Game Research Operations

Game research operations (often shortened to "research ops" or "ResearchOps") is the behind-the-scenes job that makes player research actually happen at a games studio or publisher. You recruit and schedule players to take part in playtests and interviews, run the labs, kit and software that sessions depend on, handle consent and data protection paperwork, and keep research findings organised so designers and producers can find them. You work for the user researchers and the development teams whose design decisions depend on player feedback.

Starting salary: £24k–£32k
Live graduate jobs: Search all jobs
Main way in: Direct entry to a junior research operations, research…
They usually ask for: Degree subject usually matters less than evidence you…

Approximate graduate salary

Typically around £24,000–£32,000 to start, though this varies widely - London and large publishers pay towards or above the top of that, smaller independent studios and regional hubs often below it, and contract or fixed-term playtest roles are sometimes paid hourly instead.

What you'd actually do

Recruiting participants for upcoming playtests - writing screener questionnaires to find the right kind of player (for example, people who play a particular genre weekly, or complete beginners), filtering responses, and chasing no-shows
Scheduling sessions and juggling calendars across researchers, developers who want to observe, and participants in different time zones
Preparing test builds and kit before a session: making sure the right version of the game installs and runs, controllers are charged, screen and face capture is recording, and the observation room or video call is set up
Handling consent forms, non-disclosure agreements and incentive payments or vouchers for participants, and keeping records of who agreed to what

Show 3 more

Maintaining the participant database and research repository - tagging past studies, reports and clips so a designer can search for 'what did players say about the tutorial' without asking a researcher
Moderating or note-taking in sessions when the team is short-handed, and tidying up raw survey and telemetry data so a researcher can analyse it
Running the operational side of larger tests - booking space, organising playtest days with many participants at once, liaising with external recruitment agencies or panel providers

How graduates get in

Direct entry to a junior research operations, research coordinator or playtest coordinator post at a studio or publisher with an in-house user research team - this is the most common route, and these jobs are usually advertised individually rather than through graduate schemes
Moving across internally from QA (quality assurance) testing, player support or community management. This is very common in games - studios often prefer someone who already understands build pipelines and studio workflow, and QA is a widely used entry point into the industry generally
Starting as a paid playtest assistant, research intern or placement student during a sandwich year, then being kept on or hired back after graduation
Agency side - market research, insight or usability consultancies that serve games clients hire graduate research executives and operations assistants, and that experience transfers into a studio role

Show 2 more

A few large publishers run graduate or early-careers schemes that include research or insight rotations, but these are limited in number and rarely ringfenced for research ops specifically
Games-specific or UX conversion routes - a master's in games user research, human-computer interaction or UX, or a portfolio of self-run playtests on student or indie projects, can substitute for industry experience but is not required

What employers ask for

Degree subject usually matters less than evidence you understand both players and process. Psychology, human-computer interaction, UX, games design, games development and social sciences are all common, but studios do hire from unrelated subjects if you can show research or operations experience
A 2:2 or 2:1 is typical where a class is specified at all; many games employers do not filter heavily on degree classification and some do not require a degree, weighting portfolio and industry experience instead
Some demonstrable research exposure - a dissertation involving human participants, a university usability study, running playtests on a student game jam project, or moderating surveys and interviews in any context
Genuine familiarity with games as a player and some understanding of how games are made (builds, patches, milestones, what a vertical slice is) - studios test for this informally in interview

Show 2 more

Comfort with the admin backbone: spreadsheets, scheduling tools, survey platforms, and at least an awareness of UK GDPR and informed consent when handling participant data
Professional exams are not part of this field. Some people take Market Research Society training or UX certificates, but these are optional extras rather than entry requirements

Skills that matter

Participant recruitment and screening

A study is only as good as who turns up, so writing screeners that reliably find, say, lapsed players of a specific genre is the single highest-impact thing you do.

Logistics and scheduling under pressure

Builds break, participants cancel and test windows are fixed by the development milestone, so you are constantly rebuilding a plan at short notice.

Data protection and research ethics literacy

You are collecting video of people's faces, gameplay recordings and personal details under UK GDPR, and you are usually the person responsible for consent, storage and deletion.

Basic technical troubleshooting

You need to install unstable pre-release builds, get capture software and telemetry working and fix a dead controller five minutes before a session starts, without calling a researcher away from their prep.

Information organisation and tagging

Research repositories only pay off if past studies are findable, which depends on someone imposing consistent naming, tagging and summarising discipline.

Handling people who are not researchers

You put nervous members of the public at ease, and you manage developers who want to watch sessions, interrupt, or hear results before analysis is finished.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Research operations assistant or playtest coordinator - learning the studio's tooling, participant pool and build process, and running sessions under a researcher's direction
Research operations specialist or senior coordinator - owning recruitment strategy, the participant panel, vendor relationships and the research repository, with less day-to-day session setup
Two common forks: stay operational and move to research operations lead or manager, building the function across multiple studios or franchises; or convert to games user researcher, designing and analysing studies yourself. The researcher route usually needs you to build analysis skills and often a relevant master's, and studios differ a lot in how readily they allow the switch
From there, senior or lead user researcher, insight manager, or head of player research and insights - these are small teams, so senior posts are limited and progression often means moving studio
Timelines vary widely. The games industry is project-driven and prone to restructures, so people frequently move sideways into player support leadership, product analytics, community insight or UX operations in non-games tech rather than climbing a single ladder

What people get wrong

“It's a way of getting paid to play games all day.”

You rarely play the build yourself beyond checking it launches. You watch other people play, often the same twenty minutes of tutorial repeatedly, while managing consent forms and recording kit.

“It's the same thing as QA testing.”

QA looks for bugs and broken behaviour against a specification. Research operations supports studying players - whether people understand, enjoy and can progress through the game - which is a different question with different methods, even though both sit near the build.

“It's a junior admin job with no influence on the game.”

Who you recruit shapes what the findings say, and therefore what gets changed. A badly screened panel of hardcore players can make an unlearnable tutorial look fine, so recruitment decisions carry real design consequences.

“You need to be a researcher first and the ops role is a stepping stone everyone passes through.”

At many studios it is a distinct, permanent discipline with its own seniority ladder. Some people deliberately specialise in operations for their whole career, and moving into a researcher post is not automatic.

Where this varies

This role looks quite different depending on where you land. At a large publisher or a studio with a dedicated player research team, research operations is a defined job with labs, a managed participant panel and a repository to maintain. At a mid-sized studio it is often one person covering recruitment, scheduling and note-taking alongside other insight work, and at a small or independent studio the role may not exist at all - a producer or designer runs playtests themselves. Agency and consultancy versions lean more towards client coordination, panel providers and fieldwork logistics than studio build wrangling. Geographically, most UK games research jobs cluster around London, the South East, Guildford, Brighton, Leamington Spa, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle and Dundee, so you should expect to relocate or find a hybrid arrangement; some operations work is remote-friendly, but roles tied to a physical playtest lab are not.

Search Game Research Operations jobsFrom employers' own careers sites, updated daily Tailor your CV for this roleFree with an account, 3 a month

General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.