Are market research questions on topic here?

Question

This question came up recently and it's primary focus is to provide market research information to the querent.

I'm unclear if this is similar to problem player/interpersonal crossover, but some of this question seems very much out of our scope.

At a high level, I think the question is currently too broad. The three questions listed are different enough that each should have it's own. But looking at them more carefully, the first one seems outside of our scope as it entirely lives within the world of market data. The only interaction it has with RPGs is the overall topic.

The 2nd and 3rd questions are more on topic, but it's unclear how it can be answered meaningfully to be useful data for the querent(or others finding the question.)

I'm not entirely sure all of the contents of that question are within our domain here.

The first question:

In which countries is it more usual and how common is it in those countries?

This one seems very broad and opinion-based. How are 'usual' and 'common' defined? How does one answer this with objective data that would be useful? This seems more like a general market research business inquiry then something we can, should, can answer well here (unless we have more definitions to narrow the scope of an answer.)

2nd question:

What is the usual length of a gaming session with a hired GM?

This is answerable, but I'm also not sure about how useful it is. Depending on the potential data set, having a few respondents isn't a good indicator for an overall average time spent to determine business viability.

3rd question:

What is the average cost for this type of service?

This can also be answered by users here who have utilized these services. But again, it's a limited dataset that may be not all that useful in business planning purposes.

Or are none of the above the question and OP is just asking where to find this data?

In which case, this is a question about how to do market research. Folks may be able to answer more specifically here given the association with the end-user for this type of service.

Are questions about general market research on topic?

Answer 1

Yes, questions about RPGs and the RPG industry are on-topic here

Even though the vast majority of our questions deal with issues that can be answered by GMs and players, our site serves the entire RPG industry which includes more roles than just "GM" and "player" (eg publisher, writer, etc.) and we have historically considered such questions on-topic here. You can see that in tags like publishing intellectual-property and games-industry. We don't get many questions about them, but we do accept them when properly scoped to RPGs.

"Market research inquiry" isn't really a topic, it's an end goal and that doesn't really matter if the actual content being asked about is about RPGs and meets our other conditions for being on topic.

Yes, this specific question is also on topic (though could be improved and is probably currently impossible to answer)

Right off the bat, I think OP might be better served to split off the second two questions into a separate post because I suspect that they will be easier to answer than the first.

In which countries [is GM-for hire] more usual and how common is it in those countries?

Is clearly asking about an RPG topic exclusively about the RPG industry. Being able to find, parse, and contextualise this data will take understanding of the RPG industry which means it benefits greatly from expertise that the RPG community has.

It is likely that this data will be hard to come by in the amounts and specificity that is being requested, but the availability and ease (or lack thereof) of answering does not affect how on-topic something is. Just because the data doesn't exist doesn't mean someone can't ask about it.

Your concerns about how "usual" and "common" should be defined and measured are something that should be worked out with OP and might make the question inclear, but not off-topic. As for broadness, it does seem to ask for a lot of data. Perhaps limiting it geographically could help get answers more easily, but even data from every RPG-selling country could be formatted to fit within the confines of our answer field and thus it doesn't seem Broad enough to me to warrant closure.

What is the usual length of a gaming session with a hired GM?

and

What is the average cost for this type of service?

Seem like on-topic questions for the same reasons as above. Probably a bit more answerable because the pool of people with access to a portion of this kind of data is larger. On the other hand, it still will be incredibly hard to find comprehensive data internationally for this.

How useful the answer is to OP is really up to OP. If a (potential) answerer thinks that it is useless to OP they can always simply not answer. Or, they can provide the information and then contextualise why they think it won't help OP. Or, even better, you can try to work with OP to fine-tune the scope of the question such that they do get useful answers. Either way, whether or not the end data will be useful to OP isn't really a core concern for determining if the topic itself is on-topic.

Answer 2

I think market research is on topic (with some qualifiers I’ll touch on below), but I don’t think this question is market research and I don’t think it’s on topic.

I think we should look at two tests for whether this is on topic, and I think both need to be met for a question to pass.

1. The question has to be about something within our topic.

2. The question has to be reasonably expected to have relevant experts/experience within our theoretical membership.

This seems like a market research question, but I don’t think it is. When we think of “market research” in the industry, none of the normal kinds exist: large population surveys, focus testing, and that kind of thing doesn’t exist. “Market research” in the RPG industry is things like “I’m an independent game designer; how do I learn about design trends / how do I decide who my audience is / is Kickstarter a good idea”.

Basically, nobody with industry has the access or money for access to large datasets, and nobody within industry is compiling them. It’s not part of the RPG industry’s activities, so doesn’t fall under our inclusion of the RPG publishing in our topic.

When businesses don’t do these large kinds of surveys, we don’t call it “market research”, it’s just plain research. Science.

We’re not scientists. Nobody within our topic area engages in this kind of large-scale data collection, analysis, and distillation. Nobody within our topic scope sciences the RPG population.

Basic research science is outside our topic. People doing this kind of research work are scientists, who are not in our scope.

The industry, and the activities of designing and publishing games, are both on topic. Actual market research questions that real game designers have experience with are on topic.

Since this is both outside what people do in the RPG industry (test 1), and because those who do do the sorts of market research specific to RPGs don’t do the kind of research the question is about, our theoretical membership can’t be expected to have relevant experience (test 2).

(And although GMs for hire are obviously theoretical members doing something within the topic of RPGs, individual GMs for hire existing doesn’t mean they are doing large-scale, full time science research about themselves.)

So I think market research is on topic — as market research is actually done in our industry. I don’t think this question is market research, isn’t on a topic we can have experience in, and isn’t part of our industry.