What are the most effective ways to evaluate game design success beyond sales and revenue?

Player feedback is gold for game designers! Reviews, surveys, and playtests reveal how players feel, what works, and what needs polish. But like a treasure map, it's not always clear-cut. Collect feedback carefully, weigh each piece, and use it to craft a game players truly love. Remember, it's a journey, not a destination!

The game design should strive to be easy to enter and difficult (and fun) to master. The basic rules of engagement should be relatively simple to understand, but mastering the game and becoming a skilled player must require a deep understanding of the strategy, lore and tactics.

One could say that player feedback is the cornerstone of game design evaluation. As a designer, I know how easy it is to get attached to the game and the vision of what we want that game to be, forgetting that the game is made for the players first and then for us. That's why it is crucial to listen to the players, especially the ones who are fans of your game genre, as they likely have more time to dedicate to playing similar games than us and are usually very passionate about what they want to see implemented or removed from the game. P.S. It is a good habit to check for feedback for similar games and not focus solely on yours, as it can provide a broader insight and potentially save a lot of trouble during the ideation process.

It's essential to use prototyping and tto test original design and mechanics and adjust them to fit your market audience. Remember, you're making a game that you and your players would like to play.

There's currently not a lot of ways to get true feedback from players. Reviews, surveys, beta, playtests are great but they always are never always accurate. We, as game designers and developers and trying to create new ways to collect feedback straight from gameplay. Feedback is such an important aspect for any game, it's more than critiquing a film or a documentary. In a game the player is involved and hence it's more important for the developer or designer to understand what the player likes and hates to give them the experience they more likely love to experience. Subjective matters aside there's an objective argument of making games good and a part of that comes from players who play our games.

3 things: Retention, retention, and retention. - D1, D7, D30, and eventually D365 and beyond. - Then, the D7/D1, and the D30/D7. I.e., the shape of that retention curve. - Then, new user retention compared to continuing user retention. - And any other way of looking at retention that's helpful. Retention will be the leading indicator of all the other success factors to come (or not).

Before starting a game design, it is very important to understand the purpose of the game and the target audience. Analysing data is certainly an integral part of the game design process. It is extremely important to understand and find the key to the element of surprise for the target audience. Just making a game is not important but making a game which the player wants to engage regularly is something that would measure the success of the game. GTA V has done something that the rest of the industry is still trying to achieve. They have managed to sell one game over a time span of 10 years by constantly changing environment and adding new functionality after monitoring what the requirement is from the user by carefully understanding data.

It is important, however, to look into the why of those numbers as well as the what. Only looking at the what often traps a designer in a local maximum, meaning that they optimize with a system/mechanic as designed but maybe never really solve an issue. Looking at why users might drop at a certain point often yields insight about how some other system leads to the problem in the first place, and typically this produces a better fix.

Medir el éxito de un juego va más allá de ventas e ingresos. Hay que considerar la retención de jugadores, la satisfacción del usuario, críticas positivas, participación activa en la comunidad, y el impacto en la marca. La calidad de la experiencia del jugador es clave para un verdadero éxito en la industria de los juegos.

Since we all live in the era of games as a service, user retention is by far the best way to measure long term success. At previous projects, our most important data came from both concurrent users, as well as how many servers were spun up. Both indicated that not only did we have a strong player base, but they were also highly active. The other big indicator was returning players during events. Usually if we see a spike in activity that’s a huge tell that players just needed a reason to come back (free avatar items usually went over huge).

Design goals aren't helpful, player experience goals are. If developed correctly they can be key benchmarks in knowing if your game design is a success. Knowing how to make meaningful games and having a process for doing so, is something that separates the amateur from the professional.

It all comes down to a combination of two things when it comes to design: How can you push the boundaries of expanding reality while making it feel real? I have seen games which have astounding graphics but their gameplay and mechanics is extremely bad. An example? Maybe I would consider Cyberpunk 2077 The game looked real but it didn't feel real honestly and that is the reason I would not play it again probably after the first impression. It has taught me just having is vision is not sufficient but the way to execute the vision to simulate real physical conditions and believable circumstances is extremely important. Similar case with Starfield. If we are putting the time and effort into building something, the impact should feel real.

Ooooh, hmmm. I tend to find that while design goals and pillars are great for starting a project and defining its shape, they can also get in the way. Almost all games have to find their fun during development, and this sometimes means sacrificing a design goal in the face of a superior discovery.

