Starting today, you can playtest PC games on PlaytestCloud! As we make the biggest announcement in our company's history, and while we've been celebrating 10 years of PlaytestCloud all year, this milestone feels like more than just a feature launch.
We'll get into the details further down, but before that, let's look back at how we got here.
The PlaytestCloud team has grown over 10 years!
PlaytestCloud began as a response to a failed game. In 2009, CEO and cofounder Marvin Killing released a side-scrolling game on the XBOX Live store that reached number one (don't worry, that wasn't the failure part).
Buoyed by the success of that title, he and a friend spent a year developing an even bigger, even better game, investing the earnings from the first game into better graphics, a better soundtrack and a year of hard work. And it earned less than 10% of what the first game had.
"I was very distraught by it. And that whole story got me thinking, if we were running an actual business, this would be a point where we would need to lay everybody off. One failed project could kill a company."
At the same time, Marvin was studying in the US with his friend Christian Ress, who was learning about the science of games and user research while in a computer science masters program. Christian had garnered media attention with a product built during his undergrad degree, and was ready to take on something bigger focused on commercial success. With both of them focused on entrepreneurship, a well-timed business plan competition through the Hasso-Plattner Institute got them thinking:
"We wanted to build something that solves a problem, and we wanted to work with something we knew. We knew gaming, and at the time the mobile gaming space was at the beginning of it's hockey stick growth trajectory," said Christian. They identified a gap in the market: a need for remote playtesting.
"Seeing how much we'd invested in building our game got me thinking about how big studios de-risk these projects, to make sure that they can actually be commercially successful, but also that they're actually fun," said Marvin. "And that was one of the thoughts that we had in mind when we initially pitched PlaytestCloud. We wanted to make this into a business, and make it accessible for more people to be able to find out if their game can be commercially successful."
They won the competition, which came with a small grant and stipend, and began building the platform.
Customer feedback was crucial to building a platform that could supplement lab-based playtesting without compromising on quality of player insights. The first customers were integral in the development process, and the need for a platform like PlaytestCloud was apparent in the rapid adoption by more and more mobile studios. In 2014, PlaytestCloud was officially registered as a business, and the team began to grow to support the influx of new customers.
The founders chose not to go the VC funding route, opting instead for steady self-funded growth, and ten years later, we bid a fond farewell to Cloudy McCloudface (the cloud logo), welcomed a new brand identity and entered a new market: PC playtesting.
"We always planned to add support for other platforms, but as a boostrapped company we also needed to approach things strategically," said Marvin. "Our customers who build cross-platform games have been asking us 'when can I test PC games on PlaytestCloud,' and we're proud to be able to support that same mobile experience on PC, Browser and Steam games today."
Just as the team worked closely with customers in the early days of mobile, the development phase of PC testing echoed that same collaboration.
"We invited a few existing and new customers to join our closed pilot, and had studios representing AAAs and indies, casual and hardcore, and various use cases to make sure the end product would fit their needs," said Christian. The internal PC Task Force was a cross-functional team that included developers as well as researchers and research operations.
"The really cool thing about PC testing is that this product was developed by people who play games. There were so many considerations, like connecting controllers and looking at the frame rate, where our own team's passion for gaming gave led us to building something optimized for gaming, rather than just general research," said Christian.
The team at PlaytestCloud has been excited to work on this product launch, and we've heard more than a few times how cool it is to get to play games during working hours as part of your job.
Today, PlaytestCloud can officially support iOS and Android playtests, as well as these platforms:
- Steam games: released and unreleased games, demos, and Steam playtests.
- Windows browser-based content in the default Windows browser: HTML games, store page testing and prototypes (Figma, Adobe XD, etc)
- PC game builds (including Console games)
All of these playtest options are available self-serve via the platform: Single Session Playtests, Multi-Session Playtests, Longitudinal Playtests, Kids Playtests, Multiplayer, Surveys, tasks, and custom briefing. All of our analysis tools will also work with PC playtests, including annotations, transcripts, hashtags, AI analysis, clips & reels.
As we near the end of year 10, more updates are planned for the Player Insights Platform™, and we’re excited to share them with you soon!
