Love playing your own games... or not?

(And a new pro-tip for testing prototypes)

[I strongly recommend you share this with any gaming/product person or game designer you know.]

My recent post (about becoming a Streamer at 42-years of age) attracted quite a lot of commentary. One of the more pertinent ones came from Daniel Hasselberg, Founder and CEO at MAG Interactive: 

Daniel made me think more about two questions:

• “How important really is it to play and enjoying playing your own games?” 

• “How much more value do I get by playing my games & prototypes as a Live Streamer?

I recently caught up with Jon Winters, CMO at Snowprint Studios. Jon and I used to work together at Miniclip. We recounted how challenging it became… that as Miniclip continued to grow, we just couldn’t stay as close to our games as we’d like to: there were just too many of them and not enough time in the day.

In his new role as CMO at Snowprint Studios, Jon now largely works on one title only: Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus. He shared that by having one game only to focus on, he’s been able to become a very passionate player, to the point that he’s recently been asked to become the leader of his guild. And guess what… as a result of being a genuine player as well as a marketeer… he can challenge the product team about minutiae such as the timing & value of certain in-game events.

So.. is it important to love playing your own games?

Let’s think about different people in typical gaming organisation: 

• How important is it, as a UA manager, to really understand the game or product you’re working on? 

• Does it hinder if, as a product manager, you’re not passionate about the title you’re leading? 

• How much does it help if, as a technology CFO, you can ‘talk the talk’ about the product as well as the balance sheet?

My strong view is that a passion for the product will always be a massive plus in how someone engages with the company its workplace overall. A UA manager who can respectfully challenge a game designer on certain decisions, can surely only add value. A product lead who loves their game will invariably spend more time trying to make it work, than one who doesn’t really care. And… even a CFO who understands the product or audience will have a much easier job talking to the rest of the organisation.

QA and product feedback in a “Live” environment

Becoming a streamer has pushed me way beyond my comfort zone. It’s relentless to go ‘Live’ every day. You’re exposed & vulnerable. Sometimes a session doesn’t work out the way you’d like. But overall… it’s hugely rewarding and helps progress our products with an insane pace. The audience is just such an amazing source of energy & our community is growing stronger as a result.

By playing our games “on stream” I am faced with instant and direct feedback from players who interact with me in the Live environment.

Let me give you an example. When I’m Live streaming our title Word Quiz Live I receive constant feedback about the difficulty of rounds, and accuracy of the quizzes. It helps shape and improve our content over time. I’m essentially doing Live QA with no place to hide. It’s even part of the Lore: I openly talk about being one of the developers of the game looking for feedback. People love being heard… and chatting to the dev!

We’re doing it with prototypes now too. In the last few months we’ve been working on a new prototype: “Ball Guys”. Before we went any further, we wanted immediate feedback on how it played. So… I just went Live with a demo version on a Livestream & invited people to join me inside the game. Within minutes we had a healthy chunk of downloads and were able to see on the stream how players were interacting with the core mechanics, levels and overall concept.

We learned a huge number of things that no detailed analytics report with a statistically significant eROAS prediction could ever have shown us. Of course, as the product matures, analytics will continue to play a massive role for our titles… but I’ve never seen anything quite like this for early prototype feedback.

So my pro-tip for product people who love their games and want to go the extra mile: if you really want to see how people interact with a prototype, find a way of going Live with it on a TikTok stream. It will:

• Force you to look at your product for a couple of hours: who knows what you’ll see;

• Enable you to receive direct feedback from players instantly (and for free);

• Give you more early signals than any analytics tool can do in the early stages.

An Algorithmic word of caution

There is a clear watch out, however. Algo’s like TikTok Live optimises for interest level. My stream is different from your stream… and TikTok has found an excellent way of sending people towards things that will extend dwell-time as long as possible. As a result, you should know that it’s not representative of the whole audience and that algo-bias could be a problem!

Thanks!