it’s more like a therapy
where I can disconnect from troubles of the real world.”
I hope this talk helped you understand mobile gamers and gave you different ideas
on how you can dig into your data to understand your audience.
Thank you.
(upbeat music)