Publishing lessons

A few weeks ago, I sent out the (new) annual demographic survey for The City of Games. The survey was sent to people who have either backed my most recent Kickstarter or signed up to my newsletter.

Today I’ll be sharing some of the results.

In total, 1,536 people completed the survey and each graph shows the % of people who selected each option.

Please keep in mind there was an incentive to complete the survey with 5 people receiving £75 vouchers for The City of Games store.

Games owned

I’ve chosen games owned as the first category to reveal as it suggests the majority of people filling in this survey are deeper into the hobby than the average person. With nearly 50% of people owning 101 games or more, I was very surprised to see this.

Age

I always imagined most of my community would sit within the 25 – 40 age group and it turns out I wasn’t too far off with 55% falling in this range. However, I was both happy and surprised to see nearly 20% of people were over 50 which I hadn’t anticipated.

As someone in my mid-thirties it has been a good reminder to include a wider age range of people into my playtesting groups.

Gender

As a designer and a publisher, it has always been important to me to make sure my games are welcoming to as many people as possible. When I asked this question, I had expected the male % to be higher and I am very pleased to see there are so many females within my community and a number of non-binary and other gendered people too.

In the years to come I hope these numbers continue to grow alongside my male following and I will always be looking to make sure my games are as inclusive as possible for everyone.

Location

The location results are along the lines of what I expected, I’d be interested to know if non-UK based publishers have a similar number of people from the UK following them but that’s not data that I currently have.

Player count

The key take away for me here is a 2 – 4 player game will be playable by 67% of my community and a 1 – 5 player game will be playable by 92% of my community. This is a huge reminder that both solo and 5-player options in games are very valuable.

Where you buy games

This graph surprised me with how many people purchased from online stores but not Amazon. I suspect this is heavily influenced by the people filling in this survey as most have a lot of games and are more likely to be familiar with where to get games than the average person. I will also be interested to see in future years how the conventions number changes as currently most conventions haven’t run for 1-2 years due to covid.

Summary

With this being the first year I have run the survey I have nothing to compare the data to, but I still feel there is a lot to learn from this. Especially around player counts and audience age, this data will feedback directly into all my future playtesting.

Is there anything here that surprises you?