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What is the cost of bad quality?

From a company perspective it’s a valid question. Why should they care?I took a deep dive and the more I crunched the numbers the more surprised I became by the results. To begin with it’s amazingly difficult to measure: I started by taking a couple of games where the Steam sales numbers were available and compared the opinions of the players. There are several problems with this approach: I did not consider how big an impact the prices have, nor did I consider how much marketing budget the companies used, how they used it and I did not consider the phenomenon of review bombing. The sample was too small to make any conclusions… And not surprisingly I did not learn a lot. There are simply too many variables to know why a game becomes a success, and quality is just one variable among many, many others. Right now, I think it could be answered in a more scientific way, especially with a big and reliable sample size, and help from AI to see patterns… But back then I had to give up. The conclusion that I had to draw was that I could not trace any immediate losses for the low quality. After all, when a player decides to buy a game on the day of release they will most probably not care about the reviews. But immediately when I drew that conclusion I started to look at this from another point of view: How many players are so passionate about a title that they will ignore everything and buy a game as soon as it is released? For that, the company both needs an interesting title and a good reputation. Even the strongest title will suffer if players feel that they have been disappointed before. When a highly anticipated title was a buggy mess at release. Those players will possibly add the game to their wish list, but buy it a lot later at a hefty discount… Or just forget about it altogether. So the answer to the price of bad quality is: “Maybe not a whole lot to begin with, but low quality can devastate the reputation of the company which will become a huge problem down the line. It’s like a bad hangover the day after. “

Test post User testing 2

sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia […]

From a company perspective it’s a valid question. Why should they care?I took a deep dive and the more I crunched the numbers the more surprised I became by the results. To begin with it’s amazingly difficult to measure: I started by taking a couple of games where the Steam sales numbers were available and compared the opinions of the players. There are several problems with this approach: I did not consider how big an impact the prices have, nor did I consider how much marketing budget the companies used, how they used it and I did not consider the phenomenon of review bombing. The sample was too small to make any conclusions… And not surprisingly I did not learn a lot. There are simply too many variables to know why a game becomes a success, and quality is just one variable among many, many others. Right now, I think it could be answered in a more scientific way, especially with a big and reliable sample size, and help from AI to see patterns… But back then I had to give up. The conclusion that I had to draw was that I could not trace any immediate losses for the low quality. After all, when a player decides to buy a game on the day of release they will most probably not care about the reviews. But immediately when I drew that conclusion I started to look at this from another point of view: How many players are so passionate about a title that they will ignore everything and buy a game as soon as it is released? For that, the company both needs an interesting title and a good reputation. Even the strongest title will suffer if players feel that they have been disappointed before. When a highly anticipated title was a buggy mess at release. Those players will possibly add the game to their wish list, but buy it a lot later at a hefty discount… Or just forget about it altogether. So the answer to the price of bad quality is: “Maybe not a whole lot to begin with, but low quality can devastate the reputation of the company which will become a huge problem down the line. It’s like a bad hangover the day after. “

Test post User testing

sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia […]