Here's some data about gamebooks

I forgot to post this here back in May but I ran a consumer survey where I asked people if they have heard of / played / recently played gamebooks.

The full report (with link to the actual survey where you can slice and dice the data any way you want):
http://egamebook.com/blog/data-about-gamebooks/

A few take aways (nothing too surprising, but a good confirmation for me):

• About 48% Americans have at least heard about gamebooks or Choose-Your-Own-Adventure games.
• Generally speaking, the younger you are, the more likely you are to know about gamebooks.
• People who are 25-34 years old know them the most (only 37% have never heard the term).
• When it comes to actually playing them, recently, the youngest cohort (18-24) wins (11%) followed by 25-34 (8%).
• Men are only slightly more likely to know about gamebooks and play them than women.
• Gamebook seem to be (have been) most popular on the West coast and in the Norteast of US.
• Gamebooks are best known to the rich ($100K+ income). People with median income know the least about them.
• It looks like parents are more likely to have played a gamebook recently than non-parents.

A good food for thought but a pinch of salt to your statistic.

First, you read only weighted numbers for 545 respondents Google selected as typical. The unweighted results (759 respondents) are slightly less optimistic.

Second, you really shouldn’t trust Google on details too much. The age, gender, geography and income are just an informed guess.

Sure. Although, personally, I would definitely trust the weighted results more than the unweighted ones. But that just a matter of opinion, I guess.

Well, I am definitely biased, but I do trust those informed guesses (that are based on data that cannot be easily lied about by the respondents) more than I trust Gallup polls and similar. My wife’s a sociologist who has been working as a market researcher for several years now, so I like to think I have a bit of insight.

But again, I don’t think this can be resolved unless we both dig into a year-long study of research methods. Let’s keep it as “we agree to disagree”. And I mean it in the most friendly way possible.

wow, thanks for putting this together! Stuff like this can really help gamebook authors with marketing!

None of the stats were super surprising except “the younger you are, the more likely you are to know about gamebooks.” Can you define “young”? At conventions I generally found those that were late 20’s to early 50’s were familiar with the genre (and very fond of it).

Slightly off topic, but the notion behind egamebook sounds awesome - and couldn’t agree with you more! I’m exploring something very similar, but just building the game - not the tool set. Do you twitter?

Thanks Dewfreak83!

Easiest way is to show you the data. If you click here and scroll to the bottom, see the last graph. It’s not a categorical difference, but it’s there. I think at conventions there’s a significant sample bias.

Re OT: I just checked you Heroes Guard and I love it. Subscribed to mailing list and followed you on Twitter. My Twitter account is mostly about work and tech in general, but if you’re interested in egamebook, there are ways to stay updated at the bottom of the homepage.