Convincing people to take part The only people who will play your game without an incentive are your fans, family and friends. Their feedback (and behaviour) isn’t an accurate representation of what your ‘typical’ player. Which means we need to come up with convincing reasons for someone to take part in your playtest. By far the easiest way is to offer playtesters money - a small expense to avoid the time and financial cost of people not showing up for sessions, or the wrong sort of players taking part. In some organisations a voucher might be easier to organise than handing out cash directly. For budget-stretched teams, some alternatives to


consider could be: • Codes to previous games, or others from your publisher • Recognition - receiving a ‘thank you’ credit in the game • In game currencies or rewards • Entry into a prize draw • Branded merchandise Each of these non-monetary incentives will have a


biasing impact on the type of player who attends - so consider what these are, and make intentional choices about what level of risk and bias is acceptable for your playtest.


Keeping hold of playtesters Finding new communities of potential playtesters, approaching them, and convincing them to take part in your studies can be a lot of work. To minimise the number of times this needs to be done, consider creating a ‘panel’ of people who have signed up to be contacted about playtesting. This can be as simple as a mailing list, and sharing


it within each of the communities you identified (with permission). That will generate a list of potential playtesters that you can invite to future playtests when needed. For most studies you will want to use new playtesters, but later in development, it can be helpful to invite former playtesters back to look at later game content.


What should we do with external playtesters? The exact objectives for your playtests will differ based on where you are in development. Early on your focus will be on understanding if the core gameplay loop is fun, and whether there’s enough there to build a full game from. Later on, it’ll help you finesse teaching of tutorials, objectives, wayfinding, and that the player experiences the game as intended. As a quick rule of thumb, I believe the single most valuable playtest activity you can do is sit and watch some


external people play your game. Help them with bugs (but only with bugs), print our paper to cover missing tutorials (but only where you know a tutorial will exist), and observe where they get stuck, what they fail to understand, and where problems emerge. Then ask them some unbiased probing questions to understand why those problems emerge (starting with “whats happening right now”).


Does that mean there’s no point to internal playtests? As covered, external playtesters are the most valuable source of data to understand what the player experience will be at launch - early enough to make changes. However this doesn’t mean that internal playtesters are worthless. Regularly getting your development team to play the game will help everyone create a shared understanding of ‘what are we trying to build’, ‘what is the current state of the game’, and inspire conversations about ‘what is the most important priority for us to work on next’. It will also help find bugs (which is usually not cost effective to use external playtesters for, in lieu of working with QA professionals).


Proper recruitment 10x’s the value of your playtests. Participant recruitment is perhaps the most important part of running a successful playtest - if you aren’t getting representative players, you can’t trust any of the data your playtest generates. For this reason, it’s often my priority for where I will spend money during playtests - working with an external participant recruiter to find and screen appropriate playtesters massively increases the value of the process. Good luck with your playtests!


Steve Bromley runs playtests and helps teams learn how to integrate user research into their development process at gamesuserresearch.com


December/January 2025 MCV/DEVELOP | 33


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