As a Game Marketing Specialist at Horizon Games Studio, our 51–200 person game studio constantly needs genuine player feedback to shape marketing assets, refine in-game onboarding, and test new campaign concepts ahead of launches. Before Respondent, I was scrambling to source interview participants through our own Discord community and social channels, and that approach backfired badly on our last indie title teaser test. I put out an open call for playtest feedback, and most respondents were our most loyal existing fans. Their opinions were heavily biased, and we got almost no input from casual gamers who hadn’t heard of our studio. We built a trailer tailored to that narrow fan group, and it underperformed badly when it went live to broader audiences on Steam. That misstep made me look for a platform that could help us recruit diverse, targeted research participants quickly to match our player personas.
What stands out to me most about Respondent is how granular the participant screening setup is. I can build detailed screener surveys to filter people by gaming platform, favorite genres, play frequency, spending habits, and even the types of game trailers that grab their attention. For our recent beta marketing research, I needed casual PC players who rarely engage with fantasy action games — a group we almost never reach inside our own community. Respondent let me lock in exactly that audience, instead of only getting feedback from our core fans. It’s a huge shift from relying on our existing fanbase as our only source of insight.
I also really value how streamlined the scheduling and compensation flow is. Coordinating player interviews used to eat up so much of my week. I’d juggle DMs, send calendar invites one by one, and manually track who had shown up to sessions so I could send gift card rewards afterward. It was easy to lose track and accidentally miss compensating a participant, which creates a bad impression. Respondent handles booking links, session reminders, and reward distribution in one place. Once an interview wraps up, I just mark attendance, and the platform takes care of the rest. That frees me up to focus on writing discussion guides and analyzing what players actually say, rather than managing admin logistics.
Another big plus is how easy it is to share session highlights and raw notes with our wider team. Our creative team, community managers, and UX designers all rely on this player research. I can tag key quotes and clip relevant feedback directly inside the platform after interviews, then share a filtered summary link without sending huge piles of recording files over Slack. It keeps everyone aligned on what real prospective players think about our trailers, store page copy and in-game hook moments.
We still lean on Valasys AI after these interviews to pull themes out of all the qualitative feedback and map those insights back to our marketing targeting. Respondent doesn’t replace that analysis step, but it solves the hardest first piece of the puzzle: getting unbiased, properly segmented players to talk to us. For a mid-sized game studio that can’t maintain a dedicated user research team, this tool removes so much friction from our pre-launch validation work. Now our marketing decisions aren’t only built around what our biggest fans love — we get clear input from the wider audience we need to win over. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
While Respondent is our go-to platform for recruiting game research participants at Horizon Games Studio, there are some persistent drawbacks that create extra stress for me as a Game Marketing Specialist, and I hit a tricky roadblock during a recent campaign test. I was recruiting console players to weigh in on our new game’s key art and store page messaging. I set up my screener carefully, filtered for players who enjoy roguelikes but hadn’t seen any of our prior marketing materials, and launched the recruitment. A handful of participants passed the screener and booked sessions, yet when the interviews started, it became obvious they’d lied about their exposure to our project. A couple of them had already watched our gameplay clips on TikTok. Respondent’s pre-qualification checks are self-reported only; there’s no secondary validation step to verify their answers. Those tainted interviews were a waste of our time and incentive budget, and I had to push my research timeline back to recruit a fresh batch of participants.
Another major pain point is the pricing structure, which gets expensive quickly when we need niche player segments. General casual gamers are reasonably accessible, but whenever I need harder-to-find groups — like high-spending multiplayer players or people who only play handheld titles — the participant fees jump sharply. We run multiple rounds of marketing validation per game cycle, and these costs stack up fast. Unlike some competing tools, there’s no volume discount for recurring studies, even though we run research monthly across our different projects. I often end up having to shrink my intended sample size just to stay inside our marketing budget, which limits how confident we can be in the findings.
I also find the native reporting and export options really basic. After wrapping a set of interviews, I need to feed quotes, participant personas and sentiment notes into Valasys AI for thematic analysis. The CSV export only pulls basic metadata like screener answers and session timestamps. It does not capture timestamped clips, tagged comments or the discussion notes I add within Respondent. That means I have to manually copy every valuable quote into a separate document before uploading to Valasys AI. For a study with 12 to 15 interviews, this manual transcription and copy work eats up an entire afternoon that I could spend refining marketing copy or social content. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
