It’s hard to argue — games are made to be played. At the same time, players usually have minimal participation in the development process; this is limited to external playtests for testing ready-made features and content.

Still, at Pixonic, from time to time, we practice creating content with direct participation from the community. What does that entail? At certain stages of development, we ask questions about content, the players answer them, and the most popular answers form the basis of the content unit design. This injects a sense of fun, and liveliness, and it gets the players involved in the process — a win-win for all parties.

Denis Kozin, Senior Level Designer at Pixonic, wrote an article on how we designed the Abyss map in War Robots.