With PlaytestCloud’s Competitor Testing, you can playtest a competitor’s game (or your own!) with experienced players of that game. The players will play using their existing accounts and their existing in-game progress.

In short, that means you can watch them play the game exactly as they would play it day in - day out: They will record their gameplay sessions and think-aloud, letting you understand exactly why they play how they play.

To give you some inspiration, these are examples of playtests you could run using this playtesting mode:

Competitor Testing requires no build, only a link to the game on the Google Play Store.

Placing an order for a competitor playtest is super simple and can be achieved in 4 easy steps:

1. Set up your playtest as normal in the order form. Letting us know the playtest type and key target audience demographics.

2. Go to the Google Play or App Store page of the game you would like to test and copy the hyperlink.

3. Paste the URL into the Upload your game section of the order form (under the a Mobile Game option) then click Submit.

4. After a brief check of the URL you will see a confirmation of the game you selected:

And that’s it! Configure the rest of your playtest as desired and then submit your order.

Once you've added the competitor game to the playtest you can then define which players you would like to target:

In the Specify your target audience section of the order form, you can set up different parameters and demographics for the players who'll play your game. To do this select Use PlaytestCloud testers and Pick with specific targeting.

From here you can select the player's age range, gender, location, gamer type, gaming history, and device type (for iOS). For our customers on the Professional and Enterprise plans all targeting without unique special requests are included in the base video token price.

If you select ‘Players who like…’ on the order form, and then select one or multiple genres or specific games from the drop-down menus, we invite players to your playtest that have added at least one of the listed games, or at least one game in any of the requested genres, to their profiles.

We have 56 game genres to choose from, and we have also included a number of popular game titles. If a specific game you want to target isn’t listed, you can also create a custom audience request for players of that game (see Custom Targeting below).
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When you select ‘Players inexperienced with…’ and choose one or multiple genres or games, we will only invite players that have not added any of the specified games, or any games in the selected genres, to their profiles.

While this system works great most of the time, there are instances where players' profiles might not perfectly reflect what they like to play or aren’t experienced with. This can result in a player being invited to your playtest that doesn't meet your ideal target audience. If this happens, you can use the report video feature on the player’s video page to let us know, and we will address the issue during normal business hours.

If you require a target audience that is not available through the playtest order form, we can try and find these players for you. It costs more than a standard targeted player (i.e. a player available through the order form) and may mean a slightly longer turnaround time on the playtest, so please keep that in mind!

There are two ways to come to us with your custom targeting request:

To learn how to get the most out of custom targeting with PlaytestCloud, check out this article about special audience targeting.