A Plea for Play: Why Business Development Professionals in Games Should Actively Play Games

In the fast-evolving landscape of the video game industry, data, trend reports, and product pitches only tell part of the story. As business development (BD) professionals, we often rely on market analyses, financial KPIs, and user acquisition metrics to guide our decisions. But these tools, as essential as they are, lack one critical component: experiential insight. To fully understand a game’s potential, BD professionals need to play it.

Interacting with Products: A Missing Link in Strategic Decision-Making

There’s a persistent misconception in the business side of gaming: that understanding a product’s commercial viability is solely about reading reports, evaluating ROIs, or conducting focus group research. While these are vital components of any BD role, they can mislead or oversimplify. Games are not static products — they are dynamic systems of feedback, challenge, emotion, and community.

Take Helldivers 2, for example. Its unique approach to a battle pass system—progression through player-earned tokens rather than linear tier advancement — has created a sense of freedom and ownership rarely seen in monetized progression systems. It’s a model that resonates deeply with its player base because it supports different engagement styles. This progression model has already influenced other games, such as ARC Raiders, which borrows the same underlying logic to allow flexibility in how players unlock rewards.

You really only start to understand the subtle psychological pull of these systems by playing the game yourself. As Anthropy and Clark point out in their book "A Game Design Vocabulary", game mechanics aren’t just there to function — they actually create meaning through the way we interact with them.

Helldivers 2 features various Warbonds that are collections of themed rewards. Some are available for free, while others require purchase to unlock. Each Warbond includes three or more pages of items that can be unlocked using currency earned through gameplay. To progress to the next page, players must spend a specific amount of currency on rewards from the current one.

Data Has Blind Spots

Behavioral data, funnel drop-offs, and retention curves are invaluable — but they’re also retrospective. They reveal what players did, but not why but we know, at least since Simon Sinek's book, how important the why is. Focus group testing presents similar limitations. Participants are often financially incentivized, which can lead to disengaged or unrepresentative behavior. I once witnessed a tester, clearly unfamiliar with the genre, mindlessly tapping buttons while mumbling disconnected observations — hardly a scenario from which to draw meaningful insights. These sessions are frequently time-constrained and, crucially, not always composed of the game’s actual target audience. While many business development professionals acknowledge these challenges, they often underestimate how deeply flawed inputs can distort strategic planning.

In contrast, playing a game — even for a few hours — allows one to sense friction, pacing, delight, or frustration from the inside. In user research literature, this is referred to as empathic engagement — the act of experiencing a product from the user’s perspective, rather than simply observing or measuring it. (Brown, 2009. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Creates New Alternatives for Business and Society. Harvard Business Press.)

Design Thinking and the Multidisciplinary Mindset

The case for direct interaction is further supported by design thinking principles. One of the pillars of design thinking is cross-functional empathy: the idea that innovation emerges when people with different expertise understand a problem from each other’s perspective. A business developer who plays the product can more meaningfully engage with game designers, producers, and UX researchers. Instead of abstract discussions about “retention mechanics,” they can ask: "Why does the game feel too front-loaded?" or "Does the control scheme create friction in minute three that affects D1-retention?"

This is not about becoming a full-time gamer. It’s about building an internal repertoire of reference points. The more products you’ve experienced firsthand, the more intuitive your pattern recognition becomes — what Kahneman might call the cultivation of expert intuition. (Kahneman, 2011. Thinking Fast and Slow)

Understanding the “Why” Behind Market Success

Revenue distribution by Country for Diablo Immortal. Data aggregated through various sources, including PocketGamer, MobileGamer, SensorTower, Netease press releases and financial reports.

Market performance alone doesn’t always track with Western assumptions. There’s a duality at play: what’s rejected in one region can thrive in another. Consider Diablo Immortal and its monetization model. Originally ridiculed by the core Diablo fanbase in the West, it became a massive success, particularly in East and Southeast Asian markets raking in more than 500 million USD within just one year (PocketGamer.biz). Developed by China-based NetEase, the game’s success wasn’t in spite of its aggressive monetization. It was because the model aligned with regional norms and player expectations. The irony here is striking: the very feature that Western audiences saw as exploitative was, in another context, a key to success. Understanding and predicting this disconnect requires more than spreadsheets and sentiment analysis; it demands contextual awareness and hands-on experience with the actual game systems.

The Case for Making Gameplay a Core Competency

So, is it a requirement for business developers to actively play games? Strictly speaking, no. Especially in large-scale organizations with deep silos — like EA, Tencent, or NetEase — there are specialist roles for product analysts, monetization strategists, and user researchers. A BD professional in such environments may rely more on second-hand insights.

But in fast-moving or mid-sized companies and especially those working with live games or evaluating external publishing deals, experiential product literacy becomes a competitive advantage. It allows for faster validation of opportunities, more nuanced risk assessments, and deeper collaboration with product teams. And perhaps most importantly, it fosters better judgment — the kind that can’t be outsourced or captured in a spreadsheet.

Conclusion

In a market defined by complexity, novelty, and player psychology, business development professionals must develop their own literacy in gameplay experience. Data and strategy frameworks are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Playing games is not just research. It’s professional practice. If we expect to shape the future of games, we must also be willing to experience it, one mechanic, one match, one progression system at a time. So, when was the last time you played a game and what was it?

#videogame #gameindustry #businessdevelopment #gamedev #UX #designthinking #data