Audience

Those who want to play action-packed MOBA-esque games on mobile often have only two options. They either play something light-weight with only a few strategic elements, or they play something heavily strategic that's hard to get into without understanding a very complex system. That leaves a large group who would want some more choices that the most casual games but prefer to stay away from the often harsh climate among the hard-core games.

Aiming for this mid-core group also helps us find other aspects of our target audience. They are older than the casual gamer segment as they're prepared to to take on some more complexity, they consider phones a convenient platform for gaming, and they have a wide spread. This final part is a good reason for us to include many different ways a player can identify with Embershard.

Player Motivations

Extraversion

Action: Colorful and stylized art direction offers an amazing immersive experience for players. Action and adrenaline pact combat system which allows players to engage with their environment such as destruction, colorful projectiles, and eye-catching game mode interactions will keep the players on the edge. The game does not support “wait-to-play” which will appeal to the player base as it allows them to play the game as often as they’d like for as long as they want.

Social: Social access is the element that has the biggest impact on players. Mechanics and rewards are achieved much easier with friends. Players can create their own communities to play, evolve and progress together to unlock even more rewards. The ability to share a gaming experience with others is a great way to make and maintain friendships, especially for shy people. It’s often easier to talk while doing something together.

Conscientiousness

Mastery: The main selling point of the genre is “easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master”. Players will be accustomed to the gameplay and characters very quickly and intuitively but it will take quite some practice for them to get better and more efficient with the characters as well as cooperation with other characters played by their friends or others. Creating different synergy and unit cohesion scenarios, they will master new offensive and defensive strategies by thinking ahead and anticipating the opposing team’s strategies.

Achievement: Players have multiple paths to achieve progress, completion, and power. When one is close to a milestone, it is easy to justify playing for a few more minutes to reach the next step before quitting. It is easiest to stop playing when a goal has been reached. But as soon as you reach a point, another point in character, trophy, reward, or achievement is close to finishing, so they decide to play until it does too. It's a potentially endless cycle.

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