In this blog let’s discuss a bit about mobile game testing in general. Testing mobile game means ensuring that the game is properly downloaded, installed and played. It should meet all its primary requirements and provide mind-blowing user experience to the gamer.
This may sound challenging – especially when producers launch their games globally as the game must run well across devices.
If we look at the portion of Google Play and App Store revenues, they are generated by mobile games. There is absolute necessity to seamlessly test and test automation for the mobile game components
Challenges in Testing Mobile Games
The mobile game market segment has ferociously contended and the game users have short attention span. Customer’s lifetime value for each game is heavily dependent on additional content and user relationship. This means that everything has to work over several application updates, back-end updates over an extended period of time to recover the initial marketing investments.
What are the challenges to test the aspects of mobile games?
Firstly, a majority of games use direct screen access in form of OpenGL or ActiveX bypassing the OS level services. This leads to the problem that all of the native mobile test automation frameworks are becomes unusable with mobile games. Without access to the object level information the automation can only utilize XY clicks without ample feedback or validation about the internal status of the game.
Secondly, performance is a key driver for user experience and the real performance can only be monitored using real hardware. Frame rates also matter with the richness and variety of mobile devices, where every model counts.
In fact, sometimes supporting just one more popular Asian mobile device model can bring additional $5 million of revenue during the lifetime of a game.
Also for many game application binaries are massive (which sums up to 3Gb) and games consume a lot of memory, CPU, GPU, and battery. All these need to be accounted for performance testing so that the real end user experience does not face issues to physical realities of mobile devices.
Finally, most of the games utilize sensors or other hardware features that are not consistent from one device to another. This is left unchecked and will prove to be a nasty surprise down the road.
The range of tools used, methods, best practices and frameworks for mobile game testing is pretty huge, but there are certain things that all game developers do the same way. In spite of different game engines selected, over 90% of game developers use some form of image recognition.
We will discuss more about mobile game testing techniques in our upcoming blogs. Stay Tuned for updates.
HAPPY GAME TESTING!!!
In case you’re interested to try out this for your game, please contact us and we’ll be happy to share some great cases and show how it can be done for your game.
