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Whether you’re building your first prototype or refining a live game, our playtest plus strategy guide will help you make smarter design decisions, backed by real player feedback.
Make games players love
Making video games is hard. Making successful games is harder still.
It requires making a game that players understand and enjoy, in order to achieve commercial or critical success – and to ensure players are experiencing the game as you intended.
But traditional playtesting methods are ineffective. They rely too much on what players say, which we all know is different from what players actually do. The conclusions seem vague and obvious, and usually come much too late in development to have an impact.
This means playtesting is never a priority, and gets forgotten – and games launch with significant player experience issues unresolved. Poor reviews, upset players and failed studios follow.
Most games fail to reach their potential.
A new way of making games
UX and player-centred development has exploded in popularity in the last decade, as professionals apply scientific approaches to run reliable and robust playtests – focused on objective behaviour rather than subjective feedback from ideation to launch.
Games user research has become recognised as essential to de-risk game development. Understanding players, and focusing on their behaviour will ensure that your game is understood, enjoyed and that you’ve created a fun experience for players.
Data Game Developers Can Trust
Three principles of this new player-centred approach are:
- Reliable, behavioural based research methods – focusing on player’s actual behaviour, rather than subjective opinions.
- Data at the right time – Applying lean methodologies from ideation to launch to make gathering player data efficient + unlocking iterative development.
- A collaborative and multi-disciplinary approach – understanding the player experience makes everyone better at their job. Our approach is open and collaborative, and empowers every game developer to gather and use player data themselves.
This isn’t focus groups, or ‘market research’ – it’s a new product approach of running professional quality UX studies to generate player data that game developers can trust and inspire creativity.
There’s a reason why top game studios now invest millions of dollars each year into games user research.
Welcome To The home of games user research
Games User Research applies scientific and psychological expertise to remove the bias from traditional playtesting.
I’m Steve Bromley – a recognised games user research expert, who has worked on many bestselling games.
I want to make games user research, and better playtesting, accessible to everyone who makes games.
My monthly newsletters are read by thousands of world-class product leaders, researchers, designers, community managers, producers, game developers, academics, students, and more, from AAA studios to solo devs. Why? Because it is the authority on integrating player data into the game development process.
Whether you are looking to do this as a career, or just need to run a better playtest, I will ensure you can use scientific methods to inspire creativity, and make games that players love.
Want to give Steve Bromley, UX Research extraordinaire, a giant shout-out.
Our Consumer Insights team is one team that runs a lot of market and ux research and over the last year we’ve had the pleasure of being able to tap into Steve’s brain on a number of occasions and he’s been incredibly helpful.
He has been extremely helpful as we work to support our various internal stakeholders with great research!
Meet Steve Bromley, Expert Games User Researcher
I am an experienced user researcher, specialising in games user research and building new user research teams.
I work with publishers, platforms and studios of all sizes from indies to AAA to run playtests, and integrate user research into the game development process. I’ve spent over 25,000 hours with players!
Prior to this I was a senior user researcher for PlayStation and worked on many of their top European titles, including Horizon Zero Dawn, SingStar, the LittleBigPlanet series and the PlayStation VR lineup.
I wrote the best-selling 5-star rated book Building User Research Teams.
I started the IGDA’s Games User Research mentoring scheme, which has linked hundreds of students with industry professionals from top games companies such as Sony, EA, Valve, Ubisoft and Microsoft. This inspired my bestselling book How To Be A Games User Researcher which shares the expertise needed to work in the games industry, and has over 50 5-star reviews on Amazon.
Trusted by hundreds of game developers at
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Make the best use of your limited research time and budget by focusing on these five types of studies.
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