People spend nearly 90 minutes a day playing mobile games. The visual aesthetics of your game play a big part in building an emotional connection with your users and keeping them engaged. But that connection can actually start earlier, when you’re developing your game theme. By concept testing your mobile game theme ideas, you’ll have the confidence to launch a game that you know will appeal to your users.
Apps and games
Round Robin
Which mobile game theme will users like for my free-to-play game?
Updated: May 25, 2021How to test your mobile game themes
Mobile game testing with PickFu helps your team iterate and validate creative decisions so you don’t waste time or money developing a bad idea.
Once you’ve come up with a few unique game themes, run a preference test poll using PickFu’s audience targeting to hone in on your target user base. If you’re comparing more than two game theme ideas, you can ask respondents to rank each option and give a written explanation or run an exhaustive Round Robin poll of head-to-head matchups. In each matchup, respondents vote for their preferred option and explain their choice. Most game companies favor a round-robin approach because it’s the most comprehensive.
Read through the written comments to understand why your audience voted the way they did. Look for recurring themes in the feedback and use them to improve your game theme ideas before running another test.
Continuous iteration is key. You can even use PickFu to test your final game creatives against the competition. Mobile gaming is a competitive marketplace. While you can check live stats in the App Store, getting actionable feedback before you launch will give your game the edge.
About this mobile game theme poll
This Round Robin poll is a great example of testing drastically different creative directions for a mobile game theme. The poll asks 50 mobile gamers ages 25-64 which of five themes they prefer for a free-to-play game.
Option A has a bakery theme; the rest are animal-themed. Each option shows the game’s user interface, color palette, iconography, logo design, and characters.
Option D's “Wild and Free” theme won with 65% of the vote in the head-to-head matchups. Nature and animal game themes tend to have wide appeal, which explains in part why it won.
The comments reveal more. Respondents said Option D looks “adventurous” and “challenging” compared to the childish Option A (“Baking Time”) and Option B (“Unicorn World”). Option E, also a unicorn theme, appears targeted to “young girls” — not the intended audience — while Option C’s “Naughty Kitty” theme seems “plain and boring,” respondents said.
A good next step would be to create variations of the “Wild and Free” theme in different artistic styles and run another PickFu poll. After finalizing the style, use a similar testing strategy to choose the best name for your mobile game.
Which theme do you prefer for a mobile, free-to-play game?
50 people answered this 5 option Head-to-Head poll in 2 hours and 39 minutes.
Selected responses:
This theme has more personality and seems like it would be very fun and engaging. The font is fun and the characters are very cute. If I saw it while scrolling through the play store I would be very inclined to stop and install it to check it out. I like the animal pictures that are cute and lots to choose from and the game looks easy enough to learn quickly. So far, my favorite game is Option D, Wild and Free, as it feels as if it will be at least challenging and has a little bit of a learning curve compared to Option B, which I think will be significantly easier.