Feedback is essential for game development, as it helps you improve your game design, fix bugs, and understand your audience. However, getting feedback from gamers can be challenging, as they may have different preferences, expectations, and motivations. In this article, you will learn some tips and methods to collect and analyze feedback from gamers effectively.
Before you ask for feedback, you need to know who you are asking. Your target audience is the group of gamers who are most likely to enjoy and buy your game. To identify them, you need to consider factors such as age, gender, genre, platform, and play style. You can use tools like surveys, interviews, or analytics to gather data about your potential players and create personas or profiles that represent them.
Reading community fora helps a lot. Wherever your target audience is, read those community sites. Lurk threads of games your target audience is playing, and hear what they're saying.
Communities say they know what they want but what you implement those changes it can be either extremely positive or painful. That’s just the nature of things. You need to be able to not only take the good feedback but make that feedback and place it into a box of realism and sanity. Trust me it will save you.
Depending on the size of your game, you can go and ask around friends and family, then move to something bigger. Maybe try exhibitions or some conferences and grab as many different people to check your game. Or you could give it to your Marketing/Research team to make a test to find your audience :D
Depending on your game development stage and goals, you may want to use different channels to get feedback from gamers. Beta testing, user reviews, social media, and surveys/polls are all common channels for gathering feedback. Beta testing involves inviting a select group of gamers to play your game before release and provide feedback on various aspects. User reviews involve asking gamers to rate and comment on your game after they have played it. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit can be used to interact with existing or potential gamers and get feedback on game updates, features, or ideas. Surveys/polls using tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey can be used to get feedback on topics like user satisfaction or preferences.
For testing, have a forum for discussions, and try to participate as little as possible: let the players talk. Limit yourself to answering their questions, for the most part. Asking players what they want is less helpful than you might think: they often don't know the systems that are driving their satisfaction or dissatisfaction, so you want their feedback, but not their ideas. They also can be less than honest when talking to devs directly, so letting them talk to each other often yields more honest information.
There is an argument to be made in favour of making your own feedback system and integrating it directly into your game, at least where player feedback is concerned. Even a simple popup at the end of a demo with a "Feedback please" window will go a long way. As a bonus, making it this easy to provide feedback will increase the amount you get, as every additional click will loose you a lot of people. Multiple premade solutions are available on the Unity and Unreal asset stores.
The quality of your feedback is dependent on the quality of your questions. Make sure to ask questions that are clear, relevant, and specific, and avoid questions that are vague, biased, or leading. For instance, instead of asking "Did you like the game?", you could ask "What did you like and dislike about the game?". When gathering feedback from gamers, there are three types of questions you can ask: open-ended questions, closed-ended questions, and rating questions. Open-ended questions allow gamers to express their opinions in their own words and are useful for getting detailed and qualitative feedback; however, they can also be time-consuming and hard to analyze. Closed-ended questions require gamers to choose from a set of predetermined answers and are useful for getting quantitative and easy-to-analyze feedback; but they can also be limiting and inaccurate. Rating questions ask gamers to rate a certain aspect of the game on a scale such as 1 to 5 stars or 1 to 10 points. These are useful for getting feedback on the level of satisfaction, enjoyment, or difficulty of the game; however, they can also be subjective and inconsistent.
In my view, observing someone as they engage with the game holds greater insight than merely asking questions. Ideally, this observation should be unobtrusive, conducted without their awareness. A case in point occurred when I sought feedback on my mobile game from my younger cousin. While he was playing, he expressed his enthusiasm and enjoyment. However, the moment his mother summoned him to a dreaded chore, he promptly abandoned the mobile game in favor of the monotonous task. This demonstrated a valuable feedback in understanding true preferences of the player.
The example questions on the left all suck. Ask specific questions about what players did, and then ask how they felt about doing that. "Did you fire the pistol? How did the pistol feel to fire?" "Did you open the inventory? Was the inventory panel clearly communicating blah blah blah?" Ask about spots they got stuck on. Generalized emotion questions don't do a lot for you, and again, they often aren't entirely honest.
Once you have collected the feedback, you need to analyze it and use it to improve your game. You can employ tools such as spreadsheets, charts, word clouds, sentiment analysis, text analysis, or NPS (Net Promoter Score) to organize and visualize your feedback data, measure and understand the emotions, opinions, or loyalty of your gamers, and identify patterns, trends, or outliers. When you analyze the feedback, you should look for strengths and weaknesses, bugs and issues, and suggestions and ideas that gamers have for your game. How can you enhance your strengths? How can you address your weaknesses? How can you fix the technical problems or errors that gamers encounter? What features or improvements do gamers want or expect in your game? And how can you prioritize them according to your resources and goals? Feedback is a valuable source of information and inspiration for game development; however, it is also a complex and dynamic process that requires planning, communication, and evaluation. With these tips and methods in mind, you can get feedback from gamers effectively and use it to create better games.
Feedback that indicates confusion is the most important to act on. A confused player is a player that's going to drop, and drop quickly. Players that understand the game and have opinions about quality of the experience will leave or stay because of their personal preferences, but confused players will leave because of your decisions.
Here is an snapshot from our studio: 1. Start testing as early as possible There’s a strong temptation, with limited budgets, to leave the testing as a validation step towards the end, at which stage it’s too late to avoid significant mistakes. 2. Test ‘little and often’ There is no single point at which all the key questions can be asked, meaning a ‘little and often’ approach, is far more effective. 3. ‘Fake it’ prototype philosophy Spending hours, not weeks, putting a couple of concept options together on paper or a couple of mocked-up screenshots can be enough to test the ideas and inform those fundamental early decisions, get quick feedback from your audience, and then move on.
Here’s a snapshot of the World of Tanks primary tests to collect players' feedback and in-game behavior: Common Tests Goal: Test upcoming updates, spot bugs, and gather first impressions. Outcome: Identify technical issues and understand community reactions. Sandbox Tests Goal: Large-scale testing of new/reworked mechanics and gather player feedback. Outcome: Validate concepts based on user load and feedback to refine developments. Supertest Goal: Closed testing of new additions or tweaks to existing maps/vehicles. Outcome: Fine-tune elements based on structured testing and feedback.
Analytical Tools: Use analytics to track player behavior, identifying patterns that can indicate aspects of the game that might need improvement.