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The way the market actually works is that you catch wind of a game through a friend or a website, and you eventually stumble upon its page on a digital distribution site like Steam or Good Old Games. You watch the trailer, look at the screenshots, maybe double-check its purported quality by reading Metacritic reviews (or just glancing at the game's damnable Metacritic score) ... and you imagine what the game might be like to play, and whether you'll enjoy it. You create a mental picture of that enjoyment you'll get from the game, and then you compare that to the asking price. If the asking price is aligned with the enjoyment you predict you'll get from the game (and everyone's equation for this is different), AND you have that money to fart away on entertainment, THEN you may just complete the purchase.

If i were to approach this exercise completely cynically, i would continue to tweak and refine the page until i got the best potential conversion from my respondents, and then release Spellirium without making any changes to it. Because, speaking absolutely cynically, it doesn't actually matter if the game is good or bad - it only matters that people buy it. But that's not how Untold Entertainment rolls!

Of course, i desperately do want to make a good game. So i'll use the Steam page mock-up and survey as a funnel to decide on my testers. Those respondents who report the highest interest in playing the game, and the highest likelihood of buying it, will test the game. At that point, it doesn't matter who is a "proper" word gamer and who isn't: what matters is that i have an obligation to the people who are excited about my game and who want to buy it. If those players struggle to make 3-letters words, and if those players expect long words to be rewarded over tricky words, then i will adjust the game for the sake of those players. Because those players are my paying audience - not some mythical "perfect" players that i've hand-picked to enjoy Spellirium the specific way i've configured it. The players choose my game - not the other way around.

In Gamasutra's latest feature, a unified model of player types is proposed -- by surveying work done by academics and developers and attempting to synthesize a total picture of why players play. The piece starts with Richard Bartle's four famous Types: - Killers: interfere with the functioning of the game world or the play experience of other players - Achievers: accumulate status tokens by beating the rules-based challenges of the game world - Explorers: discover the systems governing the operation of the game world - Socializers: form relationships with other players by telling stories within the game world