While this project was more market-focused, it followed many of the same principles I apply to user research—identifying needs, understanding context, and guiding decisions with evidence.

(This project is under NDA, and some details have been generalized or omitted.)

The Project

A game studio was deciding between two early-stage game concepts. Both fit within the same genre—that is, they shared similar mechanics and gameplay structure—but each had a different theme, meaning a different setting, narrative, and tone. The studio wanted help in choosing which concept to pursue, and to support their pitch for funding to internal stakeholders.

The studio had a relatively modest team and budget for the genre, with approximately three years of development time projected before release.

We had about three weeks to deliver a report, with no external budget—just what we could gather and analyze ourselves.

Team & Role

I worked on this project with my colleague Romain Maire as part of the Frontier Research team at NetEase. We split the work evenly and collaborated closely, checking in multiple times per day to stay aligned and share progress. I brought more of a user research background, while Romain came from market research, so our different strengths helped us cover more ground and catch insights we might have missed on our own.

Research Approach

Given the tight timeline and lack of budget, we focused on secondary research—specifically, market sizing and competitor analysis.

Assembling the database

We started by identifying a wide range of recent games in the genre. We focused on recent games (released within approximately the previous 5 years). For each of these games, we collected and compiled the following data:

• Sales data (when available, or estimated)
• Themes (e.g., setting, tone, and narrative)
• Critical and user reviews
• Development scope (team size, development timeline, and budget—when available)
• Content scope (average playtime, world size, number of missions, etc.)

A lot of this data wasn’t directly available to us, so we pulled from online games databases (such as IGDB), public news articles, developer interviews, investor calls, financial reports, and various other sources. We automated what we could, and cross-referenced multiple sources to check for accuracy.

We also collected data on announced but unreleased titles to get a sense of the competitive landscape leading up to the studio’s potential launch window.

Our main tools for this were Excel, SQL, Python, as well as our favourite search engines.

With the data in place, we moved on to analysis.

Genre & market sizing analysis

We broke down the genre and its subgenres, identifying key audience preferences and historical trends. For each concept, we:

• Estimated the total addressable market based on sales of similar games
• Identified growth trends, such as emerging subgenres or declining interest
• Mapped how games performed across different budget tiers (e.g., team size, development time, etc.)

As a sanity check, we also looked at how each theme was performing in other media—like movies, and TV shows—and found similar trends.

Competitor benchmarking

We analyzed sell-through and critical reception for the games in our database, and grouped them by performance. Within each group, we identified common patterns in execution, design, and broader context.

From these patterns, we built optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic sell-through scenarios for each of the studio’s concepts, tailored to their team size and budget. We provided corresponding examples of competitor games for each outcome, with an analysis of their critical and player reception, along with their development context.

Future market landscape & competitive risk

We turned our attention to the release timelines of upcoming games in relation to the studio’s development roadmap, aiming to estimate for each concept:

• Market saturation risk - How crowded would the market be at launch, and how hard would it be to stand out?
• Fit with market trends - How well did the concept align with where the genre or theme was headed?
• Long-term viability - Was there a sustained audience for the theme beyond launch?

We compared existing and upcoming competitors, analyzing their content strategies, sales potential, and reception (where relevant), to make sure our concept recommendation considered both current demand and future risk.

Insights & Recommendations

Based on our analysis, we identified a few key takeaways:

• There was a clear, high-level “formula” for success in this genre—certain elements were common among games with positive reception and strong sales. We also identified areas that were safer for experimentation and rule-bending, helping us separate must-have features from nice-to-have risks. We applied this formula to recent case studies to illustrate how different games succeeded or fell short.
• Smaller teams could succeed in this space by focusing on smaller-scope games with high-quality execution, rather than trying to match the scale of larger studios.
• Concept A had a larger addressable market and higher past sales potential, while Concept B appealed to a niche but loyal audience. Concept B also faced less direct competition in its projected release window, giving it a chance to stand out—if done well.

In the end, we recommended Concept B, based on its mix of market potential, development feasibility, and competitive positioning.