Deciding which prototype to build out into a full game is a crucial turning point in hyper-casual development. Killing prototypes with no potential while ensuring you haven’t missed out on a marketable opportunity will help you find the right concept more quickly - and start earning a profit. The problem is, it’s challenging to know with certainty if your game has potential or if you should go back to the drawing board before wasting time and resources building it out. 

That’s all changing now. At Supersonic, we built a new marketability tool that adds accuracy and transparency to the initial testing phase. We sat down with Meital Uziel, Product Manager at Supersonic who helped build the tool from scratch, to discuss how you can use the tool to make go/no-go decisions more confidently.

Take all channels - SDK and social - into account

When using the marketability tool, your score is shown as a single, unified measurement between 1 and 5 that indicates your prototype’s performance across multiple channels. In the past, prototypes were only tested on Facebook - but this narrows the potential user base only to this social channel.

Each SDK and social channel reaches a unique audience that could be drawn to your game. So expanding testing to ironSource and TikTok lets you reach the users on these channels, too. And this way, you can get a wider view of performance and see the full potential of your game at an early stage.

Expanding testing to more channels gives you a wider view of performance so you can see the full potential of your game at an early stage.

Using the marketability tool to test Tall Man Run, we were able to see that its IPM and predicted CPI needed for scaling on social and SDK channels were very impressive. Looking at just the ironSource SDK results, for example, it was easy to understand the game’s potential - it was spelled out on the upper right as a score of 4 and a CPI of $0.40.

Seeing these results made our decision to move forward with the game very easy. Carlton Forrester, the Founder of VectorUp Games and developer behind the game, was able to see this breakdown, too, so he had full transparency into our decision-making. The marketability tool was right on target with its prediction for Tall Man Run’s potential: The game grew into a #1 hit on both app stores and achieved significant profit.

Make decisions using data beyond CPI

CPI has long been the king metric of marketability testing. But it doesn’t necessarily tell the full story of your game’s potential because there are other KPIs like creative rate and placement distribution that also make up the full picture of potential scalability and profit. For example, confirming that your game has an even distribution on placements like Facebook and Instagram means it’s reaching more audiences and has higher marketability potential - it’s hard to scale a game regardless of its CPI if it’s attracting users only on placement.

The marketability tool uses multiple factors across SDK and social channels, including these additional KPIs to give a more accurate prediction of game potential.

The marketability tool uses multiple factors across SDK and social channels to give a more accurate prediction of game potential.

Looking at the Tall Man example below, we can see the score broken down by each channel.

And we can dive even deeper into performance on each channel to take a look at other key metrics that inform the overall score. So seeing that Tall Man Run had a lower score of 3.63 on Facebook but a very high IPM on the ironSource SDK network proved that we should still move forward with the concept. 

This means you can get full transparency into your marketability test results on a granular level. Knowing with certainty whether to move forward with your game also means you can avoid spending time and resources to grow a game that goes on to fail later. For Tall Man Run, after the test showed it had high potential so we continued growing the game, it only took two months from getting these results to reaching global launch.

Automate performance analysis

When you run a marketability test, you’ll usually get a whole bunch of numbers of data to sift through and analyze. This becomes even more complex when you’re running the test on multiple UA channels with different KPIs. For example, a game could have low marketability on TikTok with a CPI of $0.40, but could have strong marketability on ironSource with an IPM of 25. It can be confusing to understand your prototype’s performance in the right context and make a decision with confidence.

But Supersonic’s marketability tool handles the analysis for you. It automatically takes into account the crucial metrics across the most relevant channels and their respective benchmarks. Then it presents the results to you in a clear, easy-to-understand format - from the high level, unified view to a breakdown on each channel. Spending less time analyzing test performance gives you more time to iterate on your game or test new concepts

Start testing!

If you have access to the Supersonic platform, you can start using the marketability tool - it’s available to all our developer partners. And if you haven’t signed up yet, there’s no better time than now! In addition to the marketability tool, we have an entirely new suite of tools and features available on the updated platform

It’s time to start prototyping with more confidence by getting a fully transparent view into marketability test performance.