Excellent thread from @maxnichols.bsky.social
I see this frequently when working live service & mobile teams who are lucky enough to have an active Discord - they represent *some*of your players, & have a big sway on vocal opinions, but don’t represent the vast majority of your player’s behaviour.
It’s been a while since I last ghostrode the whip.
Congratulations David, a big milestone!
Great point, I think you’re right that it will make people continue to think a survey is the ‘easy’ option.
“Surveys are bad because people don’t know the rules”
Yes, but I don’t think better question design is actually why surveys are bad.
More common if you’re defaulting to a survey is because teams haven’t thought enough about what they need to know, or what they will do with the info.
gotta remind myself that other devs know the score and understand when I say that -
I've been in the industry for 5 years, and tomorrow is the first time a game with a significant amount of my work is gonna be played by the public...
I'm so nervous!! and proud!! please play the Denshattack demo!!
My lukewarm take
Spamming LinkedIn requests is not networking. Stop advising people trying to break into the games industry to do this
Networking isn't a game you can min/max, it's about actual personal connections. Shitposting on Bluesky is a better networking tool than blind LinkedIn connections
A excellent piece on why 'Design by Reddit' is a terrible replacement for actual user research.
Keeping a finger on the pulse of social media sentiment can be an important *complement* to understanding your users (and even add context to your research responses), but can't replace #GamesUR
Xbox Research is looking for feedback on accessibility options in video games!
I am currently trying to balance a tilting ship… have recommended to friends!
My understanding is that books on KU are free, and authors are paid by the number of pages read. So you don’t need to convince people to purchase, and getting thousands of people to read just a few pages until they abandon it will add up.
The IGDA GURSIG is happy to announce the #gamesUR Summit 2026 in Helsinki, Finland this May 2026.
We look forward to connecting our community again!
Keep an eye on our website for details. www.gamesur.com/coming-soon-...
#GamesUR #UserResearch #GameDev
Lived through this in an in-house role, and it took me much too long to realise no-one cared about the question of “does this work”?
This is the core issue with tools promising to automate playtest/UR data analysis.
We run studies to find new answers. Hallucinations create plausible sounding answers.
There’s no way to identify what the hallucinations are without doing the same analysis yourself.
Plus the food is better!
You could finally answer this guy’s question: bsky.app/profile/anic...
I only listen to audio podcasts myself, but I wonder if I’m behind the times. Many of the big podcasts get more viewers for video than audio, and Netflix is investing a lot in video podcasts.
It can be impossible to spot these without genuine players.
Playtesting helps teams tell the difference between intended and accidental difficuty, strip out unintended friction, and make conscious design choices.
(and that's before we get into talking about objective and subjective difficulty!)
When working with development teams, I often talk about the two types of difficulty:
Intended difficulty - “You’re not meant to beat this boss until you’ve learned to parry.”
Accidental difficulty - “Players got lost and spent hours walking in circles.”
Friction is core to fun game design. Soulslike players expect challenge - to struggle, fail, learn, and eventually master mechanics. Difficulty isn’t a defect. It’s where the fun lives.
But not all difficulty is created equal.
Image from Lies of P — illustrative only, not one of our projects last year.
Last year I ran a lot of playtests on “difficult” games - it was a big year for soulslikes. One challenge came up again and again:
How do you handle difficulty in a genre that’s famous for being hard?
(And Steam has a built in playtest function to find players, if you have a store page)
Many smaller teams I work with have success through Reddit. I wrote a bit about it here: gamesuserresearch.com/a-simple-pro...
“How did we make Wizards good? We asked players which bits were bad, then fixed them”
Love the focus on playtesting for running a sustainable game studio.
This month our interview series spoke to Sharkmob’s Brynley Gibson about user research for live service games and balancing data with creativity.
gamesuserresearch.com/how-sharkmob...
It’ll be sad when Jools does his last Hootenanny. Lucky it won’t be in our lifetimes.
(And typo in the original post. I meant 2025, unless I intend to read them all again next year!)
I’ve also been re-reading a lot of the Discworld books, and the ones I didn’t read on release (post 2005).
Although I’ve now reached Raising Steam which is a struggle!
51 books this year, similar pace to last year.
Some favourites I read for the first time in 2026:
- Klara and the Sun ☀️
- Lincoln in the Bardo 🪦
- Strange Pictures 🖼️
- Time for lights out ⛄️
- Politics on the edge 🏛️
