Michał Dębek, Nicola Kamas - How do players think about indie games and use Steam to purchase one?

foreign [Music] to present the results of a study which we we have done in uh last year in the end of last year and it's mainly about eye tracking and it's mainly about what can you what can you have what data can you have from from eye tracking device my name is Miho Denberg and Nicola carnas was conducting this study in

person the agenda is quite simple and I think maybe it will be shorter than 44 minutes first what do Gamers think about indie games and developers behind them that would be it would be the first topic the second one how do Gamers Gamers explore indie games on Steam because we uh we asked players to uh to explore indie games and to buy one in the game which they chose I will show you what what does how the user flow looks like on Steam I will also tell you about what is the most important information for players when browsing steam you will see how much time how many how much time

they spend on each part of steam web page browsing browsing games and a few words about why do Gamers prefer some game games over others but it would be only you know touched and few takeaways for the for the end to the end so um let's start before I will before I I tell you about how Gamers think about Indie uh indie games we have to we have to try to Define what is in the game in fact because it's a bit fuzzy concept and it was really um the reason to uh to conduct this study because we will we were curious our gamers how gamers think about in the how gamers

understand Hindi and how it is compared to uh to what we know about Indie you know in the industry so in the industry without that in the game is small team is developed by a small team uh it's more individual involvement of each team member than in Triple A Studios it's mainly done without the financial support of a publisher of a big publisher it's not really true right now in nowadays but it was a few years ago it's no oversight or directional influence by a third party mainly publisher so in the stud Studios can

be very free in in terms of creative freedom because it's no there are no controlling interests no creative limitations it's focused on Innovation and experimental gameplay and uh what is very important in indie games you can touch topics which are not which are not touched by AAA games which play more or less safe I mean in in topics in Touching for example some tough problems social dilemmas and so on flying is that labeling a game Indie is highly subjective and there is not really that there are no um foreign

agree we we cannot agree what is in the and what is not in the especially nowadays I will show you some examples of six in the games [Music] these are igf competition winners from viewers uh ago as you can see we we have many mechanics [Music] we we have uh totally different gameplays totally different ideas [Music] totally different scale of the game visuals can be very original and usually they are original so it's a bunch of totally totally

different games various games what is more uh confusing I would say in in the uh um in in the idea is that we have also uh we have also something which is called triple I I don't know if you uh if you came across this term triple I and we have also a a and a A plus which is totally not understandable by players by the way but I will tell you about it a bit more um further and triple eyes are they look like Triple A's but they are smaller in scale and they are not backed up by you know big money Big Marketing big you know marketing efforts and PR efforts let's say

it's a horror examples from Poland of course this is the perfect example or whatever with a dead girl the Moon okay so sorry so we have totally various games different you know in scale in gameplay in mechanics and so on who are Indie gamers who plays those games uh this is the data from uh from Humble games from the presentation this year's

GDC by Phil Hoffman they conducted study of over 1 400 as far as I remember um so these are really you know Big Data Indie gamers are heavy PC players mainly heavy PC players they are buying many games so they buy games more than normal let's say player average player they playing more roguelikes metroidvanias Boss Rush games and interactive stories so they they play I would say um more demanding genres uh full of gameplay like roguelikes these are really tough and they more often play games that their friends are not playing so they play games which are Niche games

but not only gaming is a part key part of their identity they are really really Gamers and in-game uh in in gaming into gaming they prefer to play variety of game genres Etc and they are also buy and play Triple A games so Indie gamer is not only you know a gamer who plays just small indie games or you know very sophisticated indie games they're also playing aaa's and they play Triple A's more often and more heavy than average player so to our study to our laboratory we recruited participants Gamers from our own database from try evidence and as you

can see these are really mid to hardcore gamers they play a lot they played at least three to five games but in the last three months but they spent at least 25 percent of their spare time playing games this is a lot of time to you know to play and uh all of them are asked also by friends uh what to play so they are kind of trend setters in their own you know small communities and five of them from from those people were multiple multi-platform Gamers so not PC exclusive but they also play uh consoles the first assignment the first part of the study was a short interview and we tried to we asked them to give us examples of Indie Games you know

