Thought - What does Quality mean?

Without looking it up, what does quality mean to you in terms of how you feel about a game or service? On it’s own it almost has no meaning, it needs to be preceded by something like “low” or “high” for it to make sense. Lets investigate it’s true meaning.

I think in every day life in the UK we actually omit the word “high” when we use it on it’s own. “I saw a quality film last night”, “the customer service was quality” all have to imply high quality as it doesn’t make sense on it’s own. A poor quality game is one that crashes all the time, looks shoddy and I think the most important one is that it lacks some decent gameplay.

But what does it mean to you? Quality is an entirely subjective concept, I think it typically refers to our expectations, we feel something that exceeds our expectations is “high quality” and something that falls short is “low quality”. Therefore, we may disagree on whether a game is low quality or whether I did a high quality job for you. Think about what expectations people may have about your game or service and consider how you can improve from there. It almost always doesn’t come from just spending more time at your desk.

In order to be consistently perceived as high quality you must exceed expectations, go the extra mile, be dedicated to what you do and turn out amazing work. Put that little bit more love into the game, pop in that little featurette. Failure to exceed expectations instantly places you in the realms of average and may even render your offering as low quality and it will take a long time to recover from that.