[games_access] Game Accessibility; the numbers

Wed Jun 11 23:02:26 EDT 2008

As someone who is neck deep in starting up his own company I can say
that it is not that simple. Generally when predicting how sales will
fare you do several things:
1. Look at closest competitors in the game space, and check their numbers
2. Look at the most similar business models and check their numbers
3. Examine trends in the marketplace for the demographic(s) you are
going after (i.e. how quickly is the market expanding)
4. State how you feel your innovation(s) will affect sales.

Generally accessibility in games deals with points 3 and 4. The real
trick to accessibility, in my opinion, is that making a game more
accessible to one population makes it more usable to many, which in
turn results in a better gaming experience for more people (and
therefore will likely result in more copies sold).

Eitan

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 7:58 PM, Robert Florio <arthit73 at cablespeed.com> wrote:
> Does anyone know currently how a game company goes about the statistics for
> sales of target market that they plan for now?  If they have a way that we
> collect data for their target market or do they just go by the most obvious
> sales of the hottest genre and copy and paste ideas when they think of what
> kind of idea will sell in games?  If that's how they do it I am saddened.
> It seems really sad that the industry just won't risk innovation which is
> what I think I know about how the industry avoids too much risky innovation
> and then just taking the safest route for game companies.  Is that true?
> Talking about all the cloned type genre games now.LOL.
>
> Is there any way to look at perhaps some of the top-selling accessible
> featured products out there and see if game genres on games in general would
> fit that same selling target people?  Maybe that's a way to say a statistic
> for sales profit if games could target that group?  What groups?
>
>
>
> Robert
> www.RobertFlorio.com
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: games_access-bounces at igda.org [mailto:games_access-bounces at igda.org]
> On Behalf Of Reid Kimball
> Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 7:50 PM
> To: IGDA Games Accessibility SIG Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [games_access] Game Accessibility; the numbers
>
>> ...we identified
>> that it does pay off to make your game accessible, because you can
>> sell more games than it costs you to make it accessible. We have data
>> on profit per sold copy.
>
> This is exactly what publishers need. Please make this data available
> if not already. If it is, please point me to where it is. It's
> absolutely critical that publishers and developers get this info. When
> I was at LucasArts (no longer there now) I made the case for
> accessibility and the financial guys said they hadn't thought of how
> much accessibility would increase sales and assumed it would not be
> enough to justify the cost of development. Since I had no sales
> data... end of discussion.
>
> -Reid
>
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 3:04 PM, Eelke Folmer <eelke.folmer at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Hi Matthias,
>>
>> Thanks for your feedback
>>
>> Sorry for the lack of context, it's just one excerpt of our paper that
>> I put online, a goal for this study is provided in a previous section
>> that I did not include.
>>
>> To summarize the goal: I'm trying to find a ballpark figure of the
>> total number of people that are affected. In a later part of the paper
>> we connect it to data we collected on implementing a number of
>> accessible solutions (such as closed captioning or one switch access
>> mechanism). Using this data game developers can make an informed
>> decision whether it pays off to make their games accessible. For a
>> number of disabilities (auditory/cognitive/physical) we identified
>> that it does pay off to make your game accessible, because you can
>> sell more games than it costs you to make it accessible. We have data
>> on profit per sold copy.
>>
>> There are plenty of more important reasons why game companies should
>> make their game accessible (ethical /legal). But sadly most game
>> companies are struggling in an ever competitive market, so providing
>> them with hard data on the potential payoff of making games accessible
>> is one viable strategy towards convincing them.
>>
>> Cheers Eelke
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 11/06/2008, Matthias Troup <foreversublime at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>  Hi Eelke,
>>>
>>>  I didn't see an intended goal or purpose of the study.  Is there one?
> As
>>> far as motivating developers to take accessible approaches I fear taking
> a
>>> broad stroke would scare developers away from taking on the problem as
> the
>>> numbers are so large and context specific (Dyslexia: Text heavy
>>> Adventure/RPGs and Scrabble) it may be too hard or irrelevant to
> calculate
>>> (disabled people that can't play games vs. disabled people that can't
>>> collect stamps), though I admire the amount of effort you put into data
>>> collecting.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> > Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:06:21 -0700
>>> > From: eelke.folmer at gmail.com
>>> > To: games_access at igda.org
>>> > Subject: [games_access] Game Accessibility; the numbers
>>>
>>> >
>>> > Hi,
>>> >
>>> > A remember a discussion a while ago (I guess it was before E for All
>>> > or GDC) when we were making flyers that we couldn't specify how many
>>> > people are unable to play games because of a disability. Anyway i'm
>>> > hoping to shed some more light on these numbers.
>>> >
>>> > For an upcoming survey paper on Game Accessibility I sat down and
>>> > analyzed several statistics to come up with a more precise estimate
>>> > for the total number of people in the USA who's game playing abilities
>>> > are affected by a disability. I based these estimates primarily on
>>> > data from the American Community Survey (2002) which provides a
>>> > breakdown of each disability category into more specific categories
>>> > allowing us to more precisely identify whether that particular
>>> > disability affects someone's ability to play games. Unable to walk
>>> > does not have the same effect on being able to play games as arthritis
>>> > while both are considered a physical disability. Another problem with
>>> > trying to define estimates is that elderly are overly represented in
>>> > the total number of people with disabilities while at the same time it
>>> > is known that elderly don't play games as much as the younger
>>> > generations. The number of people in the baby boom generation is also
>>> > very large. I tried to pull this data apart based on estimates based
>>> > on some data I found on average number of people that play games and
>>> > console ownership broken down into different age categories.
>>> > Inevitably some extrapolations were made, I wish more accurate data
>>> > was available. I corresponded with the US census office briefly and
>>> > for future community surveys they told me they are considering
>>> > including ability to use computer in their questionnaires. This data
>>> > is currently not available in the 2002 survey.
>>> >
>>> > The statistics can be found here:
>>> http://www.eelke.com/files/ga_stats.pdf
>>> >
>>> > Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions, any feedback is
>>> > appreciated.
>>> >
>>> > Cheers Eelke
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> >
>>>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> > Eelke Folmer Assistant Professor
>>> > Department of CS&E/171
>>> > University of Nevada Reno, Nevada 89557
>>> > Game interaction design www.eelke.com
>>> >
>>>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>>
>>
>> --
>>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Eelke Folmer                           Assistant Professor
>> Department of CS&E/171
>> University of Nevada              Reno, Nevada 89557
>> Game interaction design        www.eelke.com
>>
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