spontaneously whatever comes to their minds this was the the first part of the interview uh the second part was they were asked about what characterizes and in the game to describe what is in the game because we try to match this characteristic with those characteristics from industry data which I uh which I showed you a few slides ago uh we also asked them what characterizes an indie game Studio and we ask them to put some examples of in the of Indie Studios so what they what they uh put as an examples as examples of Indie Games as you can see again the variety of you know gameplays the variety of genres

because we have platformer we have strategic visual novel we have turn-based RPG action adventure it's a bunch of totally different games and these are really strong brands in in Gamer's Minds because it's spontaneously you know recalled and the next set was this and again we have Adventure roguelike arcade platformer we have Minecraft which is I don't know it is Indie but it is it used to be Indie probably this you know worldwide hit then and then they were asked about what characterizes and in the game and what they said they said that in the game is unique these are unique

ideas non-standard mechanics they the games combining genres hype there are hybrids very often they are Niche very often they have interesting storytelling and they are usually marketed in you know in in our Gamers minds they are usually marketed by word of month marketing so without a heavy backup from from from the publisher of course there are no money to make full-scale marketing some of players some of Gamers said that uh the indie game is usually usually remains Hidden Gem for for at least some time until Mass critical mass of players you know say oh it's a good

game it's a good game it's a good game so it also it usually remains hidden from you know mass mass Market and it costs about 17 Euro which is by the way uh low price and if you imagine how much game you you have to how much how many games you have to sell for 17 Euro SRP so it's 10 euro for you to make a small game you have to sell a lot of you know a lot of those games about 200 000 probably to you know uh be above the a break-even point how are we getting our Gamers imagined Studio creating uh Indie Games Studios I mean they were asked what is Studio characteristic of a studio in the studio

so they said um there are small Dev teams there are very friendly in atmosphere it's about you probably some of you friendly atmosphere people are creative unique people knowing each other passionate about game and gaming and gaming culture and they have limited access to top Technologies these were you know Declarations of our Gamers about uh you know what is the characteristic of an indie studio and what exact Studios they record usually they couldn't you know recall any Studio but if so they recalled 11-bit Studios concern type flying White Hawk politron Corporation Red Hood Studios and team Cherry which

is very interesting because flying white hook even on this picture is is really a big one but that that was that was you know about our Gamers Minds okay and the next steps the next assignment was different totally different because it was not about it was not about declarations it was about how people actually behave in Steam on Steam page we ask them to find an in-game and we assured them that we we will buy this game to them to you know create a very realistic scenario and we of course both them those games after this study uh and then after this uh after this assignment they they have

to they have to uh declare why they chose this particular game and what information was crucial to the site and Part B of this study of this part of the study was that they they were presented with three uh three games and they had to you know just browse steam pages of this games to um for us to know how people really behave in in Steam and what is the visual attention uh how the visual attention looks like uh on Steam so first I would like to uh you know maybe familiarize you with an eye tracking device because maybe not not every person here knows how it looks like this is the eye tracker it's a

small like a bit of cameras and below the screen so the study is non-intrusive it can be done you know without touching the uh the participant so what they what they do first they familiarized themselves themselves with the website of steam and the tabs available on it so they could narrow the search and what the what is the visual attention how it looks like what you see is how people wear exactly people Gamers look at in in what part of of the steam page they are looking at okay so as you can see this is the dead zone totally oh sorry

sorry yeah and afterwards we could create a heat map so the heat map is uh you know the visual representation of players visual attention and we can see that here is the you know Focus area the most focused area of Gamers browsing steam page and here and here and here nothing happened here for example uh this is the aggregated heat map from all of people gazes people's gazes players who use steam application more frequently than others immediately reach for category stop eventually all of them Reach the stop but this is how the uh categories tab looks

