Complete Market Research Guide for Game Studios

Most game studios do their research once the game is already made. They watch the reviews after launch, read the forums during early access and adjust what they can. By then, the most expensive decisions have already been taken: the genre, the core loop, the platform, the business model and the kind of player the game is built for.

Those decisions can be informed much earlier. Every genre already has games with thousands of player reviews, and players are unusually precise about what they love, what bores them and what they keep hoping someone will finally build. Read together, the reviews of the games in a genre describe what its players value, where existing games frustrate them and which needs no game meets yet. That is category research at the level of the genre, and a studio can do it before a single prototype exists.

This guide shows how a small or mid-sized game studio can turn player feedback into real market research across the whole life of a game, from the first concept to the updates after launch.

Key Research Questions

Research starts with the questions it has to answer. For a game studio, they fall into three groups: questions about your own game and its players, questions about the games and other entertainment those players already choose, and questions about how the genre and its audience are changing.

Your Game

Before development, the first questions are about the players you want to reach. Who are they, what do they play now and what do they want from a new game in the genre? Which mechanics make them stay, and which make them quit? After launch, the same questions apply to your own players: what they praise, where they get stuck, what they say about difficulty, progression and monetization, and what they ask for in the next update.

The second set is about the shape of the game. Which platform do your target players prefer for this kind of game? How do they feel about premium prices, free-to-play models, in-app purchases and subscriptions? These questions decide the budget, the scope and the business model, and players of similar games have usually answered them already in their reviews.

Your Competitors

Your competitors are the other games in your genre and subgenre, but also the games your players move to when they get bored, and other forms of entertainment that compete for the same time. What do players praise in those games that your concept does not offer? What do they complain about that you could do better? Players often compare games directly in their reviews, explaining why they left one game for another or why they keep returning to an older title.

The Game Market

The third group is about demand. Which subgenres and features are players talking about more, and which are wearing thin? Are there groups of players, such as returning players, players who want shorter sessions or players who dislike aggressive monetization, whom existing games serve poorly? These questions are hard to answer from download charts alone, because charts show what people installed, while their reasons sit in what they write.

Sources of Evidence

Evidence about a genre comes from several places, and none of them has to come first. You can analyze reviews of competing games without running a survey, and you can study a genre before you have shown a prototype to a single player. The strongest research combines what your own players tell you, what players write in public about the games in your genre, and what you learn by asking.

Your Own Player Feedback

Playtest notes, beta feedback, support tickets, player surveys, bug reports and messages from your community channels are the most direct feedback a studio has. Playtest and beta feedback are especially valuable, because they arrive while the design can still change. Collected in one spreadsheet with columns for the date, the build, the platform, the player type and the source, they become the start of a customer feedback analysis practice. For PC and console studios, this exported data from your own community and test channels is the main source, and it can be analyzed the same way as public reviews.

Store Reviews and Communities

App Store and Google Play reviews of the games in your genre are the largest public source for mobile games, and they are the core of genre research for a mobile studio. The guide to analyzing gaming app reviews covers that analysis in detail for a game that is already live. Reddit discussions show how players compare games in a genre, recommend them to each other and describe what they are still looking for. Comments under YouTube videos, such as reviews, trailers and let's plays, show how players react to a game before and after they try it.

Surveys and Interviews

Traditional methods still have a place. A short survey of your mailing list or community can ask what players enjoy in the genre and what they miss. A conversation with a few players who match your target audience shows how they describe a good session in their own words. Watching people play a prototype shows where they get confused, and asking them afterwards shows why. Notes from these sessions are user experience research, and they need the same structured analysis as reviews to become more than a set of impressions.

Researching Game Markets with Kimola

Kimola is an AI platform that turns customer feedback into enterprise-grade market research. For a game studio, that means taking reviews of the games in your genre, together with community discussions and your own playtest and player feedback, and turning them into a structured study of what players value, where existing games disappoint them and which concept, platform and business model fit the players you want to reach. The steps below follow the order a researcher would work in, and you can start with a free account, without a credit card.

Building the Dataset

After signing up, go to the Create your report area on the Home screen and paste the App Store or Google Play link of a game in your genre, or search for it by name. With the Add Multiple option you can paste several links, one per line, and Kimola collects the reviews from all of them into a single dataset. A practical first report includes five to ten games from the same genre, ideally a mix of hits and games that struggled, because the reasons players give for leaving a game are often the clearest guide to what the genre needs. The support article on creating a report by adding links walks through each screen.

