The Market Research tool in Lumos helps you size opportunities, spot risks, and validate feature ideas before you build. It gives you data-driven insights into player demand, competition, and future trends across the games market. Whether you're refining a pitch, designing a new game, or scouting for gaps, Market Research lets you explore real-world signals quickly and easily.
Navigate to Market Research
From the Home page of Lumos, navigate to the left corner to find the Market Research option.
Discover what's trending in gaming! No grind, just good vibes and great insights!
Starting a Segment
When you create a New Segment, you now have enhanced, precise ways to define your market space:
Smarter "Describe your segment": Type in a natural language description of your game concept. This tool now picks up what you’re already doing - extracting release windows, copies sold, platforms, and similar filters from your description - and turns that into a segment so you spend less time clicking and more time exploring.
Build manually: Pick tags first, then open the segment workspace to begin your analysis.
Power User Tip: Build perfectly tailored segments by taking advantage of the complex AND/OR logic and exact Include/Exclude toggles, to hit your target market dead-on. Need more granular control? Toggle Advanced mode and click Build custom rules at the top of your workspace.
The Segment Dashboard Overview
The top of your segment workspace provides a high-level snapshot of the market's health.
Total Games: The number of games matching your specific tag criteria.
AVG MAU & AVG DAU: Average Monthly and Daily Active Users across the segment.
Median Revenue: The middle baseline for earnings in this space.
Segment Growth: The percentage growth or decline of the segment.
AVG Sentiment: A score out of 100 indicating overall player satisfaction.
Spotlight
The Spotlight section gives you immediate historical and current context for the segment by highlighting standout titles and key milestones. Because every segment is unique, the metrics presented here dynamically adjust to show the most relevant insights available:
Top Performers: Discover the most impactful games leading the space, such as the Best Performing, Most Loved, or Most Wish-listed titles.
Segment Context: Get a quick read on the market's history. Depending on the segment's data, this area calls out notable milestones such as the longest-running veteran title, recent breakout successes, the most reviewed game, or the average time it takes games in this niche to reach significant scale.
Market Pulse & Momentum
Understand the timeline, velocity, and current momentum of your selected market.
Market Pulse: A timeline graph tracking macro-trends to see how the segment is breathing. Toggle between Player Count, Avg DAU, or Avg MAU to view the core player signal. The chart plots major events like peaks, surge launches, fastest growth periods, and releases.
Momentum: View exactly what is shifting right now. This metric tracks the 30-day player change, highlighting the top games Rising Now and Falling Now.
Market Dynamics
Use precise, data-driven gauges to measure market viability, crowding, and monetization trends.
Market Saturation: Measures how concentrated the top tier is. High saturation means a few top games hold the vast majority of the player count, requiring a breakthrough differentiator to enter.
Player Fragmentation: Measures how spread out the players are. Low fragmentation means it takes very few games to capture 80% of the audience.
Player Fade: The average weekly player decay from a game's launch peak.
Revenue Concentration: The percentage of the total revenue pool held by the top 10% of games.
New Entries / YR: The average number of new games shipping in this segment annually.
DNA & Personas
Your segment DNA and audience benchmarks now sit together in one place, allowing you to seamlessly analyze the tag makeup and who is playing.
Defining Tags: Features and mechanics present across the vast majority of games in this space.
Opportunity Tags: Tags that rarely co-occur within this segment, highlighting potential differentiators.
Player Personas: See the dominant psychological archetypes of the segment (e.g., Challengers, Explorers, Social Gamers) alongside excluded personas to know exactly who fits your audience and who is actively repelled by this segment.
Audience Sentiment
This dedicated section replaces the old Audience Profile block, diving much deeper into how players actually feel about the games in your segment.
Score by Topic: Track 12-month sentiment trends across distinct categories like Core Gameplay Experience, Presentation, Narrative & Worldbuilding, Economy & Value, and Multiplayer & Community.
Topic Momentum: See which aspects are experiencing sharp drops or fast declines across the segment.
Keywords: Discover exactly what players are talking about through recent player keywords extracted from the top positive and lowest sentiment games.
Feature Correlation: Identify which shared features, vibes, or tropes are common in the top 5 highest-scoring games versus the bottom 5.
Competitive Landscape & Game List
Competitive Benchmarks: Discover games outside your exact segment that players most frequently refer to as competitors. Ranked by citation frequency (number of times it has been referred to) weighted by similarity score.
Segment Activity Feed: Monitor a real-time feed of recent news updates directly from the top games in your segment.
Game List: A detailed table of all games in your segment displaying the Game Name, Release Date, Copies Sold, Revenue, Sentiment Score, and Business Model.
Pro Tips for Market Research
Look for emerging white spaces: Focus on growing segments with few well-established titles.
Balance ambition and risk: First Movers have big upside but bigger unknowns.
Leverage the new Describe feature: Use the smarter "Describe your segment" to automatically map your complex ideas into precise filters.
Hunt for Differentiators: Spend time in the DNA & Personas section to find rare opportunity tags to stand out in highly saturated markets.