I’ve heard that giant recreation studios usually run playtests the place they pull in folks with no affiliation to the venture, have them play the sport (normally below NDA), both with designers watching or the session recorded, and typically have them fill out a survey afterward to quantify the info.

Is this really a factor? If so, how are these folks recruited? Is it one thing that may be replicated on the size of an indie dev or small crew?

I see {that a} query like this one has been requested earlier than, nonetheless, the dupe-chains all appear to wind up at a deleted query. I don’t assume this might be a dupe regardless, because the questions that get duped to that one are usually about discovering customers for a big scale “open beta,” and be about constructing an preliminary user-base (or, extra steadily, attempting to recruit customers from this stack) quite than discovering one-time take a look at gamers for an NDA playtest.