What do we actually know about WotC's market research?

[kenobi65]

Holy crow. I had no conception it cost that kind of money. If I'd had to guess I'd damn near have shaved an entire digit off those figures.

Ayup. When I first started in this business, I was stunned at how expensive it could be. When I was fresh out of grad school, and a 24-year-old market research analyst working at a big personal-care products company, I was in charge of multi-million dollar annual market research budgets.

The cost of a big study like this is exactly why very few game companies (WotC and Games Workshop, and *maybe* White Wolf in a good year) can afford to do this kind of thing.

Now, you can do a research study for less, but there are a couple of factors in this particular study that have a serious impact on the cost:

1) They did the survey in two stages: the first, small survey that went to a really broad sample (the "screener"), then the second, larger survey that went to people who were identified in the screener as being gamers.

2) The sample size was pretty big.

3) It was probably a fairly long and complex survey, which takes more time (and thus money) to develop, write, and program, and requires a more significant incentive to the respondents.

4) There was likely a fair amount of back-end analytics done, which can be a huge cost factor. Not knowing how much of that actually got done on this project is why my back-of-the-envelope estimate is so broad.

5) They hired one of the big, full-service research companies to do this (pretty much a must-have for a project of this scale).

On the other hand, I will routinely do some kinds of research studies for $10K or so. But, those are smaller studies, done by smaller companies, with short simple questionnaires, relatively small sample sizes (200 or so), and no back-end analytics (the supplier just delivers the tabulations to me, and I do the analysis).

 

[kenobi65]

I would suspect that an age survey done on WOTC would show a fair bit lower age of gamer.

I could be wrong.

Though I doubt you are.

The similar polls that have been done here on EN World, asking people "how old were you when you started playing" have their big bump in the distribution around 10-14 years old. Granted, as you note, that reflects people who were 10-14 in the late '70s, but I suspect an awful lot of new D&D players today are in that age group, being brought in through D&D Minis, HeroClix, Yu-Gi-Oh, as well as by parents or uncles and aunts who are gamers.

And, I certainly see an awful lot of posters over on WotC who post with the writing style of a tween or teen.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Holy crow. I had no conception it cost that kind of money. If I'd had to guess I'd damn near have shaved an entire digit off those figures.

I'm surprised in the opposite direction. I expected it to be at least $1M. I may be able to afford a study for my startup company much sooner than I expected.

Thanks kenobi 65, BTW

 

[kenobi65]

I'm surprised in the opposite direction. I expected it to be at least $1M. I may be able to afford a study for my startup company much sooner than I expected.

Thanks kenobi 65, BTW

You're welcome.

BTW, cripes, whatever you do, don't hire one of the big strategy-consultant groups to have them do the research for you. They'll hire the research supplier, then mark up the price to high holy heaven for their trouble. The biggest way to spend a million dollars on a research study is to hire someone to run it for you.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Thank you all for your responses. This has certainly been educational.

RC

 

[Delta]

One thing that just occured to me in Lanefan's poll data is that since 1985, the numbers of new players seem to be relatively low. If you draw a trendline from 1985-2004, they even seem to be slowly fading from those low numbers. (Equation: y = -0.0008x + 0.0276; x in years since 1984, y in percent of players). This trendline zeroes out in 2019.

So, my rough prediction is that D&D will cease publication sometime before 2020.

 

[Justin Bacon]

which seems to indicate that every postcard was intended to glean information on 3 or more individuals. In other words, for every "primary" respondant, information was given second-hand on 2-3 others, seemingly skewing the results drastically toward second-hand information.

Is there something here I'm not seeing?

Since the postcards were most likely sent out blind based on random demographic sampling, they would be targeted at households. Average household size in America is 2.59 and average family size is 3.14:

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFacts

 

[kenobi65]

One thing that just occured to me in Lanefan's poll data is that since 1985, the numbers of new players seem to be relatively low. If you draw a trendline from 1985-2004, they even seem to be slowly fading from those low numbers. (Equation: y = -0.0008x + 0.0276; x in years since 1984, y in percent of players). This trendline zeroes out in 2019.

So, my rough prediction is that D&D will cease publication sometime before 2020.

There is one huge flaw in that prediction, Delta...and that's in making the assumption that the people who answered that poll are representative of the entire D&D player base.

Time and again, it's been shown that the EN World user base is considerably older, and has been playing RPGs for considerably longer, than the general D&D player base. There are very, very few EN Worlders who are under 18, and most of them, IME, are 30 and older. Go over to the WotC boards, and you'd get a very different picture...and even that, I suspect, still underrepresents the very youngest D&D players.

 

[Delta]

Good to know, I'll concede to that as soon as I see the data.

 

[Beretta]

People keep on about a sample size of 1000 being enough.

To me that is an incomplete picture.

What is important is the response rate.

So are we accepting the standard (which is I think 20-30% response rate)? ie 200-300 responses. Or do we mean 100o responses.

Because clearly a sample size of 1000 with a response rate of 10% is not so good...

Just looking for some clarification here.