GameRebellion

The video game industry has known massive growth in the past years. 2024 broke records at 19,000 games released that year alone, with nearly 99% being indie developed. However, only 20% of indie games get noticed on Steam. Players therefore miss out on great games, simply because they weren’t aware of it’s existence.

70% of indie developers cite marketing and discoverability as their biggest challenges. (2024 GDC State of the Game Industry survey)

GameRebellion is a startup focused on developing an all-inclusive solution to help video game developers market their games independently.

I was tasked with designing the first version of the GameRebellion webapp. The goal for this initial version was to allow users to claim their games through the webapp and obtain meaningful data and insights through an AI-generated analysis report. With this data, they could make informed decisions and learn how to properly market their games independently.

As the sole UI/UX designer on the project, I was responsible for conducting user research, mocking up designs and prototyping them. I also simultaneously implemented and maintained a design system.

Personas

Before starting anything else, we wanted to pinpoint who exactly our target audience was within the video game industry. This allowed us to have a reference point that we could keep coming back to and keep us focused and on the right path.

We therefore established five main potential users:

• Indie developers: Small teams, self-funded, limited marketing knowledge.
• Mid-size studios: Publisher-backed, moderate budgets, need cost-effective tools.
• Large studios: Established marketing strategies, may benefit from advanced analytics.
• Publishers: Focus on ROI and audience reach for multiple titles.
• Marketing agencies: Need efficient tools for data analysis and insights.

From here, the team aimed to reach out to these potential users to get to know and learn about their pain-points. Doing this exercise also helped us to identify our competitors and the tools our target audience currently uses.

Flows

Since we were building a complex webapp from scratch, I decided to first draw out some user flows. This allowed us to create a visual map of the website’s architecture and how they would interact between each other. It also helped stakeholders to keep alignment throughout the project.

Wireframes

After having a good understanding of what we wished to implement on the webapp, I created some wireframes to make the flows come to life. This step allowed everyone to not only finally visualize a product, but also to see where the cracks in the flows were, improving them while simultaneously working on the wireframes.

Testing

As I’ve mentioned beforehand, integrating AI features into the platform was an important requirement from our stakeholders. In order to test our offering with the market before even developing the platform, the team had been offering in-depth game Analysis Reports to indie studios. The content of these reports was mainly created through AI, which the team wanted to transfer into a core feature of the webapp.

I decided to do some initial usability testing with some of the early designs. The goal of this test was to not only verify ease of use of the product, but also user interest in it.

Testing revealed that users were very interested in the Analysis Report, giving it an average rating of 6.2 out of 7. However interest in it plummeted after users found out it was an AI-generated report, now rating it an average of 2.6 out of 7.

The overall reaction to this initial prototype of the app seemed quite positive. Participants seemed to enjoy the interface and find it quite easy to use. There were some navigation hiccups, specifically in finding their invoices. While users were interested in the Analysis Reports, they were skeptical of AI-generated content.

We decided to pivot our solution, removing the Analysis Reports section to instead provide live data of our user’s games, using AI to suggest actionable insights based on different key metrics that the user could select.