The Problem The puzzle game I had been working on had social features, but engagement was low. The team's strategy seemed straightforward get players to add more friends, because player engages player and makes them retain better, right? Right? But they'd never validated two fundamental assumptions: Do players even want "social" features in the puzzle game? What does "social" actually mean in this context? Most of my initial conversations in this regard went like something li

The Problem The team had a new product to be built. A new competitive multiplayer concept that was sure to be greenlit. Budget meetings, timeline projections, possible franchise deliberations. The pitch was compelling: an underserved market segment with room to innovate, a classic blue ocean opportunity. The research team was approached for pre-greenlight market validation and audience sizing. The plan: conduct research to identify viable player segments, then quantify market

The Problem We kept launching features and games players loved in testing, high satisfaction scores, glowing feedback but adoption was saying another story. Traditional metrics weren't predicting who would actually return. It's a bit different in apps where there is a use case, but a little more complicated in games, and partly where lies the fun. Most of my research had been in multiplayer games where retention drivers were straightforward: social bonds (players return for t

Gaming industry has had its fair share of public reckonings around representation and inclusion. There's no shortage of awareness about what needs to improve. The harder part? Building frameworks that make inclusion a design principle, not just a value statement. Inclusion manifests differently across products and user bases. Over the years, I led inclusion research that drove business impact through different lenses. In a 'fashion' game with ethnically diverse players, it m

Day 30 churn is the silent killer of free-to-play games. Users survive onboarding, engage for weeks, then quietly disappear after they've consumed initial content but before they've formed lasting habits. The team knew users were churning around D30, but not why. Generic answers like "they got bored" don't build roadmaps. My challenge was to diagnose the root causes in a way that was actionable: not just what users felt, but what behaviors and attitudes predicted abandonment