Duration: 40:22

427 views

5

Hit games are a source of inspiration for many game designers, but the features that designers find most appealing are not always the features that make a game engaging for its players. Designers may end up with a backlog of game elements that don’t fit together or serve the best interests of our players’ overall experience. Our research team wanted to help refocus the attention given to successful casual games, emphasizing what motivates actual players of these games to play long term. We developed research projects with this goal in mind, including competitor game research and long term studies blending qualitative and quantitative methods (including: game data, surveys, playtesting, interviews, etc.). This talk will cover the different methods, outcomes, and lessons learnt while conducting long-term engagement and competitor research for free-to-play mobile games. Examples will be drawn form our research on our own games, like Gummy Drop, as well as from competitor titles like Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Heroes Charge and more.

Tori Leonard
Tori Leonard is a UX researcher at Big Fish games, performing usability testing to help Big Fish create high quality games for everyone.

Tori’s research includes usability, concept, and gameplay testing research on games in development, providing usability and engagement analysis and recommendations for improvement, as well as designing and conducting competitor game analysis to better understand the leading games in different genres. Once games are nearly fully developed, Tori and Big Fish conduct focus groups and marketing research to help product managers determine the best ways to title and position a game for its release. .

All presentation content is property of the respective owner. Videos are owned by the IGDA GURSIG Conference Committee. This content cannot be copied, re-uploaded, edited or used for any other purpose. All footage posted with permission from the author. team(at)gamesurconf(dot)eu for more information.