In December, THQ Nordic conducted an unusual experiment for the desktop games market. To find out how great the audience’s interest in the Gothic remake is, she released a prototype on Steam. After that, the company asked gamers how much they liked the game. As a result of the experiment, THQ Nordic decided to launch the game into production.
Gothic Playable TeaserExperiments
In mobile, it is a common practice to test concepts on a live audience. It usually looks like this:
- several screenshots of the future game are being prepared;
- an advertisement for a non-existent project is launched for a small audience;
- after the campaign, the conversion is calculated.
Based on this, the developer understands how much his game is potentially interesting to the audience.
In recent years, crowdfunding campaigns have become a common practice for the “big” industry to “test” demand. Their success often indicates the relevance of the product to the market or one of its niches.
THQ Nordic’s approach looks bolder and in a sense innovative. The company prepared a working vertical slice on Unreal Engine 4 and offered it to the public.
THQ Nordic itself calls the prototype a playable teaser, “representing one of the possible approaches to creating a new Gothic.” They say there is no final vision in the game.
Results
In two months, 180 thousand people played in the project, which is available for free play only to the owners of the previous parts of Gothic, who left 9 thousand reviews.
As a result of testing on February 16, the company also launched an automatic survey. In it, players were asked to answer how much they liked the prototype and its elements (combat system, interface, graphics, and so on).
More than 42 thousand people participated in the survey. Most of them — 94.8% — replied that they would like a full-fledged release of the modern version of Gothic.
Based on the results of the experiment, THQ Nordic announced plans to launch a remake in full production. A separate studio in Barcelona will be created to develop the game.
The publisher promises to take into account all the wishes of the players. By the way, one of the most common requests was to return the dark spirit of the original to the project (the prototype seemed too bright to many).
The project does not even have approximate release dates yet.
Result
The THQ Nordic experiment can be considered successful. The company assessed both the demand for the title and received detailed feedback from loyal users. In addition, for example, she found out that 90% of her audience plays The Witcher, but almost does not overlap with the audiences of Dark Souls and Dragon Age games.
The question is whether other companies will adopt this experience. And, in general, was it necessary to prepare a working prototype to assess demand?