While our players play your game, on their devices the PlaytestCloud recording wrapper will in the background capture, transcode and upload their screen contents. This induces a slight overhead over the game running standalone. We worked hard to keep this overhead minimal, making use of hardware acceleration where possible. However, in some cases the resulting video recording can seem laggy.
If you feel you can’t get good insights out of this video, contact us and we’ll be happy to replace it free of charge or refund you.
What causes the lag?
Generally, lag in PlaytestCloud videos comes in one of three forms:
Realtime multiplayer experience is laggy
If your game has a realtime multiplayer aspect and the connection seems spotty or ping times are high, this might be caused by the video recording upload happening while players are playing the game, and the player is on a slow internet connection. We have plans to mitigate the effect of the upload, but no clear timeline yet.
Video (framerate) is laggy but game isn’t
If the video has a low framerate and seems laggy in general, but players don’t mention anything about their game experience being laggy, this might be an effect of how the PlaytestCloud recording code tries to stay in the background and not impact the gameplay experience. It works like this: In situations where resources (mostly CPU/processor time) are tight, the recording code will lower the video framerate automatically. This makes it possible for the game to still remain smooth.
This means that only the video recording will be (partly) laggy, but players still had a smooth experience when playing the game.
Video and gameplay are laggy (frame rate)
If the video exhibits a low frame rate and players comment on their game being laggy, the demands of the game running together with the PlaytestCloud recording wrapper might be too much for the device the player uses. You can check which device they are on in the "Tester" tab of the video player.
If your game places very high demands on the players device, PlaytestCloud offers the option to limit players to high-end devices on iOS or Android.
See it for yourself
Contact us and we’ll be happy to provide you with a wrapped version of the game that you can try out yourself.