Why Good Games Fail

Video games have come a long way since their inception. Advances in technology, the internet, and social media have produced countless feats of creativity and technical precision. But with rising quality comes rising expectations, and gamers’ standards are higher than ever before.

In a market saturated with great games, only those that provide a stellar player experience will be able to rise above the masses. If you want your game to succeed, it’s no longer optional to invest in player experience — crowd testing, community management, and player support will be the defining factors in your success.

Putting the Player at the Center

“When we talk about players, we often do so in terms of how they interact and bond with a game,” says Olga Madurska, Lionbridge Games’ Global Player Experience Program Manager. “We call this the Player Experience, or PX for short. You can think of it as the overall journey players have with a game.”

Though player experience is a newer term in the gaming world, it’s quickly become one of the most important concepts in the industry.

Tommy Lachambre, Lionbridge Games’ Director of Player Experience, weighs in. “As a discipline, player experience is a fairly recent development, but it’s the culmination of three decades of growth. Watching and learning, the industry has shifted to bring the player closer and closer to the center of the production process.”

For developers, publishers, and games services companies, a player’s experience is the ultimate metric of success. All efforts leading to a game’s release – graphics, audio, gameplay, localization, testing, marketing – are to satisfy the end user.

It’s crucial that developers don’t lose sight of the primary goal, which is to provide an exciting, appealing, and accessible gaming experience to their target audience. While game designers, developers, and other roles have a duty to creativity, technical performance, or sales, it’s all too easy to get stuck on individual aspects of a game as opposed to its whole.

Every decision before, during, and after a game’s development should be made with the player not only in mind, but at the forefront. While this sounds like common sense nowadays, history has witnessed great ideas result in games with obvious weaknesses.

Bridges Burned, Lessons Learned

Imagine this: you’ve just beat a grueling boss fight, one that took dozens of tries to get through. You’re basking in your success, pridefully watching the victory cutscene unfold. You finally did it! But then, at the moment you least expect it, your character freezes to death. During the cutscene.

For players of a notorious early-2000’s adventure shooter, this was reality. Despite its excellent design and advanced graphics, the game was plagued by an overbearing temperature mechanic and wonky controls that found gamers perplexed and enraged.

Though the game still received generally positive reviews, these seemingly small issues took reception from piping hot to lukewarm. Reviews singing its praises were buried under the thousands of forum posts asking, “why did I freeze to death indoors?”

This isn’t the only case of lost potential – thousands of would-be smash hits have come and gone over the years, many of them haunted by the same few flaws.

“We see a wide variety of player experience issues, but some are more common than others,” says Madurska.

Common PX pitfalls include:

• Disconnect between developers and players
• Misinformation and miscommunication
• Loss of user perspective
• Poor localization quality
• Game performance issues
• Poor community management

“These main pitfalls tend to manifest in things like crashes, network instability, unpopular gameplay or mechanics, misunderstood game features, cheating, unbalanced multiplayer, and lack of response to player feedback.” 

How Player Experience Makes Games Better

So, how can game developers avoid these issues? Dedicated player experience experts can help developers identify and quell these issues through three main pillars of player experience:

Crowd Testing

In-lab testing and crowd testing are two halves of one whole, but it’s unfortunately common to see developers forgo the latter. While in-lab quality assurance is crucial for ensuring a game is functional and reliable, real-world playtesting goes where in-lab tests can’t.

Crowd beta testing helps studios gather valuable player insights and feedback during the development process to identify technical issues, connectivity and hardware limitations, unpopular gameplay features, and more. Want to know how your game will run on cafe Wi-Fi in the suburbs of a remote country? Need to test in-game purchases with region-specific payment methods? How about testing your game’s performance on a low-budget, cobbled-together setup?

Crowd testing captures the realities of real players in organic settings, from simple gameplay feedback to performance and network functionality. Utilizing both in-lab and crowd testing allows developers to understand how players interact with their game, and fine-tune different aspects to ensure it’s functional and enjoyable.

Player Support

Player support focuses on addressing issues like glitches, misinformation, gameplay challenges, cheating, and toxicity reports. While the ultimate goal is still to ensure a smooth experience, we’re seeing a shift from a traditional one-to-one customer service approach to more holistic methods of player support.

Teams track feedback and complaints and report them to developers for mass fixes in updates/patches. This data is also analyzed to avoid issues in future game updates or title releases.

Community Management

Community management entails creating a space solely dedicated to players — one where they can express themselves, engage with other players,  provide feedback,  and discuss highlights or pain points. This space acts as a bridge from players to developers and fosters a healthy dialogue between the two.

Developers can keep players up-to-date and stay informed about community sentiment, while players can share their thoughts and seek the company of fellow fans. If used well, this flow of information allows marketing, PR, and development teams to get ahead of potential problems, as well as fine-tune the player experience in real time.

“What player experience boils down to is communicating with players. We want to know everything that’s going on on both sides — troubleshooting steps, localized languages, and marketing campaign schedules, but also common issues and complaints, bad community actors, and general sentiment. That way, we can facilitate smooth communication between developers and players to ensure the player experience is continually refined and enhanced,” says Madurska.