like if we put the eye tracking on that so you can see that here and here are the very very heavy they are very heavy in you know gazing for example this part is particularly not you know interesting for for players sometimes player choose their favorite genre first for example Metro divania and then narrow down the search for for in the games tag you can see it here what you will see is the participant gaze where they look and what they do this is one of strategies to find an indie game

and another participant the more the bigger the circle is the the more time they spend on you know on the page on the on the point sorry so you can see the Bros picture they browse uh they look at title and they look at price and this is recurring you know scheme some Gamers try to use the search field they use it really so they put Indie here and try to you know find and in the game called indie

of course they they tried also to simplify uh the task and to be you know smart as you can see here okay and some Gamers use the genres tab which directly displayed the genre they were looking for you can see it here like metroidvania for example or uh platformer or another General this is the third strategy of the gamer

to explore steam web page well it is interesting the the mouse is following you know the eyes as you can see the pointer is following okay okay so this was a browsing bro just browsing Steam for an indie game the next assignment was to to our participants was to explore web page of particular game how it looks like

see okay yeah that's the gamers visual attention on the whole games page so it seems like the Dead space is here it's not but it seems like you know in the first minutes I think it's dead okay why I'm why am I uh showing it to to you because I would like for you to understand what the data

came from because I will show you the heat map uh it's totally you know uh not clear I understand and I know it but I would like to know I would like for you to know that from this we create this the heat map of the the page of the particular game okay and and what is interesting the right side is so called Spotlight map Spotlight map is showing you what really people see actually on the you know on the same page so they see visuals mainly and some you know basic information here which came which sorry leads us to to

the to the next part of the analysis we divided the steam page to sections uh you know functional sections called areas of Interest and uh to examine which of them are read first read first and for how long each of them is read and thanks to uh to the eye tracker we know what is the visual visual attention real distribution in each of those sections and how it's look how it sorry looks like let's see here you have the path of the of the eyes it's the bottom of this of the page of course it it didn't fit in the slide so it's it's cut what you can see here

is how much time they spend on each of this sections okay so um as you can see visuals along with life which is also visual is a king it's a king of the of the fields absolutely next we asked participants how they think what they think is the most important for them the information important for them so what they declared they declared their that screenshots game descriptions tags and reviews are the most important this is number of declarations we have eight participants so 100 is here 25 is here and how it looks like if we you know put

it on uh actual eye tracking data this is the table of eye tracking never mind just to you know for you to know that there is tons of data it's only a part of you know of those tables what is interesting is if we compare the rank of Declaration so what people think is important to what is really important because of their visual attention we have here time to First fixation this is the measurement as you can probably see here somewhere yeah uh how it how long it took the subjects to notice a specific area for the first time on average and this is the rank so screenshots are absolutely number one and uh and trailers and streams so every visual is absolutely number one

what is interesting the number two is comments and reviews oh sorry sorry it's absolutely not this okay sorry number two is uh game description sorry whatever sorry what I'm I'm missing uh yeah what I would like to say is uh about revisiting and dual time sorry uh that revisit is how money how many time uh how many times the area was Revisited by uh by our participants and it's also rank so the most Revisited is uh section is screenshots trailers and and again Stream So visuals and this and the third is dual time which means uh which means um how much time they spend on this area on

this particular area and you as you can see uh on the second rank is long reviews and comments it's not first information they acquire but they devote many times to make you know um to be a to read it to you know uh yeah just to read it and to know about comments and the the last one the last section of this presentation is about what why do Gamers prefer some games over others so they uh choose from that store Wilderness and his inscription they show they have chosen uh death's door six of Gamers chosen this game and here you can here we can see why do Gamers prefer this game over other others those are

