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.