Develop:Star Nomination

The Develop:Star Awards recognises the very best games and talent within the industry:

These awards are all about the game dev community celebrating the creative excellence of the game makers behind the best games of the previous 12 months.

Since the Develop:Star Awards reshuffled their award categories, bundling Player Research in with enormous Localisation and Quality Assurance companies literally hundreds-of-times our headcount, it’s now all-the-more rewarding to be nominated.

Since 2012 Player Research has been nominated for the Develop Awards many times, and each never means any less than the first: peer recognition of our achievements, on the global stage.

Transform Award Commendation

Player Research’s 2019 rebrand, in partnership with UnitedUs, took home a Highly Commended award from Transform.

“The Transform Awards recognise best practice in corporate, product and global brand development work, with categories that focus on strategy, execution, content and evaluation.”

GamesUR Salary Survey

For five years Jonathan Dankoff and I have been polling the gamesUR community for their anonymous salary data. The recent addition of data whizz Andrew Menger-Ogle added a salary calculator and deeper-data-dives.

This initiative has been powerful for guiding entry-level researcher salaries, and avoiding exploitation of gamesUR staff through hidden knowledge.

Here’s the latest data:

Game UX Podcast

A podcast about the people behind interface design and development in video games – now including yours truly.

Ahmed Salama and I discussed the successes (and failures) of my wibblywobbly journey into games user research – along with discussion of the ‘flavours’ of user testing, where UXD and UXR intersect, and ‘what is a playtest anyway?’.

Listen online here, or search ‘game UX’ wherever you get your podcasts.

Imaginary Fun for Imaginary Players at ChinaJoy

If there is no agreement on who our players are – or what they consider ‘high quality’ – then how do we make good creative decisions every day?

I spoke at ChinaJoy Developer Conference, alongside Keywords’ Li Tang. ChinaJoy is Asia’s largest video games expo.