Not every game has to be fun. Not every kind of fun is the same. Games can evoke all kinds of emotions, convey different kinds of experiences, and bring players to achieve different states of mind. Souls-likes can make you suffer, RTSs bring out players' inner strategic optimization machines, and narrative games can characterize fictional characters for new layers of experience. Success in this respect can be about how well the game, its systems, or even singular mechanics work towards the expression of these other goals.

Innovación y Diferenciación: Comparar el juego con otros en el mercado para evaluar su nivel de innovación. Determinar si el juego se destaca en términos de mecánicas, estética, narrativa u otros aspectos distintivos.

Hard disagree. The somewhat ugly truths of critical reception are that a) many types of game have no chance of being recognized because of platform or other choices, b) most critical reaction to game design is actually about things that are not really part of the game design, and c) designing for critics is often at odds with designing for players. If you happen to make a great game that gets a lot of attention then that’s absolutely awesome. But don’t design for the critics.

cultural impact is critical. the way a game can become a part of a culture, community or society- priceless. When there are movies or even fan fiction about characters in games- next level.

Of cuourse this Is an important one! A critically aclaimed Game Is Allways something you want to achieve. Be It artistic, technical or narrative aproach, having an award will help your game get noticed and supported by players. Be warned, tough, having an award does not allways translate into good sales numbers or fan base.

Hardly important for game design, important however for marketing which can drive sales, but aiming for critical acclaim is a sure way to fail in pleasing your players.

Personal growth is absolutely essential for game developers and designers. Tinker with new ideas and equipment, read and learn. As at the end of the day, a game is a reflection of your creativity, and like art, it should satisfy your species being. Be happy, if it gets difficult. Since that is where learning takes place!

For game devs, every game is a new opportunity for growth. As an indie, each game, every new skill, every new idea is another tool in my toolbox. In that respect, a game, even if it doesn't achieve commercial, critical, or personal goals, they can still be a meaningful measure of how far you've come.

In my experience, purely from a game developer's perspective, anything that you develop, be it a complete game or a small mechanic in a mobile game, it is going to contribute in you personal growth in ways you can't imagine. Every minute you put into developing something is ensuring that next time you will be doing it in a few seconds instead of a minute. This is the real Personal Growth that every game dev should aspire!

A person’s creativity and personal development is the focus. First, taking out opinions about your game is a must. Creativity is dampened when the game becomes about anything than your own skills and how you approach your projects. Allow yourself the freedom of imagination and everything else comes naturally. Simple have fun!!!

There is a whole sub genere on this. Serious Gaming or edugames center themselves in making some Sort of social impact. However they have never achieved a lot of sales traction because of this very nature. Today tough, the relevance of games in social and mental heatlh Is growing exponentially. If you can make this kind of meaningfull games AND make them fun and engaging, you hoy a winner.

For game makers like me, it's important to think about how our games affect the world. We need to understand if our games make a positive difference in how people act and feel. Even though it's tricky to measure, we have to do careful research to make sure our games are good for everyone.

Success in video games depends a lot on your marketing. With a good design, luck and people talking about it, you have it all.

In reality, nothing else matters except for sales and revenue. The best game I've ever played is called the game of making money by selling games. The score is in $$$. Nothing else matters. I've been a solo indie for 14+ years now. If making money isn't the goal of your game, then you're a hobbyist, not a professional.

Evaluating a game and its design should include a conversation on methods of evaluation. Game studies can give you access to critical lenses to understand different dimensions of games. Critical media literacy can give you ways to evaluate its narrative and situate it in a greater landscape of art. Statistics and business can give you quantitative tools to understand your game's performance across different social, player-behavioral, and financial metrics. Different disciplines offer new ways to understand your game, and no one way is exclusively more effective than any other.

Copycats. If a new game design resonated with people, you will see other games trying to do something similar. This is how new genres are created. The success of PUBG created the battle royale genre. Wordle spawned countless variations of the daily word game.

I believe games are developed in our industry for various reasons. Some receive funding for a specific purpose, and the primary objective might not be revenue but rather directing users toward something else, as a marketing goal. The crucial aspect is to clearly comprehend the design's goal before progressing into the development process. Both the team and leadership should have outlined how they will measure success, identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be focused on. This ensures that the team understands how to reach their goals and in the end understand if the design achieved those goals.

I would like to speak about something i personally call as "Beyond Sales". To know if a game is really good, we can't just look at how much money it makes. We should also check if people really enjoy playing it and if it makes a positive impact on how they think and feel. Understanding these things helps us make games that are not just popular but also really good for players.