Most New Games Still Face-Plant — How Player Insights Can Flip the Script
Key take-aways from my conversation with Sean Vesce, Co-Founder & CEO of LiveAware
This week, we sit down with Sean Vesce, co-founder and CEO of LiveAware, to unpack why even big-budget games still stumble out of the gate and how “always-on” player feedback can turn failure into fast, data-driven wins.
You’ll learn how AI-powered capture, analysis, and automation bridge the gap between dev vision and real player expectations—complete with case studies from indies to AAA. Tune in for a masterclass in transforming raw sentiment into sprint-speed fixes.
🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Anchor
Speakers:
Joseph Kim. CEO at Lila Games.
Sean Vesce. CEO & Co-founder at LiveAware.
🤖 How Player Feedback Can Save Your Game
1. The Launch Crisis: $200M Mistakes Are Now Routine
Hit rate inversion. AAA and VC-backed mobile launches are failing more often than they succeed; multi-year projects have burned $200M+ only to be shut down within months.
Root cause = insight gap. Teams still build in an echo chamber where real-player expectations surface too late—or not at all.
Executive implication: Raising CPI budgets or extending soft-launch windows won’t help if you’re shipping a product nobody asked for.
2. Why Traditional Play-Testing Breaks Down
3. A New Model: Capture → Analyze → Share in Real-Time
LiveAware’s workflow (and why it matters):
Capture
One-click secure streaming from PC, mobile, console, XR; no SDK or FPS hit.
Supports “think-aloud” voice annotation + auto-transcription in 35 languages.
Analyze (AI-first)
NLP clusters sentiment, friction points, bugs across video, transcripts, Discord, YouTube, surveys.
Generates issue themes (“Sniper scope jitter,” “On-boarding confusion”) with auto-clips.
Share & Act
Role-based dashboards: designer sees pacing notes; artist sees lighting complaints; engineer gets stack-traced bug video.
One-click create / append Jira tickets (bi-directional roadmap on the way).
Time saved: What once took a UX researcher 3 hours per play-hour now lands in Jira in < 10 min.
4. What “Always-On Insight” Looks Like in Practice
Brain Jar (12-person indie, Dead as Disco)
Moved from zero internal play-reviews to weekly, annotated sessions.
Unblocked team resistance (“it’s not ready yet”) by making feedback frictionless.
Iteration loop tightened; team confident enough to open friends-&-family build months earlier.
GSC Game World (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2)
Community streams feed directly into LiveAware; AI flags bugs & difficulty spikes within hours of patch release.
Identified recurring boss-fight crash via player clips—QA reproduced and fixed within the same sprint.
Treehouse (unannounced co-op title)
Imported competitor YouTube streams to mine feature complaints; pivoted progression design pre-production.
5. Strategic Playbook for Busy Studios
Start before Grey-Box. Use weekly annotated build reviews to create a “listening muscle” early.
Define questions first. Each play-window should test explicit hypotheses (e.g., “Does new recoil model improve D7 retention?”).
Mix tastemakers with mass. Weight feedback from genre experts higher, then confirm with broader cohorts.
Quant × Qual, always. Funnel drop + clip of “why” = actionable; either one alone is noise.
Democratize evidence. Every function—art, design, eng, marketing—gets a tailored feed of their issues.
6. ROI Dashboard
Cost offset: Indie teams replace outsourced UXR spend (~$15-25 k per round) with Pay-As-You-Go ingest fees.
Velocity bump: Studios report 2-3× sprint throughput from fewer “cannot-reproduce” tickets.
Risk hedge: Early-stage qualitative kills doomed features before they accrue sunk-cost millions.
7. Adoption Cheat-Sheet
Bottom Line for Executives
Player-first insight is no longer a “nice to have”—it’s table stakes for product velocity in the AI era.
If your team still relies on quarterly playtests and end-stage surveys, you’re betting eight-figure budgets on guesswork. Continuous, AI-assisted feedback loops like LiveAware turn that bet into measurable, sprint-level iteration—exactly what today’s razor-thin hit economics demand.
Questions or war stories about closing the feedback gap? Leave comments, and let’s compare notes.