ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Robin Boyar is the founder of thinktank research and strategy, a boutique consultancy in the San Francisco Bay Area that has spent close to two decades telling companies whether the thing they are building will actually work. Her practice runs on segmentation studies, concept surveys, focus groups, interviews, UX testing and games playability sessions, and her games clients include 2K, Activision Blizzard, King, Sony, Supercell, Tencent, Wargaming and Zynga. Across 25 years she has worked on more than 100 video game franchises, alongside projects in healthcare, media and consumer technology for companies including Adobe, Amazon, Disney, Google and Microsoft.Before founding thinktank in 2008, she led consumer research at Electronic Arts from 2001 to 2007, where she built the company's first centralised research department and ran yearly research plans across more than 30 franchises, among them Madden, The Sims, Need For Speed and Medal of Honor.Chapters:00:00 Intro01:00 Fun is a byproduct05:04 What a researcher actually does07:37 Testing a game before launch12:42 IP half lives and nostalgia19:18 Remakes, scale and small teams26:47 How the market split34:01 The original sin of free to play37:49 Attrition curves and life stages41:34 Core versus growth audiences46:40 Where new genres come from51:43 Nintendo, Palworld and IP54:42 What kids actually play58:20 Breaking into gameshttps://www.thinktankresearch.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-boyar/
