[...] not sure if you’re lying or if you’re not remembering this correctly. Here’s a link to an article about the study. [raphkoster.com] To [...]

[...] be interesting to see the breakdown across all the groups and how much of a percentage they make up.This site has a bit more breakdown on the figures suggesting that the overall make up of the gamer [...]

[...] blogged about the original pass of this study. Now there’s an update. It’s focused on gamers specifically, and it looks like it was a [...]

Dave-
Now Dave, I think you just issued me a challenge?

And I think I’ll take you up on it.

And here is my rebuttal challenge:
Please list for me all the stakeholders who need data related to video game players/market.

I have a certain predisposition for making things accessable to people who cant “afford” it. I like to think it’ll result in better games.

Signed.

Allen CFDT (aka Cranky Flippant Data Troll)

Web 2.0 Data Mammals 4tw!

If you’re a true indy making a single project because you believe in it you probably can’t afford it, but you don’t need it, either. … Whether they’re really worth it?

I don’t think market research isn’t necessary to any business; although, understanding the state of the market is useful to strategy. There is a problem with market research that isn’t a problem with the research. When businesses become reliant on the research, they tend to respond to market demands, creating a stagnant culture of incrementally innovative competition that is often referred to as being market-driven. Examples of these incrementalist offerings include Apple’s iPod, Microsoft’s Zune, Nintendo’s Wii, and Sony’s PlayStation Portable — all of which are convergent devices.

Firms that are market-driving are interested in offering radical innovations despite the risks inherent to straying from the status quo. The rewards of radical innovation are greater as we’ve seen with such businesses as Amazon.com and FedEx, but larger companies typically cannot afford the risks or the restructuring costs. Most market-driving businesses eventually become market-driven firms to retain their position in the market and to maintain stability, but some companies such as Sony (as a whole) remain consistent as radical innovators focused on growth.

NPD expertise in sampling and weighting techniques ensures that return samples are representative and actionable.

That takes care of my sampling concerns. Your comments about the cluster analyses takes care of the stability concerns. Thanks for the reply.
Let me know if you need a 57 year old respondent….

Whether they’re really worth it? Even bad numbers can be strategically meaningful, if your competitors are working off of them. If you’re a statistical wonk and you think you can do better for less money, have at it.

–Dave

A couple of comments…

Allen - Your initial criticism does strike me as being a little bit… well… cranky, to use your own words. Good luck with your new business.

JuJutsu - Thank you for making some very good points (by the way, nice inferences considering you were working with just the press release). To your points…

Sampling (this should address StGabe’s question as well) – The survey was indeed conducted from our online panel and for this particular study we went out to 6-44 year olds. Demographically speaking the skews should be fairly well taken care of as we project and weight our data to be representative of the population, and we even go so far as to control for the interactions of various demographics that we find to be important to the space. You can find out more about it here (http://npd.com/about.consumerpanel.html).

NPD vs Parks Assoc - Our studies indeed look at two different groups of people, as you noted. Parks is looking at online PC Gamers. Our segmentation focuses on the universe of console + portable owners. Apples and oranges as it were. Having said this, we’ve also done research recently on online PC gamers and we have seen some similar things in terms of what appears to be an increasing group of casual gamers whose demographics are far more diverse than the typical ‘hard core gamer’ archetype.

Cluster analysis - You are entirely right here as well. Cluster analyses can be unstable, but there are ways of minimizing the instability. When I ran the analysis I did it multiple times with different cluster solutions and different orderings of cases. The solution we report ended up being quite stable in repeated tests, and we’ve actually applied it (via discriminant analysis) to datasets from two other surveys where we’ve asked the identical questions and gotten very solid results both for the new group we’ve applied it to and the control group.

A final note – Without tooting the corporate horn too much, we’ve been covering this particular industry for more than ten years, and the industry pretty much considers us the gold standard in terms of tracking and reporting both retail sales and consumer behavior. A lot of people spent a lot of time on this one. We stand behind the numbers.

- JD

PS: Good breakdown Jujutsu