It's only natural that you would want to peek into what makes your closest rivals successful. Innovation is built on progression and a successful competitor analysis will help to ensure that your game at least equals (and ideally exceeds) your competitors' best practices in terms of gameplay, retention, UX, and story.

One of your competitors might have a great onboarding section, but a weak transition into teaching players about the metagame, while another title does the latter very well. Another has text that is hard to read with no relevant settings available to tweak presentation, while another includes readable text with a variety of accessibility options.

When it comes to the games of your competitors you can now look at what works, and what doesn’t, with the newest member of PlaytestCloud’s family of playtesting services: PlaytestCloud’s Competitor Testing.

Start off your game development with a set of principles for having great onboarding, successful transition to metagame, readable text, and a useful set of relevant accessibility settings – all based on the current best practices. This means less iterating on these and other UX issues at the start, leaving more time to work on the game's core experience. And in that lies the value of competitor playtesting with PlaytestCloud.

Introducing Competitor Testing

With PlaytestCloud’s Competitor Testing you can see and hear how players interact with any game on the Google Play Store – no build required.

Using a newly developed PlaytestCloud recording app our players can record their experience with any game on the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, whether it’s their first or thousandth time that they play this game. Yes, you're not dreaming: it’s now possible to playtest with experienced players as well using Competitor Testing.

Now, the opportunities for testing are endless: The ability to playtest any game as long as it is in the Google Play Store or Apple App Store is right at your fingertips.

PlaytestCloud’s Competitor Testing supports all our playtesting types, from having players do a single-session first-time user experience (FTUE) playtest, to short multi-session playtests and week-long longitudinal playtests. Even playtesting with kids is possible when using Competitor Testing.

The results of a competitor playtest are screen (gameplay) and audio (think-aloud) recordings of all players, survey answers (if you added a survey) and detailed player profiles. Unlike with playtests where you upload a build, displaying where players touch the screen is not available in Competitor Testing.

Use cases for Competitor Testing

Testing a competitor's game

A deep understanding of the market that your game exists in is crucial. Through playtesting you can understand how players experience games that you are competing with.

PlaytestCloud’s Competitor Testing supports everything from having players complete a single-session first-time user experience (FTUE) playtest, to short multi-session playtests and week-long longitudinal playtests. Combine this with a playtest in which players use their own, long-standing account to gain rare insight into a player’s relationship with your competitor’s games.

Testing your own game

Counterintuitively, this playtest type isn't just useful for testing games of other game studios. When you don’t have access to an iOS or Android build of the game, Competitor Testing can also be used to playtest your own games if they’re already available on either one of the app stores.

This is especially useful to observe players playing with their own, long-standing accounts. Use this to add a qualitative perspective to the analytics you’re collecting, for conducting research on existing game features, and for testing with VIP players.

Ordering a competitor playtest

Ordering a playtest of this type is simple: You design your playtest using our order forms (whether it be a single session, multi-session, longitudinal, or kids playtest) and then, instead of uploading a build, you submit the link to the game’s Google Play Store or Apple App Store page.

And that’s it!

For more information on this topic, check out our upcoming webinar and browse through these articles in our help center:

Available today

PlaytestCloud’s Competitor Testing is available for all PlaytestCloud customers.

If you’re new to PlaytestCloud, start a trial today to gain access to all Professional Advanced features – including Competitor Testing – for 14 days.

If you’re an existing PlaytestCloud customer and want to find out if Competitor Testing is available in your account, see this article for help or contact us.