A common metaphor for games user research (GUR) is that it’s like a compass, seamlessly helping game studios navigate the uncharted waters of video game development. By knowing what players want and need, you can avoid hazardous storms and reach your destination with ease.

But in reality, this is a vast oversimplification. Games user research consists of numerous methods, both qualitative and quantitative. They model the preferences, motivations, and psychological traits of a game’s target audience. These methods include focus groups, competitor analysis, expert review, experiential playtests, FTUE usability playtests, player experience and preference studies, longitudinal studies, and resonance testing.

And the insights gained from player research don’t just point you in the right direction. They inform the game development roadmap in many ways, both in the pre-launch and scale-up phases.

Distinct Advantages of Games User Research

Games user research seeks to understand “why” players engage with games. It then transforms this knowledge into product requirements based on human truths, not assumptions. Through this approach, studios can optimize a game’s product-market fit and boost engagement, retention, and monetization.

Here are some of the key advantages that robust GUR provides:

De-Risk Product Decisions: GUR validates designs, mechanics, and art styles before heavily investing, avoiding costly misalignments.

Optimize Player Experiences: Continual iteration based on user feedback ensures gameplay, progression, and monetization all resonate with your player base. This leads to strong retention and engagement.

Discover Whitespace Opportunities: Identifying unmet player needs exposes openings for unique product differentiation and market disruption.

Accelerate Time-to-Market: Early user validation of concepts, prototypes, and features shortens development cycles by reducing reworks and pivots post-launch.

Prioritize Your Roadmap: With player feedback on existing games, you can know whether improvements would address player needs or if a new game would better address their preferences. You can even use player research to understand the market demand for new games. You can do this by conducting comparative analysis between existing games and game concepts, benchmarking player satisfaction and engagement.

The Disconnect With Games User Research

Almost every studio understands the important role that games user research plays in the development process. And clearly, the advantages that it provides are invaluable. Yet there is a disconnect. If GUR is capable of providing almost psychic levels of early stage game development and scale-up optimization, why do most games have such a difficult time reaching and maintaining their audience?

The reason has a lot to do with the compass metaphor and why it’s so inaccurate.

Understanding the benefits of games user research is simple, but executing it correctly is almost always difficult. For every advantage that GUR unlocks, there is a pitfall waiting to be encountered. Fall into any one of these traps, and GUR immediately becomes far less useful. What do these challenges look like?

Representativeness of User Samples

One of the biggest challenges in GUR is making sure it employs representative samples that accurately reflect your target audiences and player segments. If you’re only getting feedback from a skewed or narrow demographic, it can lead to misguided product decisions.

Moreover, more and more people are signing up with recruitment agencies such as Antidote, PlaytestCloud, and Gametester. These professionals ‘understand’ how to answer certain screeners and what answers to give in order to be compensated for a study. This is a problem for GUR. It is increasingly hard to pull genuine data from remote user testing, especially in an unmoderated setting.

The Subjective Nature of ‘Fun’

What was fun 10 years ago in video games is not as equally fun as it is now. So ‘knowing the landscape’ by knowing what popular games are out there and why people like them is a very important element of GUR that goes beyond research methods and user research overall. It’s challenging to stay ahead of the curve, anticipating what people may like or may not like. Focus groups or broader discovery research can help, but these methods often aren’t championed enough within studios.

Anticipating the Delta Between Testing and Reality

Playtests and captive research settings can only approximate reality to a certain degree. Players simply react differently when games are released into the wild. Developing accurate models to adjust for the inevitable delta between studios’ research sandboxes and actual live gaming environments is tricky — but essential.

Speed and Scale

Traditional games user research methods can be slow and provide insights too late in the development process to make meaningful changes. By the time studios complete the research process, the game’s production may have already moved ahead of the findings.

To address this, studios have started using faster testing methods like shorter playtests, remote video sessions, and online studies without moderation. However, these methods often involve user samples that don’t represent the target audience and include ‘professional playtesters’ who may provide biased feedback to receive compensation.