For Reddit threads and YouTube videos, Kimola's browser extension, Airset Generator, collects the feedback from a page and sends it to your account as an Airset, which you can turn into a report. Store pages for PC and console games are not among the supported sources, so studios on those platforms work mainly with their own data. Playtest notes, beta feedback, surveys and support tickets can be uploaded as an .xls, .xlsx, .csv or .tsv file. If the file has columns such as build, platform, player type or date, Kimola reads them, and you can filter and compare the results by those values.

By default, Kimola finds the themes in the data itself, which matters in games, where players talk about mechanics, progression and balance in the language of each genre. A pretrained model built for game feedback, the Mobile Game Feedback Classifier, is also available for studios that want a standard set of game categories.

Choosing Dimensions

Dimensions are the research questions Kimola asks of every piece of feedback. You choose them when you create the report or add them later, and the guide to Dimensions explains each one. For a game studio, six are especially useful.

Motivations asks why people play, such as competition, progression, story, relaxation, creativity or playing with friends, and it is the closest thing to a design brief that players write themselves. Unmet Needs asks what players looked for and did not find, which at the concept stage is the most direct evidence of an opening in the genre. Pain Points asks what goes wrong, which in game reviews often covers difficulty spikes, grinding, aggressive monetization, matchmaking, bugs and updates that changed something players loved.

Personas groups players by who they are, such as competitive players, casual players, collectors, story-driven players and returning players. Each group judges the same game differently, and a concept built for one group can disappoint another. Substitutions shows what players compare a game with, which reveals the real competitive set. Experience Stages places each comment at a moment in the player's journey, such as the first session, the early game, the midgame and the endgame, and shows where in that journey players leave.

Reading the Report

The Overview shows the main themes in the feedback and how sentiment is distributed. Kimola finds those themes in the data itself instead of sorting comments into a fixed list of categories, so a review can be tagged with something as specific as energy systems that limit play time or a tutorial that explains too little.

Each review can mention several themes, and each theme gets its own sentiment. A player who loves the art and the core loop but is frustrated by the cost of upgrades contributes positive mentions of the art and the gameplay and a negative mention of monetization. A single star rating would hide that the design and the business model are being judged separately.

The Performance screen ranks themes with a Satisfaction Score and a Dissatisfaction Score. These scores account for how many reviews mention a theme as well as the percentage, so a theme backed by five reviews does not outrank one backed by fifty. This protects against the most common mistake in small-scale research, which is redesigning a game around a handful of strong opinions.

Signals

Signals are findings that have passed a statistical test. Kimola crosses every theme and Dimension with the columns in your dataset, such as game, platform, star rating or date, and checks whether a topic is discussed more often or more negatively in one group than in the others (Differences) or more often recently than before (Trends). Only significant results become Signals, and they are ranked so the most important ones come first. The explanation of how Signals are tested covers the method in more detail.

For genre research, the game column is especially revealing. A Difference might show that complaints about monetization are concentrated in a few games, or that players praise one game's onboarding far more than the others. A Trends Signal can show that requests for a feature have grown across the genre recently, or that complaints about a game rose after a particular update. Signals need enough feedback and at least some selected Dimensions. When the data does not contain a pattern strong enough to report, the report shows none, which is an honest result.

Compare

Compare puts segments of a report side by side: different games, different platforms, or one-star and five-star reviews. Up to five can be compared at once, without using extra queries. In a report built with Add Multiple, the most valuable use is placing the leading games in your genre next to each other and seeing the volume of feedback, the sentiment, the themes they share and the themes that appear for only one game. After launch, the same feature places your game next to them. If players keep praising one game for respecting their time and criticizing every other game for grinding, that is a decision waiting to be made.

Action Plans

Action Plans turn the findings into steps. You start by choosing or creating a Profile that describes your studio, the game and the players it is for, then select a perspective: Our own offering, A rival or Our market. These match the three groups of questions at the beginning of this guide. At the concept stage, a plan with Our market and the Product Development goal focuses on what the genre is missing and what a new game should offer. A plan with A rival examines a leading game in detail: why players choose it, where they are frustrated and where it leaves room. After launch, Our own offering focuses on your game and its next updates.

Kimola builds hypotheses from the report, tests each one against the feedback and drops the actions the evidence does not support. Each remaining action comes with a confidence level and explains why it matters, who it is for, when and where to act, the risk involved and how to see that it worked, along with the evidence behind it. A plan contains up to 12 actions. Plans work best when the report already has Signals, as the support article on how actions are built explains.

