Audience Intelligence
Sonar’s analysis runs through six stages. Understanding this pipeline helps you interpret your report and get the most from the intelligence.
Stage 1: Fan Base Adjacency
Sonar starts by identifying audiences adjacent to your comp titles. It scans the 8 social platforms for communities explicitly discussing your comp games: subreddits, YouTube channels, Twitter threads, Discord communities, etc.
This gives Sonar a starting pool of fans who have already stated interest in similar games.
What you get: A ranked list of communities discussing each comp title, with size estimates and activity levels.
Stage 2: Fandom Type Mapping
Not all fans are the same. Some are hardcore lore-focused players. Some chase competitive leaderboards. Some collect achievements. Sonar classifies segments within each community by behavior.
This segmentation is crucial: you don’t market a story-driven game the same way to speedrunners as you do to narrative enthusiasts, even if both play the same comp title.
What you get: Audience breakdown by player type within each community. This shapes who you target and what messaging works.
Stage 3: Quantic Foundry Motivation Mapping
Sonar maps audience motivations using Quantic Foundry’s framework: Action, Completion, Power, Social, Immersion, Story, and Creativity. This answers the question: what does this community want from games?
A community of story-focused players will respond to different messaging than a community of competitive players, even if they overlap in interest.
What you get: Motivation breakdown per community. This informs your creative direction and ad copy.
Stage 4: IP Recommendations
Sonar surfaces comp titles you may not have considered. It finds games with high audience overlap to your title and presents them ranked by relevance and reachability.
Sometimes the best comps aren’t the obvious ones. A cozy crafting game might have more audience overlap with a narrative indie title than with another cozy game in a different art style.
What you get: Ranked list of recommended comp titles, with overlap reasoning.
Stage 5: Weighted Audience Scoring
Sonar scores every detected community on relevance and reachability. Relevance measures fan overlap: how much of this community will care about your game? Reachability measures your ability to reach them: is the community open to external voices, or is it a closed group?
A subreddit with 50k passionate players who ignore external posts scores differently than a subreddit with 10k players who actively engage with game devs.
What you get: Ranked community list scored by impact. Focus your seeding effort here first.
Stage 6: Game Design Brief
Sonar synthesizes everything into actionable recommendations:
- Seeding priorities - which communities to target first, in which order
- Message mapping - what messaging resonates with each segment
- Timeline - when to begin seeding relative to launch
- Design signals - insights about what features and tone your target players want
This is where community intelligence becomes product feedback. You can see if your game is hitting the motivations your target audience cares about, and where there might be a mismatch.
What you get: A prioritized marketing playbook and design alignment check.
Reading your report
Your Sonar report presents all six stages, starting with the highest-impact communities and narrowing down. You don’t need to read all six sections to take action. Most studios start with Stages 5 and 6 (the ranked communities and the game design brief), then dive deeper into the earlier stages if they want to understand the reasoning.
Next steps
Use your Sonar report in parallel with your marketing team’s strategy. The community rankings should inform your PR list and early access priorities. The design signals should feed into postmortems and future iteration.
See Using Sonar for help navigating the report interface.