Market research for video games?

[Fake_Account]

My Business Intro 101 project is to make a business plan based around passion/interest/skills. I chose video games as a passion, as I do plan to one day own my own Indie business(After working for other companies for a couple of years).

Part of the assignment requires us to do market research for our business plan. So I'm researching online and now I'm thinking: How should I go about doing this? How do I do market research for video games? Or more specifically, because they are the games I want to develop, how do I do market research for online social games and RPGs?

Wouldn't it be impossible for me to tell how well/bad my game would sell based on history of sales of OTHER games? And would it even be a good idea to base my games on those sales?

I think the people who do that just wind up making some cheap reamake of World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, or Angry Birds(we've all seen plenty of those, and it's just so obvious when you see them).

Also, I plan to make PC/Online games with my main source of profit coming fromicro-transactionsns.

Where can I find a list of sales of a certain game? More specifically, one that is digitalldistributeded.

Please list ANY and ALL resources & findings on the subject. I WILL choose you as best answer just for this.

[MavistheMaven]

You don't need to cite sales history for specific games. Cite sales for role-playing games or social games or games with a certain theme. It is quite possible to gauge your sales expectations on existing data for other games. You can see whether a trend shows those sales to be increasing or not, or which platforms (PC vs. console games vs. mobile games) are gaining/losing market share. If you don't see many sales for something, that may indicate an underserved market, not necessarily lack of interest.

Two sources you might check:
The International Game Developers Association
Game Developer Magazine has industry surveys and such.

Other ways you might do market research are to give your own surveys and hold focus groups of people in your target market (college age males, or schoolkids, or adult women, or senior citizens)