Helping THQ understand its Customers

As the video game industry matures, it will need to invest in understanding its customers. Sometimes you get the feeling that games are made based on what the people in control of the process want to play (or what their gut tells them other people would want to play). Essentially, it is a glorified guess. For the larger companies, they deeply believe in this process because it got them to that level of success. They ignore the fact that they were lucky; while they guessed a successful game, there were 10 other companies who guessed wrong. Now, as these big video game companies grow and go public, they are subjected to heavy pressure to continue to create new hit titles. Well, they may be able to guess one hit game...maybe two...even three, but when their revenue projections begin to rely on 10-30 solid titles, the odds of guessing will catch up to you.
So what do you do? The initial reaction of a immature industry is to go conservative. They try to find ways to release sequels every year even though it will not move the title forward very much (essentially trading future brand equity for current sales). They look at the hits of their competitors and try to replicate it them. I think you can see every large video game company committing these faux-pas. What they need to do is try to understand their customer.
This past Friday, I completed one of the first projects that was assigned to me back in week one. The project was to analyze data surrounding video games of boy-targeted TV licensed properties. Incidentally, a goal of the project was to better understand the customer. For the project, I amassed an impressive data set that included sales, advertising, TV ratings, and platform install base info and tried to sift through it looking for key lessons about the genre.
It turned out to be a very difficult project. The difficulty was not in interpreting the results, it was finding the proper methodology that would deliver relevant results. To this end, I had to redo my research three times - revising data, finding new data, modifying regression methodologies. On that 3rd go around I was very relieved and amazed to get some solid findings.
Now, I am not going to reveal the key findings (thats why THQ pays me the big bucks), but I can say the results reveal two distinct levels in the target market that dictated different product types and different marketing strategies. I won't be so bold as to claim my results are hard and true facts about how this genre operates, but they are starting point for further observations to test the validity of my conclusions. More importantly, it establishes a methodology for other THQ brand managers to evaluate their markets.
...And that is a step towards better understanding their customers.