What Comic Con Bangalore Taught Us About Player Research

January 18. Comic Con Bangalore. 18 of us on the floor.

Art, Engineering, Product, QA, Production, HR, UX. The whole team was there for What The Fate's first real public outing. 50,000 people through the venue over two days.

We watched strangers pick up the phone and play. No instructions, no tutorial walkthrough from us. Just: here's the game.

Two things we kept seeing.

First, the silent exits. Players who got confused didn't tell us. They didn't leave feedback. They just quietly put the phone down and drifted to the next booth. You don't see that in analytics. You see a number go down. You don't see why.

Second: the people who stayed longest weren't the best players. They were the ones who stumbled onto something surprising in the first 90 seconds. One person laughed at a specific decision in the game and spent the next 20 minutes showing it to people around them. Hadn't even really started yet.

Delight hooks before skill. We knew that on paper. We saw it in person.

The whole team came back with something no data report would've given us. That's the part they don't put in the post-mortem template.

Drop your best example of player research that surprised you.

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