Finding ways to better understand your players is crucial for creating mobile apps that truly resonate with your target audience. In this article, we'll explore how AI can help you achieve just that.
You know the games you love – but do you know why you love them? Can you explain why something is cool, but something else just doesn't do it for you? Most people can't, and it's a tricky challenge even for game developers. While players can often identify elements they like – such as colors, puzzles, or characters – they rarely can elaborate why the elements appeal to them.
As game developers, we need to understand not only what players like to play but also the why behind it. To achieve this, we can use a range of methods to gain insights into player motivations. The more traditional and obvious methods, like playtests, player surveys, market research, and in-game analytics, are useful for understanding what people enjoy playing. However, these methods only scratch the surface.
To truly understand why players engage with our games, we need to tap into AI-driven tools that can help us identify patterns and motivations. This is where AI-powered game development comes in – by leveraging machine learning algorithms, we can analyze vast amounts of player data to uncover hidden insights.
Integrating Player Psychology into Game Development
To create experiences that truly resonate with players, game developers need to integrate player psychology into their development process. Here are three steps to help you do just that:
1. Find Your Audience Before You Find Your Game
At Metacore, we believe that understanding your audience is key to creating a game that truly resonates with players. To achieve this, we use AI-powered market research tools like Game Refinery, which analyzes millions of mobile gaming data points to form clusters of player behaviors, categorized into 12 motivations and eight player archetypes.
For example, if we had an idea for a new merge game, we could examine the player motivation breakdowns for popular merge games using Game Refinery. This would help us understand what players love about these types of games – such as completing milestones, solving puzzles, or escapism – and design our game accordingly.
2. Reveal Your Audience's Motivations with Player Research Data
Once you have a live game, you can use player research data to gain insights into why players engage with your app. By analyzing real player data, you can pinpoint which parts of the game resonate most with players and identify areas that are less enjoyable.
Through clustering player behaviors based on likes and dislikes, we can generate archetypes or player personas specific to our audience. These insights are invaluable for guiding game development, highlighting what to enhance and what to re-evaluate.
3. Leverage Player Insights Beyond Game Development
Proprietary models are great because they only consider players who are actually actively playing your game. However, they don't consider players who don't play your game, nor do they help understand who the players are as people outside the game.
To truly unlock the power of AI in mobile apps, we need to leverage player insights beyond game development. By analyzing player data across multiple touchpoints – including social media, forums, and review sites – we can gain a deeper understanding of our target audience's motivations, behaviors, and preferences.
By integrating AI-powered insights into your game development process, you can create experiences that truly resonate with players. Whether you're looking to boost engagement, increase revenue, or simply understand why players love your game, AI is the key to unlocking the power of player psychology in mobile apps.