Declarations of our of our gamers if you are curious is it I don't know statistically significant significant it is not because it's eight players and it's you know deeply qualitative study not quantitative but we have also quantitative data what is important uh for for gamers to prefer one game over another again from the humble uh humble games study story and narrative is absolutely a king and it's it's from study of over about 1 000 1000 participants so that's statistics so people when asked why they prefer one game over other story narrative is one number one controls feel is number two and amount

of content is number three few takeaways for you in my opinion maybe they are not so you know elaborated but it's always nice to remember that visuals is the most critical area of gaming of Gamers interest so you have to you have to put a lot of effort and care about this section where the screenshots and trailers are it's obvious but it is worth noting again and again second takeaway is if you see uh with if we dig deep in the data we saw that you have not even two seconds to convince a gamer or a player in a short game description that it's worth reading the long one so the short

game description is written is red sorry for not even two seconds it's 1.7 second approximately so it's quite short of time and again do not under underestimate the long description because it is red story and narrative is one of your vital marketing assets so visuals yes of course you have to care about visuals but do not underestimate uh long description and the story and the narrative because narrative especially in Indie is really really important feature of the game if not the you know number one Gamers care about other Gamers lengthy reviews that's the fact so they they read it and uh may they even May uh care about other

Gamers reviews than journalists Metascore I don't know if you if you notice that Metascore was on the 16th or yeah this the last yeah to time to First fixation so it's not really uh it seems like it's not really so important for for gamers and the last one it's for you to you know take away to have uh the energy to fight biggerages and be data driven and try to you know Implement unique ideas non-standard mechanics exciting storytelling and Niche topics because they may prove a hit really it really matters in Indie gaming the especially unique idea or unique ideas hybridity and you know and the niche

the the maybe not so funny or maybe not so um I would say what is not so uh sorry there are tons and tons and tons of indie games every week you know putting in at steam so it is even if you try to make unique idea non-standard etc etc etc there are tons of developers developing also UniQue Ideas non-standard mechanics hybridity and so on so it's not so uh it is tough and one last thing you have to remember

of about how Indie Gamers play games they also play triple Ace and they play Triple A's very often so they are used to some mechanics from Triple A's okay and they wait for mechanics like in Triple A's so if you because they know it so if you try to implement some mechanic be original but remember that for example horizon or GTA or I don't know Red Dead Redemption or any AAA game is known by players by Gamers and they will expect some you know uh direction of the mechanics like like in this Triple A's even if you are small in this study and Studio sorry and even if you have unique idea so that's

not the the point to you know to be very very very very very absolutely original beware of that thank you feel free to contact me if you are if you are interested how eye tracking may be applied in actual research of games not only steam page but games you can just visit our blog there is an elaborated article about it or you can see how we uh how we explored trailers of goodfall versus hellblade some time ago introducing network marketing like you know eye tracking and also galvanic skin response so it's a measurement of emotions and so on so we can just click here on our blog okay thank you Mikhail uh we have plenty of time for the questions

oh and we have plenty of questions thank you for start letting me start it's an awesome presentation thank you for measuring this Alex this is this is something that we came up with some surveys some experience uh but I actually wanted to ask you once again you made this based on eight person right eight people right can you show me them are they from Poland from Poland right are those game developers not not Gamers Gamers just Gamers that's one important question and the second part is I would to ask you to return for them um the part where they had the list of the games the list of the games yes uh because actually this is the first very first step to learn about an indie game you told them to find an indie game right right yeah and this is one of the issues like they I'm not even sure if people

look for indie games they look for games and sometimes an indie game is presented to them yes okay totally true yeah uh well I wonder if this is this is some somehow included in this like perhaps you noticed on this this main page main mainstream page how often they look for Indie Games how often they actually not look for indie games they they their eyes met an indie game okay so uh you ask me if we or whether we are planning such a study yes yes we are planning it with Nicola right it was just the first note to uh explore Steam and to explore how eye tracking is working on steep inter steam interface and we have plenty of ideas how to you know elaborate uh this eye tracking uh studies to other you know cases like you said

thank you hey thank you very much for this topic it's really great to see uh such Topic in data-driven approach my question is related with recruiting participants to to such study because for me was very unexpected that the big part of the group was females and when I was reading in Internet most of the females are more in casual games and from your data those girls was involved like 15 plus hours per week in PC games indie games so there was some like maybe like requirements that you wanted to have like this much of females or this is like a standard group no no we we just wanted to have typical yeah the different people and we wanted females in the group and we

