When you work on a product for too long, you get used to all of the little workarounds you need to do in order to use your software. Part of you is aware that they need to be fixed at some point, but then deadlines loom and memory fades and bugs become features.

The best cure is external playtesters. Fresh eyes, attached to bodies that have never played your game before. People who are as new to the experience as the people who will pay money for your product. In a perfect world, this means having the resources to build a multi-million test centre like Microsoft did for Halo 3 or building it in to your design process like Valve does and running playtest sessions every week or two.

Failing that, it’s a good idea to have people in your company who are not part of the day to day production of your game try a build. An outsider to the project doesn’t know or care about WHY you made the compromises that you made, they only care about their experience of the product. You should be using the same techniques as you’d use if it were external playtesters. Valve has a good PDF that covers this.

What put me in mind of this was a rant by Bill Gates about his experience trying to download Moviemaker in 2003. Most commenters seem to be taking potshots at Microsoft or at Gates, but it’s actually a great example of why having outside eyes is so important. Without knowing them, I am pretty sure that the people who worked on Microsoft.com were all pretty intelligent. Having worked in the trenches of software development, I can only sympathize and cringe along with the poor developers when Gates says:

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.