Our product review is a service trusted by the likes of Meta, Sony and Tencent. The findings have been used to evaluate publishing opportunities, focus in-development projects and turn around live games.
A two week remote engagement sees our team play your game (or game-adjacent product) as well as comparables in the market. We use our play insights alongside data and dev team discussions to build a tailor-made report that lists clear problem statements, followed by creative solutions to address them.
Guided by the client, we focus our attention on topics as broad as economy, progression, monetistation and gameplay. Our advice is backed by decades of creative and product experience in the world’s most successful games.
Department of Play is selective in our projects: We are an intentionally small agency and pride ourselves on the highest quality output. We exclusively work with teams and products where we believe the process will be enjoyable and useful. If we feel we are not a fit we are always happy to make other introductions.
We have worked with single page pitch documents all the way up to products that have been live for over two decades. Generally, the earlier we are engaged the sooner we can save you from frustration and lost dev cycles. We are also low distraction, commonly requiring only two or three hours of contact time.
Traditionally new client wait times have been in the region of four weeks to three months. As of March 2025, we have reopened the product review offering, but with a reduced capacity of one project per month.
A review is always our first engagement on a product, as it gives us foundational insight into its commercial and creative state. For about half of our clients this gives them the confidence on how to improve their game independently, but for some clients we help them with their next steps.
We have advised clients with work as varied as full economy modelling and balancing, feature design, prototypes and concept artwork.
