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 will 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.
Playtest inspired iteration is the secret weapon of game design
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 we don’t do enough of it.
I’ve worked with hundreds of studios, and 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!
- The conclusions seem vague and obvious
All of this adds up to an uncertain return on investment for your time, and significant experience risk.
I can help. Games user research 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, and led teams of all sizes to integrate user research into their game development process.
Join the newsletter to get started today with a repeatable and reliable method for getting your first 100 playtesters.
Then browse my free articles on how to apply games user research methods to make playtesting more efficient and easier and join a masterclass to develop your own research skills.
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 book me to supercharge your team’s ability.
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 find playtesters
Learn how and where to find good quality playtesters for games user research

How to write a playtest survey
Learn how to write reliable playtest surveys, and discover games UX issues.

How many players do I need for a playtest
Learn how work out the right number of players you’ll need for playtesting games
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This toolkit is for game developers who 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

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.

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