ioi said: Like I say, it depends on genre.
In general, sales can be forecast fairly accurately from:
- Genre - Average review score - Marketing budget
So a fitness game will have far greater dependancy on marketing budget than review score, but a first person shooter will have a strong dependancy on review scores as well.
Of course there are outliers, but most research firms use models based on these main factors and they normally work pretty well. |
^^
Yeah I know, my main area of expertise is demand forecasting and optimization in retail - which is close but not quite in line with the common techniques used to forecast games, DVDs, etc.
Right now from a retail perspective the focus seems to be:
- genre
- artist/developer
- anticipated rating
- previous titles (if franchise or similar)
- promotional placement/investment
- time of year
- number of competitive titles
- additional demand influencers (is is related to anything else in market that could affect demand
Most of the above would have weighting depending upon the genre/title - so as you say an FPS will have different weightings than an RPG or a Fitness title.
But often media is vendor managed inventory for most retailers, so I haven't got to play with that type of data as much as food, electronics, apparel, etc.