Inside modern game design - Cheryl Platz (Riot Games, Microsoft)
Cheryl Platz, Author of "The Game Development Strategy Guide," returns to The Product Experience to explore how video game design principles can transform product development.From her time at Riot Games and Marvel Strike Force to teaching at Carnegie Mellon, Cheryl shares hard-won lessons about player motivation, onboarding, and building products that thrive. Discover why competition is no longer the primary driver of modern gaming, how a children's game taught her about gendered design assumptions, and how she turned a catastrophic server outage into a UX win that made Reddit happy.
Key Takeaways
1. Player motivations have fundamentally shifted
Competition is now under 20% of player motivations. Self-expression and companionship dominate modern gaming - Riot's entire business model is built on selling character skins, not the game itself.
2. Different users need different things from the same product
The Disney Friends case study proves this: girls engaged with pure relationship gameplay, boys needed visible mastery goals. Small changes (adding sparkles and a friendship meter) served both without compromising either experience.
3. Your enterprise users are gamers too
The same people using Xbox use your IT software. They have the same brains and bodies. Why does Xbox get all the UX love while config manager gets neglected?
4. Onboarding isn't optional if you want growth
Saying "players will learn by playing other games" or "they like it hard" locks out massive portions of your addressable market. The silent majority who bounce off your product won't show up in surveys.
5. Journey mapping scales to complex progressions
Whether it's 100 game levels or complex user flows, visualizing the entire experience helps identify gaps where users struggle without guidance.
6. Design for on-demand learning, not one-time tutorials
People are distracted, forget things, and return after weeks away. Separate learning content from progression rewards so users can access training anytime.
7. Honor your helpers
In any community, people want to support others. Build systems that recognize and empower these contributors rather than leaving them to Reddit and external forums.
8. Turn crises into opportunities
When Marvel Strike Force's servers crashed from orb shard overload, the UX team didn't just fix it - they redesigned the interface with logarithmic scaling, solving both the immediate problem and a pre-existing UX issue.
Chapters
06:03 Game development is cloud services plus filmmaking
07:08 The problem with silos in game studios
08:24 “Modern” games: live service, messy business models, shifting tastes
09:58 Defining a game: players decide if you got it right
11:41 Motivators of play and why they matter to product people
12:26 Disney Friends: the moment a playtest rewrote the design
17:19 Classic vs modern motivators: what technology changed
20:41 The research that challenged the “games are competition” assumption
22:36 Why game lessons translate to enterprise software (and where gamification goes wrong)
25:19 Pro-social design: trust, safety and communities at scale
28:33 Designing for companionship and shared experiences
34:43 Onboarding as growth strategy, not a “nice to have”
37:38 Journey mapping 100 levels: making invisible drop-off visible
39:25 On-demand learning beats one-and-done tutorials
41:58 Advice for people trying to break into games during layoffs
44:36 Turning a sixth anniversary outage into a UX win Receive SMS online on sms24.me
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