Methodology

The data presented in GameVision reports is based on information from three specially commissioned surveys designed to gather information about the size of the gaming market in Europe, and about the behaviours of gamers themselves:

• the Market Sizing Face to Face Survey
• the Online Market Sizing Survey
• the Online Games & Gamer Survey

The surveys are carried out in five countries: UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. This year, the face to face survey was carried out in the UK, France, and Germany.

Research takes place in January-March and July-September each year. Each year we interview a sample of 37,500 people for our Market Sizing research and 12,000 'Active Gamers' (those who have spent money on games in the last 12 months) for our gamer behaviour and game tracking research.

Together the surveys provide the most robust and reliable assessment of the whole gaming market available for UFIGS territories. We are the only research company to provide such depth of insight from both face to face online research. This delivers two advantages for our clients:

1. Firstly, it means that we are tracking the whole market not just those responding to online surveys.
2. Secondly, the face to face research allows us to check and control the response profile online. We know that, unchecked, keen gamers are up to 7 times more likely to respond to an online survey than marginal or casual gamers. While this means we might have an enthusiastic set of responders, it also means that unchecked surveys will provide a picture that vastly overestimates readiness to spend money and time on games and gives a very distorted picture of all gamers' interests.

We carry out a lot of in-survey quality control measures to ensure that the right people are being interviewed and they are giving full attention to the questions they are answering. Any respondent failing our quality controls is dropped from the data set. All data is then comprehensively checked before inclusion in our reports.