Watch the full video where our UX team talks about the importance of player profiles.
What Are Player Profiles?
Player profiles define the type of person you want to test your game with. While the most common approach is testing with your target audience, profiles go much deeper than just “fans of this genre”.
A a profile can consider:
- Genre experience: Have they played one game in this genre or hundreds?
- Play frequency: Do they game daily for hours or casually once a week?
- Demographics: Age, region, gender and language all play a role
- Device preferences: Console, PC, mobile or VR players each represent different profiles
- Experience level: Sometimes you want veterans, sometimes complete newcomers
The goal is understanding exactly who will buy and play your game, then ensuring those people are the ones providing feedback. Testing with the wrong audience produces misleading data that leads to wrong decisions.
Why Getting Profiles Right Matters
You wouldn’t give a hardcore MMO to someone who only plays casual mobile games and expect useful feedback. Their reactions would be fundamentally different from your target audience and any design decisions based on that feedback would be misguided.
Profile definition also depends heavily on understanding your genre’s culture and context. Some genres like MMORPGs have very high barriers to entry and don’t typically attract new players, so you might want veterans whose feedback reflects deep genre knowledge. Other genres might specifically benefit from newcomer perspectives, especially when testing onboarding and new user experience.
For example, if you’re testing the FTUE of an extraction shooter, you probably don’t want veterans with thousands of hours in similar games. They’ll skip past tutorial elements without even registering them, the same way experienced gamers ignore basic ‘use left stick to move’ prompts. If your goal is making the genre accessible to new players, test with new players.
Profile decisions also need to account for what you’re trying to learn. Sometimes studios want to understand how their core audience responds. Other times they want to explore conversion, how players outside the usual genre might respond to the game. Both are valid goals, but they require completely different profiles.
Defining Profiles is Broader Than You Think
Most studios arrive with a clear idea of their target audience. But in practice, the right profile is often wider or more nuanced than the initial assumption.
Through playtesting, studios sometimes discover their game resonates with slightly older demographics than expected, or that specific mechanics attract an adjacent audience entirely. An adventure game with certain added mechanics might resonate strongly with Metroidvania fans who weren’t part of the original target.
This is why the profile definition process benefits from external input. Studios know their game deeply, but an outside perspective helps challenge assumptions and identify opportunities they might not have considered.
Accessibility testing adds another dimension. Sometimes you specifically don’t want your most compatible player. You want someone less experienced to verify the onboarding works for a broader audience, not just players who already know the genre well.
How Antidote Handles Player Recruitment
Starting with the Panel
Antidote maintains a panel of hundreds of thousands of players who have created accounts and shared detailed gamer profiles, including linked Steam and Xbox accounts showing play history, hours logged and achievements earned.
Recruitment starts by filtering this panel using specific criteria, age ranges, country, gender distribution, games played, hours logged in specific titles, and more. Players who match get contacted and invited to participate.
Screener Surveys
Before confirming any player, a screener survey verifies compatibility. These surveys are carefully designed to prevent players from gaming the system to get selected. Common techniques include:
- Fake game titles: Including non-existent games in a “select all you’ve played” list. Players who select everything or titles that don’t exist are flagged as dishonest.
- Exclusion criteria: Sometimes the goal is finding players who haven’t played a specific game. Adding that game to the list means anyone who selects it gets disqualified, without ever revealing that’s what you’re looking for.
- Steam verification: For players with linked Steam accounts, play hours can be verified against what they claim in surveys with our Steam connect feature.
The key principle is that players never know exactly what the screener is looking for, so their only option is to answer honestly.
External Recruitment
When the existing panel doesn’t have enough compatible players, targeted paid media marketing campaigns attract new candidates who match the required demographic brackets. These players go through the same screener process before being onboarded.
Player Onboarding
Once players pass the screener, the onboarding process begins. This typically includes:
- Email instructions outlining what’s expected
- A dedicated Discord server for direct communication with the research team
- Clear timelines and session requirements
- NDA signing and any legal requirements handled through the platform
The research team stays in close contact with players throughout, answering questions and making sure everything is ready before testing begins.
Key Takeaways
Player profiles are the foundation of every playtesting decision that follows. Getting them right means understanding your genre deeply, knowing your research goals and sometimes challenging your own assumptions about who your audience is.
The recruitment process behind finding the right players is more complex than it might seem. It’s a combination of database filtering, screener surveys, fraud prevention and in some cases external campaigns to find exactly the right people.
Studios that invest time in defining precise profiles get significantly more useful feedback than those who test with whoever is available.
