Playtests: fears and opportunities

When we were still playing games in the two thousandth, we essentially made them for ourselves, focusing on our own views and tastes. And they could not even think about how to really learn more from potential players about their expectations and consumer habits. But now there are so many games and so many things come out that to release a successful and competitive product, developers must know the target audience, its habits and preferences, the situation and trends in the market, analyze competitors, follow trends, etc.

In the previous article “ Myths and Illusions of Developers ” I reviewed the most common misconceptions of developers regarding playtests.
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This publication will discuss what bonuses and opportunities a team can give to playtest. But first we will talk about things that may scare developers.

What can scare?

Price

In any case, holding a playtest will require certain financial expenses, and in our reality a test for collecting general impressions will cost from $ 1500.

Fear of the new and the unknown

Even if you finally decided to playtest, a dilemma arises: to carry out the playtest yourself or to hire an office that professionally deals with them.

If you decide to conduct it yourself, then from the pros there will be an opportunity to gain experience in conducting playtests.

Since you will probably do the playtest for the first time, then step on all possible rakes, spend more time and get not the most accurate and high-quality data, which can lead to erroneous decisions as a result.

It may also seem to you that you will save money, but the salary to a member of the development team (most likely, a game designer) who will be engaged in carrying out will not differ much from hiring a third-party team to conduct a playtest.
Someone from the team will spend on research from one to three weeks. First, a person will think about how best to conduct and develop tools, then he will organize and carry out, and then - to analyze and summarize the data.
Comparing to Playtestix, in the company in which I currently work, we have learned how to conduct high-quality research in a week.

In any case, even the first, poorly conducted playtest with a video game will show you a lot of flaws in your product, as well as new opportunities for its development.

If you decide to order a study, you can also face a difficult choice, because you need to choose the optimal price / quality ratio of the study.
In the west, there is another problem - the timing. Companies that are engaged in such studies are loaded for months in advance. And companies that are engaged in marketing research, but not in the gaming industry, can conduct not entirely qualitative research.

Chance to detect a critical problem

The game created according to the plan may not be viable - such a problem can be avoided if, at the preproduction stage, to conduct market research, and to evaluate the intermediate product in the course of production.

Further, on a counterbalance to the fears listed above, I want to list the many obvious and not obvious possibilities that the development team will receive when conducting its product's playtests.

Bonuses and features

The main advantage of conducting these studies in the development of games is the opportunity to see and evaluate your own and competitors' product from the outside, through the eyes of a potential target audience. Research can and should be carried out at different stages of product creation. Below are examples of using this development tool.

Pre-production

• Defining the Target Audience of the game

When developing a game, it is important to understand for whom you are going to make a game, whether there is an audience for your project, what competitors are, and what the cost of a competitive product is. Finding and exploring the target audience is important even before the start of development, examining their habits and preferences in competitive games. Even making a clone, this stage is necessary - after all, no one guarantees that even a simple change in the graphic style of the game can greatly change the desire to play it. Unfortunately, some developers even now skip this stage, and as a result make the wrong decisions.

• Competitor research

You need to know all the strengths and weaknesses of competitors to get around them or to be at least on the level. For this, it will be useful to let your Central Asia play these games and measure the game's scores in order to orient yourself towards them.

• Focus groups

From my own experience I will say that it is difficult, without conducting research, to decide which features and mechanics will be of interest to the target audience. Already knowing the target audience and having conducted focus groups, one can determine consumer habits, the wishes of the players, the most important points in interest in the game, and elements that should be avoided. Such information will greatly simplify and speed up the process of making the right decisions.

• A / B test graphics

Which art is better? What style of graphics to choose in the game? How to define it? Repeat for the leaders? Create your own style? Believe expert or investor? Answers to these questions will give a comparative A / B test with a survey.

Naturally, no one has canceled the need to play the game leaders of this genre, but the opinion of one player, even if he is a representative of the target audience, will not replace the opinion of the target audience.

Alfa

• Check the new prototype

Understand how interesting, easy and understandable to play in a set of certain mechanics.
Check UI - you have developed the game interface, you understand everything, let other team members play, they also like everything. But you are the developers, not the players, your eyes are blurred, and besides, you are not necessarily the target audience :) Remember this when you say that everything is fine with the interface, because you showed it to your 3rd colleagues. The sooner the interface is checked, the less it will need to be redone.

• Management type comparison

Checking whether it is convenient and interesting to play on the type of control that the developer offers the player. If in doubt, it is necessary to evaluate, and then compare with alternative ones.
Evaluation of the style of graphics - at almost every stage of development, it makes sense to evaluate the current graphic developments, so that later you need to cut and redo anything less.

Beta

• Usability check

Check the convenience, clarity and pleasantness of the game interface.
General impressions of the game - collect quantitative indicators of the target audience from the beta version of the game in order to have time to make the game better before the release. At this stage, it is possible to understand how, in a particular country, the game is considered beautiful, with good voice acting, simple, interesting, understandable, exciting, complex, dynamic. And also learn Net Promoter Score, which, as can be seen from recent research, shows whether your product will work or not.

• Monetization and retention test

This is a test that will be very difficult to conduct on your own. Since it will be necessary to find representatives of the target audience, develop a toolkit and organize respondents to play at least a week. But such a test will allow you to see how the monetization in the game works and what retenna performance is to be expected.

• Identification of new bugs by real players

How many games do not test through internal testing, before the release, there is always a feeling that you missed something really important. To release a better product, you can attract real players who, you can be sure, will find the main problems that you have missed. In addition, players will have their real and diverse devices.

• Balance improvement

The ability to make a more accurate balance before going to Soft Launch or Closed Beta Test. The balance of the game is a relative and complex thing. And even if the balance is perfect on paper and in theory, in practice, most likely, everything will not be so good.

Stage “Soft Launch”

By releasing the game in limited navigation, you will get a lot of statistics, but alas, not all the answers. Statistics paired with playtest will give significantly more clear answers. For example, judging by the statistics, you know that players rarely go to a specific menu. But why they do not go there statistics will not tell you. Maybe the user was lost on the previous screen, maybe the button is inconspicuous, maybe the players do not want to go on that screen. But after conducting playtest with questioning and video recording, you will understand the motives and reasons for such player behavior.

I tried to list all those doubts, difficulties and anxieties I encountered when developing games. On the counterweight, I described all the bonuses and opportunities that can be obtained by conducting this type of research. I really hope that my publication will help you make your product better and better :)
I will be glad to see your comments and feedback, maybe you also have something to share!

In subsequent publications, I will take a closer look at the various, exciting developer, tasks and how to solve them with the help of playtests.