Why does game dev research have to suck?

Game developers are one of the hardest professional audiences to research well. They have highly tuned nonsense detectors, deep domain knowledge, and limited patience for questions from people who don’t understand what they do. Most research that reaches them fails on all three counts.

I’ve gone back and forth between shipping games and building the platforms and tools that serve them — with recent experience on both sides. That’s given me a close view of a persistent disconnect: the companies trying to build better tools and platforms for game developers genuinely want to get it right, but they don’t have a reliable way to reach the developers who could tell them what right looks like. They’re asking the wrong people at the wrong studios about the wrong things — while the developers who have real opinions about what’s broken are never in the room.

Vertical Slice Research exists to be that connection — a panel of verified working developers, studies that respect their expertise, and compensation that reflects what their time is worth.

Better research leads to better tools and platforms for game developers.