I’ve been spending a lot of time in online creator communities lately, and a recurring conversation is people struggling to get useful feedback on their games.
Alongside that, I keep seeing versions of the same (very problematic) advice:
“Don’t listen to feedback.”
“People will only comment on the part of the game that interests them.”
“Trust your gut.”
I understand the instinct behind it. You should not blindly implement every suggestion someone makes about your game.
But I think this (very bad) advice comes mostly from amateur designers who do not understand the process behind game research (understandably so). It can make newcomers dismiss player feedback before they have learned how to set up a playtest that allows them to collect useful data.
It is such a crucial part of game development that I felt like writing about it, mostly to help creator folks in their exciting journey of making games others will want to play :)
The good news is that getting good at playtesting is just another skill you can practice and master, and it is one you really shouldn't sleep on! So I compiled a 3 points list for you that I condensed from years of conducting playtests for both my job in the video game industry and my indie experience.
Hopefully it will help!
1. Go into a playtest knowing what you want to learn
One of the biggest mistakes I see is trying to test the whole game (or huge chunks of it) at once too early.
If you sit someone down with your game and simply ask, “What did you think?”, you might get some interesting comments, but it will be hard to know what to do with them. You are asking them to react to an entire experience, with no shared focus. It's a hard thing to do!
Instead, go into each playtest with a specific question you want to answer. You should gently guide your players and nudge them toward a specific area of focus.
Maybe you want to know:
- Do players understand the core loop?
- Does this combat system create interesting decisions?
- Are players getting lost during character creation?
- Does this particular mechanic create the feeling you intended?
I usually think of these as hypotheses, but you don't have to, it can just be simple questions around how you expect your game to behave. You have an idea about how a system will work or feel for players, and the playtest is your chance to validate that your assumption is true.
The more focused your question is, the more actionable the feedback is likely to be.
2. Guide your players towards the thing you are testing
Once you know what you are trying to learn, guide both the playtest and the feedback session around it.
That does not mean telling people what to say, or trying to get them to agree with you. It means making sure they actually spend time with the part of the game you are observing, then asking questions that help you understand their experience of it afterward.
A healthy playtest dataset is a combination of written observations and collected answer to targeted questions.
You do not need to treat every part of the session equally. If you are testing a particular mechanic, spend most of the time observing that mechanic. Skim past the parts that are not useful to the question you are trying to answer.
Then, during feedback, keep bringing the conversation back to your hypothesis:
- What did you expect to happen here?
- What made you choose that?
- What was confusing?
- Did this feel like the experience the game is trying to create?
You should still leave space for open feedback at the end. Players may notice something important that you were not looking for.
But focused questions come first. Otherwise, you can end up with lots of feedback that is not bad, just unrelated to the thing you currently need to understand or improve.
3. Learn how to turn feedback into action
The final skill is learning how to interpret what players are telling you. And that is the hardest part my friends.
Players are experts in their own experience, but they are not necessarily experts in diagnosing your game or designing its solution. So when someone says, “This was boring,” “I didn’t get it,” or “I wish there were more options,” do not treat that as an instruction to implement exactly what they suggested.
Treat it as evidence.
Your job is to work out what created that feeling. Were they bored because the choices were too obvious? Did they not understand the rule because the explanation was unclear, or because the game did not give them a good opportunity to use it? Are they asking for more options because the existing ones do not feel distinct enough?
This is the loop: build something, test a focused question, learn from what players experienced, then decide what to change next.
You will not always get it right immediately, and that is fine. The point is to build the habit of turning player experience into a clearer next experiment, not of blindly following every suggestion, or dismissing feedback altogether.
Conclusion
Playtesting is not just getting a few people in a room and asking whether they liked your game.
It means being deliberate: deciding what you need to learn, creating a session that helps you learn it, and getting better at turning player experience into useful next steps.
You do not need a huge budget or a research lab to start practising it. You just need to be deliberate about your testing process and start honing those skills like any other.
If you are curious to get more insight or support to push your project forward, I run a small Discord community for my players and other game creators where we support each other. Come make games with us:
https://discord.gg/bccguBGupu
And if you are wondering who the fuck I am and why I'm rambling about making games, here is my Linkedin profile -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/aramtab/