Welcome back to our ongoing series of articles on how to use business development strategies to improve your LARP. The tool I wanted to focus on this time was LARP market research. (It’s worth noting that LARP market research is just market research with LARP in front of it for SEO purposes. I’ll talk about SEO in a future post. We’re gonna go down a rabbit hole, folks!)
Market research can be viewed unfavourably for very legitimate reasons. It seems skeezy. You can describe market research as “understanding your customer so you can make the most money out of them” and be 100% accurate. If your LARP is about maximizing profits you can definitely use it that way, just like any other business. But LARP isn’t really like that the way traditional businesses are. LARPs are often so heavily run by volunteers that they can easily be viewed as a community instead of a business. When we help you start a LARP we want to make sure you have the best chance of success.
LARP Market Research is about helping your community
As a LARP owner or creator you know that your success is intimately tied to the satisfaction of your players. That’s a big challenge! Especially if you’ve been entertaining the same players in the same game world for a long period of time.
Some market research can be accomplished without interacting with your players. If you know that there are a high number of players from a certain faction in your game, you can infer that a well written plotline based within that culture would have a high level of interest from your players. Getting content to players that engages and excites them helps everyone. The goal is to have as many people experience this as possible.
Doing surveys after your game is a form of market research. They’re critical and they help you understand how your players feel when the experience is fresh in their minds. Conducting polls or asking questions about rulebook revisions is also a great way to understand your players. Learn what they want from your game.
It doesn’t have to be overly complicated
Massive entertainment companies do massive market research. Companies like Netflix, or television and film studios, put out a pile of diverse content. They’ve been doing it for ages and they’re the biggest in the world. Because of how much money they have on the line they put a lot of money into market research. LARP market research is completely different.
It’s so easy an orc could do it!
If I wanted to do LARP market research and had an unlimited budget, I would start with focus groups. From there, I would go to every Underworld LARP guild and assemble groups of 10 or so players. After that I would ask them dozens of questions about how they feel about their LARP experience. Finally, I would also put out a bunch of smaller surveys. Most importantly I would reward everyone who engaged with my market research appropriately. That helps me collect as much data as possible.
Everything I can get out of that complex and costly process can be achieved in other ways. It’s less efficient and it’s going to get me less data, but it’s still more information than I had at the start. That’s significant. I can use that to make informed decisions. I can use that to help grow my community and the experience they receive.
It doesn’t have to cost anything (With examples!)
There are so many free tools available to help you collect information from your players. All you need to do for LARP market research is collect data and analyze it. It doesn’t need to happen rapidly and it doesn’t need to be perfect. There’s always time to collect more data and implement more improvements.
When we were rebuilding the Underworld LARP website we used the opportunity to conduct market research on the Underworld LARP community. This helped us build the best tool for this job based on what they wanted. This didn’t cost us anything, we just created a Google form with a bunch of relevant questions on it. The form was a total of 7 pages, you can see it here. The information we got from this form was invaluable.
Here’s some of the cool stuff we learned in this process, and how it informed our development decisions
This question helped inform our recent decisions to overhaul the wiki into the new Lore section. It’s also why we’ll be launching a newer, better global forum in the coming days.
This is a follow-up to the previous question. We had ideas for how to improve the wiki and we used this question to validate those ideas.
We want content on our website. Amplify the voices in our community is a great honour. A huge portion of our community shares this value. We’ll be launching some exciting new features around this very soon!
This market research also serves as advertising. We have two distinct styles of content available to our players, and they have opinions about that content. This allows us to check in on how they’re viewing our brand. It also creates content that links to our website and can be shared on social media.
LARP Market Research helps you make the most out of your game
You can use market research principles as a tool to help you improve almost anything. Writing mods, plotlines or stories? Market research helps you know what your players like. Creating a rule system? Market research helps you understand what you players consider fair.
Your time is important. It can feel really frustrating when you roll something out to your players and it doesn’t get the reception you want. Wasting time causes negative emotions. Don’t waste your time like that. In hindsight you’ll feel it could have been done differently or shouldn’t have been done at all. That can lead to burnout. You owe it to yourself to have the best possible experience running your LARP or building your stories. You owe it to your players to to provide them with the best experience you’re able to put together.
We’re all in this together. LARP is art. It could be argued that sometimes artistic expression is more important than customer service. But for the times when you need to check in with your players, using appropriate LARP market research tools can help. There are a lot of resources out there to help you get started. We’ve tried to make this easily accessible, as do others in the LARP space, but you should be aware that this is business development and the more detailed you’ll get the more jargon end terminology you’ll be exposed to.