NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Terramotus" data-source="post: 5613381" data-attributes="member: 7220">Interesting article.  And while I don't find any fault with any of the analysis (the picture trick seems like a pretty good idea to gauge if there's a market in an established genre), I do find fault with what I saw to be the implication of the article - that it IS in fact possible to market research your way into a successful product.In fact, given his examples of the CCG market, forget the idea of success without research being lotto winners - only 2 products surviving after a decade ARE lotto winners, regardless of whether they did their market research properly.I think that, often, market research fills a role of "helpful, but not sufficient".  I won't even call it "necessary".  There are a few reasons for this.  First, much of the creative process is, in fact, a winnowing of the wheat from the chaff idea-wise.  Do I need to do research to know that an RPG about dogs playing poker is probably not going to be a best-seller?  Probably not.Second, much of the market research falls into the role that, increasingly, criminal profiling is filling.  That is to say that successes and failures fit the mold that the research would predict after the fact, but that its predictive power is far from certain.  Of those CCG games previously mentioned, I'm sure that a thorough analysis could elaborate in great detail why the many failures failed, and why the successes suceeded, but if you looked at everything beforehand, and had no knowledge that Magic was already a successful product in 2001, would it really be possible to predict with any degree of certainty that Magic would be the one that came out on top through research?  I suspect not.Finally, and I think, most compellingly, I believe that many of the biggest successes in any industry are those that fill an "unrecognized need".  They seize on the zeitgeist of the time and distill it in such a way that it's simultaneously exactly the way people were thinking and transformative at the time time.  The success of D&D itself would not have been possible to predict.  And while, in a mature market, where transformative products are unlikely to occur the accuracy of market research is greater, in the long term, it's those transformative products themselves that tend to stay evergreen, for a variety of reasons.Ultimately, I would say that his article somewhat misses the point.  Many of these transformative products were the product of a singular vision.  In fact, I think that, in fact, you DO need to maintain that clarity of vision, which sometimes needs to be a situation where input from others is avoided.  Design by committee can work, but only in a very small committee.  More often, the dilution of the vision serves to ruin the product.I understand the goal of market research, though.  From a comapny's perspective, how do you make sure that these transformative products are produced by employees of your company and not by either competitors or upstart companies?The short answer to that is that while you can do certain things make it possible, you really can't ensure it with any kind of accuracy.  Do some shops catch lightning in a bottle more than once?  Absolutely.  Almost never do they realize what it was they were doing right, though, or are even able to put it into words.  Even observing success stories you have too small a sample size for any kind of real conclusions, and are likely to suffer from confirmation bias and the placebo effect.  If there were an actual solution to this problem, we'd have a very different landscape than the bajillions of contradictory management books on the market.</blockquote>

Verification