Make Games Players Love
Unlock confident game design decisions from ideation to launch. Learn how to run professional quality playtests, improve the UX of games and make games players love.
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Making successful games is hard
Hundreds of games are released each day on Steam. Most of those sell less than one hundred copies.
The vast majority of studios fold after releasing their first game.
Too often, game developers are reliant on luck to create a successful game.
A successful game requires minimising production risk (You can’t make it), market risk (there’s no-one to buy it) and experience risk (players won’t like it).
Reduce Game development risk
Imagine releasing a game that you are confident players understand, will enjoy and buy.
Learning problems early in development, when you still have plenty of runway left to pivot and fix them with elegant solutions (without relying too heavily on pop-up boxes of instructions!)
Getting regular inspiration for what does and doesn’t work with players, confidently prioritising your busy development schedule.
Ultimately – making a game you know players will love.
Playtests That Matter
Regularly seeing players interact with your game will help you understand what’s working, what’s not working, and where the fun lies. Raw inspiration for iteration.
Every developer recognises the value of playtesting. But it’s never a priority
I’ve worked with hundreds of studios, and I know what holds teams back…
- It’s hard to prioritise player experience amongst all the other busy game development tasks we have
- Finding playtesters is frustrating and slow
- Builds are never in a testable state
- There’s endless data to sift through, it can be hard to make sense of it!
- Low quality tests telling us ‘what we already knew’
All of this adds up to an uncertain return on investment for your time, putting off playtests, and significant experience risk.
Take Control of Your Game Development Today
I can help. High quality games user research studies offers an alternative, professional quality approach to plan and run lean, efficient studies that generate real actionable conclusions.
I’ve spent over 25,000 player-hours running games user research studies, worked on many successful games and led teams of all sizes to integrate user research into their game development process.
Start planning your playtest roadmap today – sign up below to get started today with my guide on essential playtests to run throughout development.
Then browse my free articles on how to apply games user research methods to make playtesting more efficient and easier.
When you’re ready to run better playtests, get the Playtest Kit (“the perfect tool for game development teams of any size”) to give yourself a head start.
Or, if you have no time, Book one of my high quality research studies to confidently identify ‘what is the state of my game’ and ‘what should we do next’.
Unlock confident game development with games user research today – Run professional quality playtests, iterate your game, and find the fun.
Top articles for game developers
How To Run A Games User Research Playtest
The comprehensive guide to planning and running professional quality playtests that inspire game development!
How many players do I need for a playtest
Learn how work out the right number of players you’ll need for playtesting games
How much playtesting is enough?
When to start (and stop) playtesting throughout game development.
Meet Steve, 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.
Kind Words From Previous Collaborations
Steve ran a study for one of our games to understand the impact that usability and accessibility issues were having on our players. Steve’s work was excellent.
He made a huge positive impression with our team and helped shape our future roadmap for game improvements.
Steve’s support throughout the whole project was amazing and we’re looking forward to possible future collaborations
We approached Steve in the middle of our dev cycle to validate our controls and difficulty on a platform that we were unfamiliar with.
Working with Steve was incredibly easy and very useful, watching the testing and reading the breakdown gave us great insight into how players were reacting and what they were learning. This led us to make great strives, improving overall quality and player comprehension.
I have found Playtesting to become a vital tool in making good development decisions at different times in the project from concept to finishing. It is an additional data point that helps prove out and support ideas and assumptions we have created. It gives me additional information and insight I didn’t have before which is useful both for internal and external discussions around the game.
I worked with Steve on a title where we had many thorny issues that only playtesting could aid us to make headway on.
He has a real clarity of understanding of how to translate your questions and needs into practical unbiased tests and programs to get the understanding you seek.
When Wish Studios created the PlayLink concept for PlayStation, we developed a new gameplay paradigm in which casual players would use mobile phone apps as controllers for console games. Such a radical shift, aimed at a non-technical audience, naturally required in-depth playtesting to ensure we got it right.
Steve’s test team provided the answer, delivering well-structured, informative, actionable feedback for our development team to work with.
We asked Steve Bromley to help playtest and analyze the FTUE of our game to improve it, and the experience was exceptional. Steve’s attention to detail and keen observation skills during the playtest gave us valuable insights into the user experience and what was lacking in the game.
What sets Steve apart is not only his expertise but also his clear and insightful communication.
The analysis report we received was comprehensive, highlighting strengths and suggesting actionable improvements. We are very happy and grateful to have worked with him.
Steve is an expert in his field, and his exceptional manner is very suited to working with a range of clients. I don’t hesitate to recommend him.
We contacted Steve after conducting some playtests, as we wanted a more objective viewpoint on our data that didn’t come with the biases we had after working on the game for so long.
After a quick chat, we sent over all our footage and data to Steve, and he quickly generated a full report which exceeded our expectations in terms of detail and execution time.
Steve was able to provide an external, unbiased viewpoint which was invaluable to us!
We worked with Steve on a playtest for our early beta, and he was incredibly helpful and adaptable to our needs.
The process was timely and thorough, providing us with valuable insights. These insights are now shaping Spellscaper according to our players’ needs and desires.
We highly recommend Steve’s expertise in user research to anyone looking to improve their product.
Run Playtests Today
This toolkit is for game developers who need to run a playtest but have no time.
Made in collaboration with game designers, producers, community managers, UX designers, QA managers and solo game devs, it brings the expertise of over 25,000 playtest hours into one complete playtest toolkit – making playtesting accessible to all.
It’s a comprehensive & actionable toolkit packed with processes, templates, guides, and tools. Everything you need to be confident running playtests today.
“An absolute must-have for games UX, insight and research teams.”
Nathan Pana – UX / UI Director at Mighty Kingdom
“the perfect tool for game development teams of any size”
Jo Haslam – Design Director at Snap Finger Click
Regain Control of your game development process
Get my free Playtest Plus roadmap guide, then monthly new articles on integrating playtesting and user research into your game development process.
Join the most interesting conversations about games user research, learn new playtesting methods, and be introduced to new ways to think about developing games.