Publisher Sunday shared their little guide on how to conduct marketability tests. The article can be helpful for developers of any rank and status, so we advise you to listen.

On the road to developing a hyper-casual game, they emphasize early tests of marketability through video ads. The test ensures that the game will be in high demand after the publisher publishes it. Only if video ads reach a high CTR (Click-Through-Rate) and IPM (Installs Per Mille), Sunday continues to develop the game… otherwise, the project will quickly die. In the marketability test, your goal is to test the product’s suitability for your game’s market and aim for low CPI and high CTR or IPM.

In early summer, the publisher saw an alarming decrease in the number of successful tests for marketability. The number of successful tests per month dropped to 0 as no projects passed the 5% CTR test. At first, Sundays continued to work the same way as before, hoping that the following projects will be more successful. But after a few weeks, they realized that things were not getting better. They needed to quickly analyze the situation and figure out the problem and how to solve it.

After a massive amount of research and experimentation, Sunday discovered a critical change in the process. After implementing the change, they saw that 30% of their projects passed the competitiveness test. Instead of just moving on to the next project, they needed to study why each project failed carefully?! This allowed the publisher to learn from every failure and share that knowledge with everyone!

Every time they shut down a project, the company got together to review the failed project for a retrospective meeting. They have developed a system of 22 different items that we will cover in detail: gameplay readability, camera perspective, theme, character, and game scenes. This knowledge is then collected and archived.

Once a week, product groups met to present the team with their lessons from failed game prototypes. It helps to grow and improve as a company, and it reinforces the mindset that failure isn’t a problem if you don’t learn from it.

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