Game Market

The game market is a good place to begin. You can determine a market simply by looking at titles that are similar to the one you are developing. By looking at sales figures, you can determine what size of market a particular style or genre has and your potential for sales. An excellent source of game market data can be had at www.pcdata.com. You can search information on PC sales, Mac sales, and even home education sales. An example of the data available at PCData can be seen in Figure 5.9. If you are planning a game to run on multiple platforms, you should try to break down this information among them.

Figure 5.9: Example from PCData showing market sales for February 2001.