Ask and You Shall Receive…Video Game Market Research

Ask and you shall receive?  What does that even mean?  Before writing this off as a religious overture, hear me out here.  A video game marketing professional, I find this critical.  As in critically important for anyone in video game publishing.  And even more important for anyone making video games.
Allow me to explain.  Like any quantitative minded marketer, I think of the world as a funnel.  As in One.  Big. Funnel.  Borrowing something that my team had created some couple years ago, check out the following.

More aptly, if you are in the business of making video games, you are already familiar with the game development framework or process. No matter how you slice and dice it, it roughly breaks down into:

I. Concept –> II. Pre-Production –> III. Production –> IV. Launch –> V. Live Service/Maintenance

Needless to say, a marketer isn’t necessarily a ninja in agile product development.  Nor a 6-degree black belt in financial planning and forecasting  However, allow me to illustrate. HOW CAN video game market research benefit a video game?  Literally in each of Concept, Pre-Production, Production, and Live Service/Maintenance stage?   And I will use a random video game example to make my point.  Disclaimer:  I deliberately selected games that I did NOT work on.  Translation:  no Nondisclosure Agreements signed OR violated here.  But if you are in the business of making video games, keep reading.
But regardless, I hope you walk away with a solid understanding of how video game market research helps increase your ODDS of the commercial success of YOUR game.
Let us begin.

I. Video Game Market Research: Concept Validation

Before writing a single line of code, the developer needs to assess market opportunity and the Total Addressable Market.  To get at the answer, we may get creative.  Assume the developer is thinking about building a card battle game with strategy and RPG.