Crowdtesting in the gaming industry
Gaming is becoming more popular than ever. New target groups, connectivity, and security – are you ready?
Providing early validation, full accessibility, and a great gaming experience
Whether you’re developing a mobile puzzle game or an always-online open-world MMORPG, it must provide players with a fun, immersive, and positive user experience. If not, several things can (and often do) happen.
Not only will they delete the game or simply not play it again they’ll go online and tell the entire world what they think of it. Worse they won’t buy the sequel and simply avoid your franchise altogether. You may only get one chance to get it right.
Show moreBut the challenge to do just that is growing. Next to all the technical issues and the need to meet player expectations, there are resource and cost issues when playtesting, such as legal regulations, market saturation, increasing complexity, changing player demographics, and difficulty scaling to demand. Making a good game that provides the best experience is becoming a difficult and time-consuming grind.
Today’s games fill virtually every niche, style, and genre, from immersive VR and AR, online-only, mobile, ‘free-to-play’, RPGs, FPSs, role-playing, educational, racing, sports, e-sports, virtual sports, and many more. And the industry is growing fast with many wanting their piece of the pie. This puts a huge amount of pressure on developers to get it right – even before the player downloads the game or puts the disc into their console. Promises made online, stay online forever.
Gamers also want 100% uptime. Continuous updates that add content and fix problems. Seamless support. Great graphics. A positive experience every time they play. And it all better work faultlessly on their platform of choice!
Games need to meet some extremely high customer expectations from day one. They should provide a seamless user experience even before the fun begins. They should download quickly, install quicker, and (if required) have an easy login. They all must provide an increasingly extensive range of accessibility options – whether to customize the gaming experience or enable people with diverse physical conditions to play. But when games can take many years to fully develop, and as costs rise, the push to release a game, whether ready or not, increases.
This makes it vital to playtest games and ensure that all of the bugs, glitches, and errors that inevitably arise are caught early and well before the player encounters them. And why validating gaming builds throughout the development process is essential.
Show lessIt’s always a good game with crowdtesting
Creating a good game that appeals to your intended audience, or a broad global audience with a million and one expectations require playtesting. Ideally with real people at every stage of the development process, from click-dummies to fully produced games.
Our ability to select diverse and unbiased people from one of the biggest and most active communities of testers is a game-changer.
If your game’s genre has a clear audience, we can quickly source regular (and hardcore) gamers who know your genre inside and out. If it’s meant to have more mass appeal, we can find testers from non-players, casuals, and regular gamers.
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Whether male or female, with different abilities, of all ages or from backgrounds of all types, we can find the perfect tester for your game. Importantly, games testing, which is based around user research, can be done early in the development process. That means you can better validate your game at every step.
Our crowdtesters can also help you to improve accessibility for players of all abilities. Through our Usability and UX Testing, games user research, and gaming accessibility testing, we can focus on accessibility features from closed captioning, customized controls, modes for impaired vision, various devices (such as controllers) for gamers with physical disabilities, and much more.
Today, gamers demand flawless experiences. It doesn’t matter what the game, its simplicity or complexity, whether it’s free-to-play, freemium, or paid, always online, mobile or tablet, console or PC, it has to work as expected wherever they are and at any time. Wherever your games are played, we can test them.
That’s why it’s essential to playtest games with the right people, on the right devices. Their fast tester feedback is vital for your game’s mission success.
Show lessActual users, real-world games testing, winning results
A successful game isn’t just a good game. There’s a lot more involved when it comes to providing a positive experience. But issues, such as a lack of resources from people to devices, operational blindness, and difficulty running tests in real-world conditions, often get in the way. Mobile game testing isn’t possible without the right devices!
With our crowdtesting services, you can use real people to receive truly unbiased and actionable feedback and insights on what works, what doesn’t, and where improvements can be made to fully optimize your game.
To test their expansive sim-like 3D adventure game, our client needed to go big and ensure it was issue free and smooth to play. 54 crowdtesting gamers took on the challenge.
When it comes to life simulation games, it’s all about the details and when it comes to adventure games, it’s all about the gameplay and story. Our client developed a highly interactive hybrid of both. This, naturally, increased the number of challenges to get everything right and create a great overall experience.
With such depth and complexity – added to by introducing a huge variety of characters and 3D graphics – the need to get things right was vital.
Not only do players have to design their avatars but they’ll eventually go on quests, explore, solve puzzles, and take part in a wide variety of activities. You can also farm, craft, collect items, and rebuild buildings, including designing and decorating your own fully customizable house. It also has to work well on PC and the Nintendo Switch.
