How to Define a Competitive Set

So you have a game you want to launch. Your dev team has been working hard on an interactive entertainment masterpiece (at least that is what the EP is telling you). It's your job, as Publishing/Marketing lead, to define who is in your competitive set. But how many competitors should you choose and what should you research on each?

You can quickly go overboard with too many competitors being analyzed if you don’t have a structure to follow. Here is a method I have used with my publishing teams to help focus. We try and define competitors in buckets based on how similar they are to our game. We usually define 3 buckets and limit each to three games (nine total analyzed). Think of them as concentric circles (as illustrated in the picture below for Marvel Strike Force) where the core is your most similar competitors and each ring out is less similar but relevant. As you move out from the center the level of research and analysis is less.

Here are the categories we have defined:

1.      Primary Core Competitors – These three games are the most similar to yours. In most instances, they will share genre, platform, business model, and most importantly – target audience definition. For your primary core competitors, you will want to be exhaustive in your research. You need to know everything about these games in order to properly differentiate and market to their player base

2.      Product Category Competitors – Normally there are a few games that are in your genre that didn’t make it into the primary core three. For these, put them into this bucket. For this bucket, you are looking for games that suck the wind out of the genre as a whole but are markedly different than yours on multiple levels. Research macro trends for these games. When do they come out, what are their main marketing strategies and messages? Don’t need to drill as far down into these three

3.      Platform Category Competitors – Typically these are big games that are “events” on the platform you will launch on. You may be launching a FPS on PlayStation but if the next GTA is also launching on PlayStation near your launch you need to be prepared. Make sure your team is tracking the essentials on these games – dates, marketing tactics, co-op details etc. 

For the Primary Core Competitors I like to have my team think deeply about how we compare on multiple fronts. Usually doing a SWOT analysis for each of the three is a good way to understand where you can differentiate. Knowing your strengths compared to their weaknesses is helpful when constructing your GTM plan. Taking it one step further is doing a TOWS strategic exercise which turns a SWOT into actionable strategies against each competitor!