Scale presents different obstacles. As games expand across more titles, genres, platforms, and markets, the amount of user research needed grows rapidly. Internal teams can’t always keep up with researching the necessary demographics, languages, and gameplay styles at a granular level. Even simple requirements like facilitating hundreds of concurrent remote playtests present technical and operational scaling challenges.

How to Make Games User Research More Effective

By now, one thing should be obvious: games user research is not a compass. It isn’t one single tool, it doesn’t perform one single function, and it is far from simple to use effectively.

What is a more apt metaphor for games user research? Since there’s nothing in the world quite like game development, maybe video games themselves are the most fitting metaphor. Just like experienced gamers study community knowledge bases to optimize their gameplay, game developers rely on GUR as fundamental strategy guides. These guides reveal the most engaging and profitable ways to sharpen their own skills in creating highly resonant experiences.

If you look at games user research through this lens, then what are the most effective ways to strengthen these strategy guides? In other words, how can we make games user research more effective?

Align Research Participants With Target Audiences

When playtest samples accurately reflect the motivations, behaviors, and psychological traits of your target players, it helps eliminate potential blind spots and reduces extrapolation errors. It minimizes throwaway development work and rework cycles by front-loading alignment with exactly who you’re building for from the research stage onward. With this approach, every iteration and pivot inches you closer to nailing product-market fit for your target audience.

Work With Trusted Partners

Scale and speed issues can be difficult to address internally. GUR teams are knowledgeable about products and development. However, increasing the team size may not necessarily lead to a significant increase in productivity.

Working with a dedicated research partner focused on the gaming industry can be incredibly valuable. They can provide ongoing feedback, share the latest best practices, offer specialized expertise, and introduce new research methods. This can continuously improve and enhance a studio’s internal research capabilities.

Implement Comprehensive Screening Procedures

To combat the ‘professional playtester’ phenomenon, studios can implement multi-step screening and verification procedures to validate participants actually meet targeted criteria before participating in research sessions. This prevents disqualified or fraudulent responses and ensures a more valid data set.

Embed Researchers Directly on Product Teams

Placing user researchers directly on product development teams can maximize research impact. Rather than user research operating in a silo or as a support function, these embedded researchers can act as product strategy partners, continuously injecting the vital player perspective. They become experts in that specific game’s player base, infusing research-based decision-making into a team’s DNA.

Democratize Insights

Researchers shouldn’t be knowledge gatekeepers. It’s important for their work to be accessible and easy for game designers and developer teams to digest. Many studios launch dashboards, portals, data visualization tools, repositories, workshops, and more to empower anyone in the studio to tap into the player data their GUR team has gathered. This approach makes research a common language across all studio conversations, initiatives, and processes.

The Most Important Things to Know About Games User Research

Games user research will look different at every studio. That’s because no two studios are alike. Every studio has its own culture and way of operating.

But all studios do share a common goal: make games players will love, and make a business out of it. With that goal in mind, there are some objectives all GUR should strive to achieve:

  • Provide valuable player feedback at every stage of the development process — preferably as early as possible.
  • Illuminate data and insights that can validate assumptions and inform countless decisions.
  • Supercharge iterative game development with testing and refinement based on player feedback.
  • Drive long-term success by prioritizing informed player satisfaction and engagement.

While challenges will certainly arise, they don’t need to be daunting. The important thing is to be aware of the ways that GUR can be hindered and to implement solutions proactively from the beginning. That way, you’ll be sure to make your GUR efforts pay off.

Learn More

How Psychological Insights Supercharge GUR – While user research is indispensable in game development, adding psychological insights into the mix makes results more accurate and actionable in numerous ways. In this article, we’ve outlined some of the most dramatic outcomes of incorporating psychological insights into GUR — including how it de-risks the entire process.

Research GUR Partners – If you’ve ever struggled to keep up with research demands at your studio, it may be time to work with a third party. In this article, we evaluate three of the biggest players in the research space.