From Findings to Decisions

Research is only useful if it changes a decision. For a game studio the decisions are concrete, and each one connects to a specific part of the report.

Genre and Concept

The first decision is what kind of game to make. Motivations shows what players in a genre are looking for, Unmet Needs shows what no existing game provides, and Pain Points shows what players are tired of. A crowded genre can still have room for a game that solves one widely shared frustration, while a genre where players are satisfied needs a clearer reason for one more entry.

Target Players

A concept becomes stronger when it is built for specific players. Personas shows which groups talk about the genre and how differently they judge the same features, and Experience Stages shows where each group drops off. A game for competitive players and a game for players who want short, relaxed sessions may share a genre and still need different designs.

Platform Choice

Platform decisions shape the budget and the audience. Comparing reviews of similar games across platforms shows whether players judge controls, performance and session length differently on each one. For PC and console games, your own surveys and playtest data, compared by platform, show how players respond to the same build on different hardware.

Monetization Model

Monetization is one of the most discussed topics in game reviews. Pain Points shows which models players accept in your genre and which ones they reject, such as paywalls, energy systems or advertising, and Personas shows whether the objections come from all players or from specific groups. Underlying Causes, if you add it, shows whether players object to paying at all or to how payment affects fairness and progression.

Pre-Launch Community

A community built before launch gives a studio feedback while the design can still change. Reddit and YouTube discussions show where players of the genre gather and what they respond to, and your own beta and wishlist community produces feedback that can be analyzed in the same way. Comparing what early players say with what genre players say in public shows whether the game is heading where its audience is.

Post-Launch Updates

After launch, the question becomes what to fix and what to build next. Pain Points and Experience Stages show where players struggle and where they leave, Unmet Needs shows what they ask for, and Trends Signals show whether an update improved the themes it was meant to improve. Compare shows how your game's reviews move against the other games in the genre.

Ongoing Research

A single report gives you a snapshot, and a genre changes with every major release and update. Repeating the research at each milestone, from concept to vertical slice, beta, launch and each major update, shows whether the game is moving in the direction players want. Repeating the genre report once a year shows how the genre itself is changing.

On paid plans, Feeds keep the research running continuously. A Feed collects public mentions from social media, news sites, blogs, forums, YouTube and review sites, based on the keywords and links you define. Alerts email your team when something important happens, and Mailings send a regular summary. Over time, Trends Signals show which topics are rising and which are fading.

Game Publishers and Growing Studios

Publishers and studios with several games face the same questions across many titles, genres and platforms. On the Enterprise plan, each source of feedback, such as a game, a platform, a support channel or a player survey, can become a Space, a continuously growing source of feedback classified with the same Funnel, which is a shared set of custom models and Dimensions. Because every source is analyzed the same way, results stay comparable over time and between games. Spaces also calculate an NPS from what players write, on a scale from -100 to 100. It is derived from the positive and negative share of written feedback, so it is not the same as a Net Promoter Score from a 0 to 10 survey, and NPS targets can be set for each game or platform.

When a finding needs action, Tasks assign it to the right team, such as design, engineering, live operations or community, with the underlying feedback attached as evidence, and Tasks can be sent to Jira. After a Task is closed, Kimola measures feedback on the same topic again two and four weeks later, so a change can be checked against what players say afterwards. Executive summary screens give leadership a single view of what players are saying across the portfolio. Enterprise accounts are set up together with a dedicated Account Manager, and you can request a demo to discuss your setup.

Frequently Asked Questions

A few practical questions come up when a game studio starts researching with player feedback for the first time.

Can a studio research a genre before building anything?

Yes, and that is often the most valuable time to do it. Reviews of the existing games in a genre show what players value and what they are missing before you commit to a concept or a prototype.

What can PC and console studios use?

Store pages for PC and console games are not supported sources, so these studios work mainly with their own data: playtest notes, beta feedback, player surveys and support tickets, uploaded as a file. Reddit and YouTube discussions add the public conversation about the genre.

How many reviews do I need before the findings mean anything?

There is no fixed threshold, and the ranking on the Performance screen is designed to protect you from small samples by weighing how many reviews support each theme. Adding more games from the same genre to the report is the easiest way to reach a dataset large enough for Signals.

Getting Started

Players of every game in your genre have already written down much of what you need to know about the game they still want to play. Create a free Kimola account, add the leading games in your genre to a single report, and see what players value and what they are missing. The market research guide for photo and video apps applies the same approach to a neighboring app category, and the market research guide for small businesses covers the method for any industry.