For developers who run frequent playtests, has it been worth it?
We recently held our first online playtest, and honestly we were pretty nervous about the outcome. If we get any useful insights from it, we’d love to share them later.
Before this, we had only done a small closed offline playtest in our country. We did get the kind of feedback we were looking for, but we also felt that local players might be a bit more forgiving or biased, so we wanted input from non-local players as well.
One thing I’ve noticed is that some developers seem to run playtests very frequently, and it made me wonder: do frequent online playtests usually have more positives or negatives?
By frequent, I mean running a new playtest every time you fix major bugs, add new features, or improve existing systems.
For developers who do this often, has it been worth it? Or can it become too overwhelming for both the team and the players?
We’re hoping to learn how to approach playtesting in a better and more structured way, so any opinions or experiences would be really appreciated.