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Lee: Traditional mirror-room focus group game testing produces useless feedback

Elan Lee · Find co-creators everywhere (with Exploding Kittens Inc.’s Elan Lee) | Masters of Scale · Dec 12, 2023 · at 34:26

Elan Lee, CEO and co-founder of Exploding Kittens, explains why he rejected the board game industry's standard focus-group testing methods.

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“Traditionally, the way that game testing works is you hire a group. They do these blind tests. Everyone sits in a room. There's the one-way mirror. You watch people play the games. It's horrible. And I looked at that trying to figure out like, why are these tests so bad? Why are we pouring all this money into it and literally learning nothing? And the reason is because nobody plays games like that. None of that feels natural.”

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