Playtests vs. Jobs and Ford

What the talk is about

Oleksandr Dziuba of Sense Vision challenges the idea that market research and playtests are unnecessary because Jobs and Ford supposedly avoided them. He argues that the "faster horse" line misrepresents research: it does not hand you a finished game, it sets the frame and metrics a solution must meet. By his account, Apple ran research actively, largely in-house. Game designers come up with ideas, and target-audience players judge them. Playtests work at every stage, from idea to post-release, and they don't replace soft launch: playtests explain why players behave as they do, while soft launch measures what happens at scale. His method is to recruit matching target players and give them questionnaires of 50–60 questions, and about 25 people usually suffice. Useful for game designers, producers and studio founders.