Simple tasks and get higher rewards and incentives

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.

I like that I can earn by being helpful and assisting people. Also, setting up Respondent was easy.