To get into the game and ensure as many diverse people could playtest, we sourced 54 testers who used a mix of controllers (23) and keyboard and mouse (31) while playing. To make it more immersive and comprehensive, each gamer played the game for a total of eight hours and finished six different surveys focused on finding bugs and looking at the game’s playability and usability.
All of this resulted in highly comprehensive feedback that enabled our client to make necessary changes to optimize the game even further.
Our client wanted to test that their colorblind players could also play and to see what the first-time experience was like. Our crowdtesters started testing with eyes wide open.
Our client, one of the world’s largest game publishers, had us test two consecutive editions of their football game. The first was to check the player’s experience when using the 2022 edition for the first time on Xbox consoles, and the second was to help them determine the effectiveness of colorblind modes in their 2023 version.
The 2022 version:
Already available on PC, the developers were looking at console players and this meant seeing how the game handled a controller rather than a mouse and keyboard. We assembled 20 Xbox-owning testers to take part in both a two-hour playtest and a 30-minute remote interview. The goal: To better understand the experience when using an Xbox controller, to gain insights into what a player with no prior experience using the game felt while playing, and to gauge the first-time user experience after two hours of gameplay.
Ultimately, their feedback saw our client improve the ability to navigate menus via the controller, make everything (especially navigation) more consistent, and consider boosting areas such as using more music and providing a guided learning feature.
The 2023 version:
With controller issues and other functionalities smoothed out, the developers turned their attention to accessibility for those with one of three types of colorblindness, protanopia (reds appear black), deuteranopia (they cannot see green, so reds look brown/yellow and green a dark yellow), and tritanopia (blue looks green and yellow appears purple or light brown). As such, three modes were developed.
We located 19 testers. Eight with protanopia, six with deuteranopia, and five with tritanopia to test onboarding and free gameplay in both their specific mode and without any mode. Testing was then used to show where issues occurred in each part of the game.
Was certain-colored text readable? Were skin tones obvious? Clothing colors? And how they differed between colorblind mode on and off.
Our crowdtesters were then able to clearly show exactly where tweaks could be made to greatly improve accessibility!
Two clients were after the same thing but for different applications. One wanted their gaming platform to be free of bugs, another their mobile game. The bugs never stood a chance.
If there’s anything that’s going to drive players mad, it’s bugs. Nobody wants the game to crash at a crucial point. Or can’t progress. Or can’t read a bad translation. Everything has to work smoothly and flawlessly. This is a priority for our clients.
One client wanted to ensure their gaming platform, which enabled gamers to download and launch games on their PC or Mac, worked correctly with as few issues as possible. The other wanted to test their mobile game on a wide variety of devices to find and remove bugs.
We then sourced crowdtesters from around the globe to take part in Exploratory Bug Testing. Our platform client used 30 testers from 13 countries to test on PCs and Macs with a wide variety of specifications, and the mobile client 26 testers on 26 different smartphones (and OS versions). A great advantage of exploratory testing is that you can find bugs in areas that aren’t obvious and that you never imagined even existed. This meant the testers were able to freely use the platform and game to see what happened on their specific devices.
Testers would then follow multiple use cases (create an account, download the game, use its features, delete the game, etc.) and then categorize (translation issue, display error, crash) and rate any bugs found (low, medium, high, critical).
Our crowdtesters were able to find and log multiple game-breaking bugs. This enabled both clients to further improve their solutions and better ensure a positive experience for their customers.
Create empowering and fun games with crowdtesters
As mobile gaming continues its unstoppable growth, regulations around the world increase, and the market becomes saturated, developing games that retain players is becoming a big challenge. Especially as today’s gamers have extremely high expectations when it comes to the quality of their games.
They must work perfectly on any device and operating system, wherever they are, whenever they want to use it. It also must deliver a positive experience. Getting these elements right can build trust and ongoing loyalty. And that’s vital. There’s always another game they can download.
This is where our highly flexible and fully customizable crowdtesting services, including playtesting and mobile game testing, can help you create a fully optimized, dependable, and secure game – regardless of where, on what, and when it’s used! Making it fun is up to you!
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Stop guessing if your product meets the expectations of your users and start making decisions based on facts.
Do you have questions about testing in the gaming industry?
Would you like to have more information on how we can help you make your digital products even better? Just send us a message, one of our solution consultants will be happy to get in touch with you.
