From my over 10 years of game dev, I've found that the hardest part of game dev (after staying motivated) is getting useful feedback for your games. So a while back, I came up with a possible solution. I'd love to hear feedback about it.

So the idea is an "on-demand" testing service catered to games. You'd pay $29/tester, and you'd receive 30 minutes of gameplay, audio recordings of testers speaking their thoughts, and a post-game survey. Another $39 could get you a gameplay/controls/pacing review by a veteran game dev.

What do you guys think of this idea? I'd love to hear your feedback on service, things you think are missing, price, ANYTHING.

Thanks for your time!

It's going to be difficult to get customers to pay you for this service.

In formulating the pricing you describe above, have you considered the costs of marketing (to attract customers to the service) and of operating the business (servers to store the video and provide the email and web) as well as personnel and overhead costs?

What differentiates this from all of the other game testing outsourcing companies?

9 minutes ago, Tony Li said:

What differentiates this from all of the other game testing outsourcing companies?

Those other test labs are to identify bugs, TRC issues, localization problems, and user experience issues. Feedback Kit described play testing services. Only extremely small devs, probably, would be in need of such. 

1 hour ago, Tom Sloper said:

Those other test labs are to identify bugs, TRC issues, localization problems, and user experience issues. Feedback Kit described play testing services. Only extremely small devs, probably, would be in need of such. 

Good point! But there are also game design consulting & playtest companies that provide gameplay feedback, with occasional overlap in functional testing. (PlaytestCloud seems to be a representative example.) The difference in Feedback Kit's idea seems to be the upfront flat fee. I've never used an outside game design consulting service, but those that I've come across only seem to offer quotes on request.

Edit: Just wanted to add that I would consider using a service like this, depending on the quality of the feedback, after exhausting my list of local playtesters. The upfront flat fee is an appealing feature.