Creators: you deserve better. Better tools and better services.
If you read our last post you may be aware that Epoch gets to spend every day talking to game creators. Every creator we speak with has two things top of mind:
1. Will players actually like my game?
2. How can I get to market faster? [in boring business terms, time to market means money and money means whether or not a title lives or dies]
We had first hand experience around how using a patchwork of solutions caused massive delays in our game development pipeline [some of the Epoch team met at a game creator in the VR space]. Our setup included “best in class” tools and services such as, OBS, TeamViewer, Parsec, Slack, Google Sheets, Notion, JIRA, Google Drive, Box, Unity, and some specific tooling related to VR game dev — whew, that’s a lot of stuff. And when you have more than one person using a lot of stuff….well, a lot can go wrong.
We dressed these assembly-line level issues up with terms and phrases like “polish” and “we want to make the best experiences possible,” but the reality was, outside of the actual creative part of game creation, our ability to create software was….bad.
It’s not that we were bad at making games. We were actually pretty good at that. We just didn’t have real tools we could use and were cobbling together software and hoped and prayed it all stuck together — and it did, for a bit.
What got us here. Won’t get us there.
**TLDR of the post from here on: if you want to move faster as a game creator, but don’t have the time [you know, because you are making a game] to learn a new tool, Epoch’s white glove service is for you. And it’s likely cheaper than the services you are using now — get the benefits of our tech, delivered to you! Of course, our entire suite is available to you as well, in a completely self-serve/use manner as well.***
So let’s spend some time on those two questions that nearly all of our “business” customers ask.
Will players actually like my game?
Our hope is that players will love your game!
We’ve spoken to so many studios — indies, AAA, and everything in between. We’re fairly confident in saying, you are likely waiting too long to get player feedback.
Games are hard to make on good days and impossible to make on bad days.
Like most pieces of complicated software, games could benefit from a constant feedback loop, but unlike software, games do not benefit from built for purpose tooling that allows this to happen.
Nearly every studio we connect with is using some form of the following for their feedback loop:
- outsourced/crowdsourced playtest QA team [hell, even EA is trying this with their play at home testing framework now!]
- some level of survey/text based feedback gathering tool [often running into the hundreds of questions]
- the rare studio is using some level of screen sharing to watch users actually play the game in real time
- oh and nearly everyone seems to “coordinate” over Discord. Cool.
Despite using these “best in class” processes, when we ask creators what the biggest pain-points to getting games to market faster are, we ‘re often told:
“it takes too long to organize playtests, and it takes too long to get player feedback.”
What we have witnessed is that, in an effort to establish a feedback loop, studios are often spending significant amounts of money on “free” software and QA, yet they are not achieving the desired results. In other words, studios haven’t been provided with the necessary tools to effectively perform their jobs and worse, need an army of people supporting an army of software that just isn’t working.
So, when we engage with game creators, we pose a simple question: “How can we help you? It seems like you have two main issues here — a software stack that doesn’t work (outside of engines, there’s no real tooling for game creation), and a mountain of “stuff” to sift through. (hi crunch!)”
We then let studios tell us what they want. Not what Epoch can or can’t do. We’re not here to sell you another piece of software that doesn’t really help.
Studio: What I need is a tool or service that captures play sessions and gives me insights.
And that’s exactly what Epoch does. Out of the gates, as players play your game, we collect quantitative information [think FPS and other metrics that matter to you] and we allow users to annotate play sessions during/after a play-through with thoughts and comments. We then present all of that in an easy to read dashboard that you can drill-down on.
Customers wind-up coming up with all sorts of unique uses — from player feedback loops, to bug tracking, to automating a ton of their test plan, to automating compliance work, to integration with existing pipelines and systems.
Studio: I mean I love this and it beats our current process, but learning a new tool could be a bit much.
We hear you. Look, we think it’s an easy tool to learn, but, of course, we understand teams are busy, and adding another tool may not be the right investment of time or money right now. Epoch also offers a white-glove service, and you can still benefit from all the data collection while we take care of the logistics. Just send us your builds, and within 24 hours, we’ll send you the output you want. Likely, for a fraction of what you may be paying an outsourced service provider. If you’re crowdsourcing, the time savings for your team by not having to run those playtests alone is worth considering Epoch!
Studio: All this is great, but how do I get to market faster?
This one is our favorite!
When customers walk us through their QA and/or playtest processes, we often hear “oh well, tools are fine, but if I do this myself, it’ll only take 5 minutes.”
Immediate red flags go up. Let’s focus on the game development process for a second. While an individual task done manually during QA test scripts may take 5 minutes, once a bug is found (or really, anything that demands cross-departmental attention), that 5 minutes ends up being… a lot more. And that’s just QA, this same process applies to artists, audio engineers, in-game-monetization teams, literally anyone working on a title…it never takes “just 5 minutes.”
More often than not, we see a lot of “throwing it over the fence” between QA and Devs (and really, all teams). This silo’ed approach to development is one of the main reasons why our customers, prior to using Epoch, missed launch or update deadlines.
Studio: Got it. So, Epoch helps my teams work better together, got any data to prove that we’ll move faster?
You bet we do. On average, our customers are shipping between 5x-10x faster with Epoch than before using us. Simply put, we gather what a team may need right from the source and display it so that everyone can review. Teams just move faster. Turns out, all that “free” software folks have been using is creating a drag on development timelines. You could move slow, hire more people to “go faster” but that doesn’t always translate to actual throughput.
Epoch is a trusted advisor to game creators…that built some dope software to help!
Yeah, we’ve made some software that, in our opinion [outside of game engines], finally help game creators with the building-the-software-side of gaming. Our goal is and always will be to help you get to market faster. Yes, we want you to have a cost savings, but really, if you get to market faster, we’re also supporting you in making revenue.
And hey, if you don’t want to learn a new tool. We hear that. Just use this.
We’re Epoch. We know making games is hard. We’re here to help make it easier.
