Faster surveys, sharper player insights
This global, free-to-play mobile game publisher never stops researching its players. The team tests every concept, feature, character, and storyline with real players before it ships. That kind of pace needs a survey platform that can keep up. After outgrowing two previous platforms, the gaming company’s UX Research team brought in Alchemer, and it now powers research across UX Research and the broader Product Producer team as well.
98% faster survey builds
From 1-2 days down to 15-20 minutes
~20 studies per month
Player research studies now run through Alchemer
About the company
This international developer and publisher of free-to-play mobile games across several gaming genres. To keep its portfolio of titles fresh and engaging, the team runs a steady stream of research studies with both existing players and prospective audiences, testing everything from game concepts and features to characters, storylines, and visual assets before they go live.
The challenge: Complex research, held back by simple tools
Before Alchemer, the gaming company’s research team built surveys on two competing platforms, and both fell short in similar ways. One platform was simple enough for Product Producers to use independently, but limited in what those surveys could actually do. The other offered more functionality, but was too complex for anyone outside the research team to navigate without support.
Certain question types weren’t supported at all. Passing audience attributes into a survey required manual setup for anything beyond basic logic. More advanced logic created even bigger challenges: randomizing pages or displaying one question at random from a predefined set required heavy manual setup or couldn’t be done at all.
The result was a team spending more time finding workarounds for its survey platforms than analyzing results, with some studies still requiring outside help to pull off. That gap is what sent the team looking for a new platform.
The solution: A platform built for research, not just surveys
A researcher on the team had previously worked with Alchemer and knew it could handle the logic and complexity they needed. The gaming company piloted the platform and evaluated it against a clear set of criteria:
- Breadth of functionality for complex survey design
- Reliable player-data transfer
- Integration with respondent recruitment platforms to pass respondent IDs between systems
- Ease of use for Product Producers, who needed to launch surveys independently, not just researchers
- Pricing and overall value
- Technical reliability and stability
Alchemer checked every box, and the research team moved quickly from pilot to full rollout, retiring its previous platforms in the process.
UX Research piloted the platform first, then rolled it out to Product Producers with an internal guide and a webinar. Within about a month, Product Producers were building and launching their own surveys with confidence, closing a gap that had always required research team support before.
A few things stood out to the gaming company’s team as they got hands-on with Alchemer:
- Advanced logic and branching that can handle real complexity, not just basic skip patterns
- Integrations with respondent recruitment platforms and internal player data, so surveys reach the right audience without manual list-building
- Reporting built for analysis, not just raw response counts
- A tool non-researchers can actually use, which is what made the Product Producer rollout possible in the first place
The impact: From two days to twenty minutes
The clearest measure of Alchemer’s impact is speed. Building a complex survey with advanced branching and logic used to take a UX researcher one to two full working days. With Alchemer, that same survey typically comes together in 15 to 20 minutes. That speed shows up in the team’s day-to-day research mix, which now spans:
- Player satisfaction survey that track reactions to game updates in real time, instead of waiting for the next scheduled wave
- Feature perception research that helps the team gauge which ideas are worth building before development time is spent
- Creative asset testing that lets the team validate a character or storyline direction with real players before it’s locked into production
- Recruitment and screening for qualitative studies, pulling in qualified participants without building lists manually
- Data export and reporting that gets findings in front of stakeholders in the format they need, without a manual export step slowing things down
- Integrations with respondent recruitment platforms and internal player data that let the team reach beyond its existing player base while still targeting by the attributes that matter
The results reach beyond research operations and into product decisions. Across several waves of player feedback, the mobile game publisher heard consistently that one game had become too difficult. The product team used that signal to rebalance the game, and satisfaction with the difficulty level increased by 65% in the surveys that followed, a direct line from player feedback to a shipped fix to a measurable lift in satisfaction.
“For teams considering Alchemer, we would absolutely recommend it, especially if they run complex surveys with advanced logic and need a platform that is both flexible and efficient. The biggest benefit for us has been the significant reduction in survey setup time, allowing researchers to spend less time building surveys and more time generating insights.”
— UX Research team member, global mobile game publisher
Results at a glance
| Before Alchemer | After Alchemer |
|---|---|
| Complex survey builds took 1-2 working days | Complex survey builds take 15-20 minutes |
| Two disconnected survey platforms | One platform for the full research workflow |
| Complex logic often impossible or manual | Advanced logic and branching built in |
| Product Producers could launch simple surveys independently, but not ones with complex logic | Product Producers now launch surveys with complex logic on their own |
| Player feedback collected, but slower to act on | Real-time player feedback drives faster product decisions, like a game rebalance that lifted difficulty satisfaction 65% |
Conclusion
Alchemer didn’t just make the team’s surveys faster to build for this mobile game publisher. It changed what they could do with the time it got back, turning research from a bottleneck into a direct line to better games. What started as a fix for slow, limited survey tools now shapes real product decisions across the company’s portfolio.
Related Content
H&R Block Case Study
