Core gamers ‘don’t technically exist’

A new Steam Spy report claims audiences such as the ‘core gamer’ don’t technically exist.

Sergey Galyonkin, who runs the Steam data mining service, said the playing and buying habits of people who are put in such a category are vastly different. He said while DOTA 2 players only play Valve’s game, the Torchlight 2 audience, for example, generally plays around ten times more titles on average.

According to the report, DOTA 2 players generally own 12 games, while Rocket League owners average 78 purchases, and Torchlight 2 players average 117 titles in their Steam library.

“’Core gamer’ is a nice term to flaunt around when talking about your personal habits, but it’s not a viable term for defining your audience,” said Galyonkin. “It’s too broad and too vague.”

He went on to claim that players aren’t generally interested in new games in existing genres, or at least a large part of that audience. He cited the popularity of DOTA 2 and League of Legends, whose players are unlikely to move over to a new MOBA. World of Warcraft meanwhile, rather than creating the MMO market, in fact created World of Warcraft players, rather than an MMO market, he said.

“I think when you start thinking in terms of audiences for individual games instead of broad vague ‘MMORPG crowd’, ‘MOBA crowd’ you’ll start to realise that sometimes a huge success of one big title doesn’t mean much for everyone else,” he said.

“It doesn’t expand existing market or destroy it, it creates a new one.”

In total, Galyonkin claimed that rather than fighting for the attention of Steam’s 135 million registered users, many developers are targeting a market of buyers generally made up of 1.3 million people who are buying lots of games.

You can read the full report here.