byS. D. Dudley
No industry will be able to survive if it does not provide its consumer base with what that base wants. No company can survive trying to steer itself to where it is selling a product that the company is comfortable with selling as opposed to what the buyers in the market demands. While such incompetence is rare, many companies have, in the past, delivered a ton of products to the market that where rejected by consumers. The reason for this rejection in many instances was because a company made the critical mistake of misreading the desires of the market. Usually, such an error is the result of shoddy or improper marketing research. When it comes to PC online gaming, companies have a huge step up when it comes to knowing what their market desires because the PC allows for unrestricted communication and market research between buyers and sellers.
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun’s rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert—a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
The World Of The Message Boards
Those who love PC online gaming and are rabid about the hobby will also frequent message boards and discuss their PC online gaming likes and dislikes. Some of these individuals who post messages about PC online gaming are not only rabid in their love of the activity, but they are also highly educated and knowledgeable about the business side of PC games. This provides a gaming company with an incredible resource for marketing research that virtually eliminates second guessing what the gaming consumer audience wants or will purchase. After all, the consumers are telling the companies what they want and what they like (dig) or dislike (un-dig?) and do so in an uncensored manner.
The candid nature of the PC online gaming message boards is tremendous for the companies’ ability to receive unadulterated information. When a market research plan is initiated internally within a company, many times there is the tendency for marketing research reports to be 'doctored’ so as to provide the company with information it wants to hear. (Those in charge of the research may be afraid of losing their job so their reports end up being skewed)
Of course, just reading a message board is not going to provide a PC online gaming company with the perfect answer to all their business practice questions, but it does provide an excellent source of material that can help guide the company in a direction agreeable to all who are involved.