Cliffy B has revealed in a blog post that he feels Gears of War was ruined by the use of focus groups in development.
In a TLDR post on his Tumblr, Cliff talked about his experience working on the franchise with Microsoft’s internal testing labs. Part of their process involved such focus group testing, using local ‘target demographics’, who were often 18-35 year old males, as game testers.
Cliff thinks the testers who came in were placed in a situation different from that of the average consumer. For example, being selected to test the game made them individually feel that they were more important than the average gamer. They also did not have to go through the consumer dilemma of having to decide to buy the game to play it. Cliff also points out that people just behave differently when they know they’re being watched.
Focus group as a form of research has been the subject of criticism before, outside the gaming sphere. Common causes of concern include the experimenter’s bias, groupthink, social desirability bias, and other psychosociological effects of placing test subjects in a focus group.
Now, Cliff contends that the information acquired from focus testing is useful, but only in a limited capacity. He actually agrees with much of the criticism of later Gears of War games as being too linear, easy, and adding too much handholding.
Of course, Cliff is just sharing his opinion here, but it’s interesting to see him bring up focus testing at this juncture. I suspect he did so after seeing Xbox One’s release slate play out, and make his own assessments of that console’s lineup thus far. Microsoft has seen radical changes in the past few months, but does Team Xbox itself need a major reshuffle? It’s a question that we may continue to ask in the succeeding months.
Image is from Gears of War Judgement.