wanted females in you know the strong representations representation of females because it's not statistically uh you know uh significant study it's not like recruiting the population sample or you know random sample of people it's just you know on purpose so you didn't want to have like uh the major part of your group for the studies or so you want like just girls and boys from from from this group like to have like different approaches um I'm not sure I understand I'm just trying to figure out if the if girls like really um some a really big part of this group of of those participants in in real life can we just think about it like like okay you you you okay so if you think that females are in

minority of Gamers right and uh so you expect that the sample would be also uh people sorry females will be in minority foreign okay we will think about it in in the future just to you know to test it on maybe Nikola would like to add something to this because she was recruiting this group so from what I understood uh you're asking like you're thinking that girls are like a minority maybe even in our database right but in our database we have over 250 Gamers and it's almost 50 50 I would say we have a lot of girls in our database um I would say like maybe 40 of them are girls 60 of them are like boys but it's not like we have only 20 percent of girls so in general we have a lot of

girls in our database so like recruiting those three girls was not a big problem for us uh because like we asked our uh like the people from our database uh if they want to take part in the study and there was a lot of people who wanted to and we chose the the people who are like who had like all those criteria um so it's not hard to find girls who want to participate and they are not really a minority at least in our database I don't know if that answers your question or yeah okay no problem we have plenty of Hardcore Gamers female Gamers really really right and I'm I'm you know they they play a lot more than me for example and and even if I'm mid core gamer hardcore gamer they play much more than I or some people from try evidence even

so they are really hardcourse yep so thank you for a great talk uh I have one question because words struck me as a surprise was that the steam score wasn't released it as the one of the top factors so don't you think that it's just because it's immediately visible and players actually don't really spend time looking at this but it's still one of the most interesting factors it was it was in fact it was I will show it you mean yeah I mean the one yeah so which one is it is he it's here like a score the steam score is somewhere here in opinions like we name it opinions like you mean this thumbs yeah so for example these players see mixed or read mostly Negative they won't even bother looking further isn't it true uh equal

uh here yeah there is opinions yeah okay so we call this stupidness okay yeah so two and a half seconds they spend on on this you know uh small really small um part of the of the same it's important it is important for players okay thank you so I was wondering because you are using if I'm seeing it correctly you are using an and a steam that is not locked in so you are using uh the steam page without the player history and I think that is an important data point that steam has its algorithms algorithms algorithms and recommends games to players so for example they could for example look towards areas like players

like you love or your Discovery queue or something like that so I think that perhaps it would be a good idea to perform another study using uh the steam page when the players are actually logged in yeah sure sure this would probably be in my opinion it would be more representative than just looking at the pay at the raw page because that's how people interact with this team daily or whenever they interact yeah right right that's a good point so you measured the amount of time spent on each individual element uh do we have any link to the decisiveness of this element because like I would expect people to focus their eyes on visually stimulating elements even if they don't really impact their decision to buy or not buy so basically is it will be great to see for example a

funnel of after which element how many people leave the page earned and how how many people will stay because maybe if they are reading like description they already like mentally decided to buy it and just like they are the justifying the decision to themselves and it doesn't really matter that much later right yeah maybe maybe that's also a good point yeah we have time for the last question and the mic goes to hey sorry I'm in the back here a bit of visible I had a question about the uh fixation ranking of price and I'm wondering if that was at all affected by the promise to purchase the game for the participants if maybe if they didn't have that promise they might have looked at that price uh a lot sooner than it was ranked [Music] no I know it was ranked but it was ranked quite lowly from the participants

and I'm wondering because early on in one of the slides you mentioned that you had told participants you would purchase this game for them and if that promise hadn't been given to them perhaps price had been would have been a lot higher on the ranking to look at first maybe so that that was yep so thank you all for the great discussion I believe that you can still catch me how and Nicola during our break let's give them one more round of applause thank you [Applause]