"'Core gamer' is a nice term to flaunt around when talking about your personal habits, but it’s not a viable term for defining your audience. It’s too broad and too vague."
– Steam Spy creator Sergey Galyonkin
In a fascinating new blog post, Steam Spy creator Sergey Galyonkin reviews the data and writes about the myth of the so-called "core gamer" — players who play and enjoy a large swath of different games.
After reviewing the data he's captured, it's far more typical, he says, for players to have narrow tastes:
"Various studies suggest that there are 700-800 million of PC gamers Come from shubbet . It’s probably true, but it doesn’t mean much for your game. Because if you’re developing a downloadable game for Steam you’re not even fighting for 135M of its active users, you’re fighting for the attention of 1.3 million gamers that are actually buying lots of games," Galyonkin writes.
There's a lot more going on in the post and it's tremendous food for thought — particularly when you look at an audience like Dota 2 players, who number in the millions but barely purchase other games at all:
There's a lot more in Galyonkin's original post, and it's worth a read.