How Target Audiences Work

February 4, 2025 - Published

The point of having a target audience can be distilled to a single point: no game can appeal to everyone.

For every super-dedicated Minecraft fan, there are dozens of people that refuse to play the game because "it just looks too ugly." For every Pokemon fan, there are people that just find it boring. For every Call of Duty fan, there are people who find it too violent or unappealing. You can look at the best-selling video games of all time, and for each one, I'm sure you can name at least one person for each of those games that has either never played it before or outright expressed their distaste for it.

I don't say this to be discouraging. I say this because it's something that a lot of people need to come to terms with, and it's why I think that target audiences are a concept that are much simpler than most people make it out to be. You could make the best game in the world, and there will still be people that will never touch it. To me, this is very freeing -- those are the type of people you never have to worry about once when making your game.

In other words, there is no reason to try to make your game appeal to everyone when you can just market it towards a single type of person.

How do you find your target audience?

In one of my classes, we had an assignment to create a target audience by making up a guy -- defining their age, gender, name, daily life, active hours, etc. to figure out how to market the game to them. I think this is absolutely ridiculous.

I've seen some people be intimidated by this stuff because they think it's part of this strange, difficult web of abstract marketing concepts, but it really doesn't have to be that complicated if you're not working for a business. You're only asking one question: who is this game for?

And if the answer is, "This game is just for me," then that's totally fine! You know Undertale, one of the biggest (mostly) solo-developed video game success stories of all time? Yeah, Toby Fox has expressed multiple times that the game's design was specifically based on his own personal tastes in RPGs over mainstream appeal. From what I've read, there was no profiling or marketing strategies when figuring out the game itself. The target audience was just him.

If you want to cast a wider net and not just leave it up to chance, it's helpful to go to the basics. What genre is your game? What type of gameplay does it feature? Are there any existing games you can compare it to? What types of people play these games? The types of people that tend to play first-person shooters are usually different from the types of people that play farming simulators, and those people may be different from the types that play roguelikes. Do basic research into demographics, and if you don't want to do all that, then just use yourself -- you're most likely reading this as an indie developer designing a game that appeals to you, so what are the types of things that you have to account for?

Does your game make more sense for people who just want to wind down, or is it the type of game that people want for action and intensity? Does your game make more sense for people who want to find 5 minutes of free time, or is it the type of game that people want to grind for hours? If you know people around you like friends and family that love or hate your game genre, ASK them why they love or hate it, because all this information is helpful. Once you do all that, we have another question to ask ourselves.

What do you do with a target audience?

Now that you have a target audience, you use it to help direct your decision-making with marketing and game design.

Yes, I know "marketing" is a scary term, but for now just focus on the basic ideas like: "If I were deciding whether to buy this game, what would I want to see?" 

If you were making a game like Animal Crossing, you might want to put a special focus on the character design and put them front and center, since the characters will most likely pull people in. As an avid fighting game player, I know there's nothing that ignites the fandom more than seeing the words "rollback netcode" on a Steam page, and there are many people who will literally refuse to play the game unless they see those words. However, only fighting game fans will know what that means.

Whenever you want to add or change certain features within the game, it can help to think, "Would my target audience like this?" If you're making a game for casual gamers, you generally won't want to add high difficulty or mechanics that require complex inputs. When making DracoFighter, I found certain combos and techniques to be really cool, but since it was aimed towards a beginner audience, I had to remove them so that beginners wouldn't have to go through the pain that is watching a combo cutscene while losing 60% of your health. Some people would be fine with that, but not my target audience. If people wanted that, they had many other games they could play instead.

If you have a goal, don't undermine it with the rest of your game. If you decided your audience is the type to like quick-paced action, then it'll probably be unwise to pair it with long stretches of heavy grinding. If your audience is the type to enjoy spending time to figure out complex puzzles, then it might be difficult to mesh that with dangerous, reaction-based combat. This doesn't mean that these games aren't impossible to design, but moreso that you must keep in mind that without properly accounting for these player types, you have a large risk of alienating them with your game. That's fine if you want to make a more niche or specific title, but be aware that you are not making something mainstream.

I think those are about the basics! I wanted to keep this one relatively short and sweet, and always remember that the target audience is never the end all be all. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was a TV show aimed towards girls under the age of 12, after all.

• Vecderg