Player Fit 🎮
What Is a Player Fit Test?
The Player Fit Test is an automated testing tool that gives you quick access to a sample audience of 500 players. The goal of the Player Fit Test is to estimate your game’s potential based on playtime data. You can use the results to refine your game and evaluate whether your game is ready for the big stage.
How does a Player Fit Test work?
When you send out your test, the process is quite similar to running a Playtest. You can choose a category, set up the wanted orientations for mobile gameplay and send out the test. A small group of Poki players will receive a Mystery Tile on their page while playing on Poki. Clicking on it will lead them to your game.
Unlike playtests, footage of gameplay is not recorded. Instead, the test will measure how long the player is playing your game. Once 500 players have given your game a try, the test will automatically end and the results will be gathered.
Once you start the player fit test, it usually takes around 5 hours to complete, but depending on the traffic on Poki, categories chosen, and the amount of requests for Player Fit tests at that moment, testing times will vary.
Developers are currently limited to 2 test requests per day.
What do I Need to do to unlock Player Fit Tests?
In order to unlock the ability to request Player Fit Tests for your game, you will first need to watch at least 5 playtest recordings in Level 2.
How to interpret the Test Results?
The result is a histogram showing the distribution of recorded play time ranges across the 500 players.
Let’s say a player plays your game for a minute and a half. In the graph, that player will be represented on the 1-2 minutes bar, with the other players that played between 1 and 2 minutes.
You can also select the results of two different tested versions at the top of the graph to display them next to each other. This makes it easy to compare the performance and improvements of different versions.
What does my game need to achieve to proceed to the next stage?
In order to move on to the Web Fit Test stage, your game needs to reach the following metrics:
- An average overall playtime of over 3 minutes;
- At least 25% of the 500 gameplays must be over 3 minutes;
If your game reaches these metrics, that shows that players take a genuine interest in your game. In addition, you can be assured that it’s not just one small group of players playing a lot— there’s a meaningful portion of your audience engaging with your game.
It’s good to note that the goal of the Player Fit Test is to be an iterative tool. If your game does not reach the metrics needed to continue on to the next testing stage in your first tests, that’s not necessarily a sign that your game is not good. What it does mean is that your concept might need some more tweaks and changes in order to be introduced to a larger part of the Poki audience.
How do I improve my Player Fit Test results?
Success in the Player Fit Test can be measured by how players are distributed in the graph. The larger the bars are on the right-hand side of the graph, especially the 5m+ one, the more players will have played your game for a longer period of time and the better your game has performed in the test.
If the results from your tests do not show enough players in the 3-5m+ range, that could indicate that your game might need some changes in certain areas of the game.
- Most players fall in the first two columns: If your test shows most players fall in the first two columns, that means players have stopped playing your game quite early on. This indicates that your onboarding and early game experience might need some changes.
- A lot of players in the middle columns: If your test shows a lot of players in the middle columns, that indicates that the players are interested in what the game has to offer, but it might be lacking content or a needed hook to keep players interested. In this case it could be helpful to either review whether the amount of content in your current version is enough to keep players engaged for a longer period of time. It might also help to reassess the core mechanics of your game and see if they are interesting enough for longer playsessions. Conducting more Playtests may help you identify the issue.
To test your changes before doing another Player Fit test, it’s good to know you can request more playtest recordings if you want! They’re very helpful to see how your changes affect player behavior. You can find the Playtest tab in the entry for your game. You can request them during any testing stage!