Why is investing in Game Testing Platforms necessary?

With millions of gaming apps, market size, and the projected growth foretell, gaming apps have enormous business potential and, thus, need to be of top quality to capture the market.

• The gaming market is constantly booming, and video game market value is projected to hit USD 268.8 billion by 2025, compared to USD 178 billion in 2021. 
• North America has set an example, stands out, and remains the top-grossing gaming business globally despite solid growth in the APAC region.

One has to expense loads of time and hard work to make their gaming app stand out. Being such a multimillion-dollar sector, the role of expert game-testing platforms is highly felt. Testing a gaming website could enhance the user’s experience on varied OS-browser combinations.

What is Game Testing?

Game testing is a software testing procedure for assessing a gaming app for bugs or errors. As gaming applications are ubiquitous across distinct platforms such as PCs, gaming consoles, mobile devices, and tabs, testing ensures that your game meets all the user’s standards. 

It also guarantees that your gaming app works perfectly with all hardware, OS or browsers, tablets, mobile devices (phones), etc. When video game testing is performed, software developers focus on factors like code errors, completeness, inconsistencies, bottlenecks, and coherence.  

Despite these factors, game testing also lets the developers know the possible threats that will be brought into the market. Some of these are:

• Is this gaming app easy to access and control?
• Does the game have a convincing player-centric design?
• Does the software entice the niche audience?
• Are there any technical glitches, or does the background music exist?
• Does the visual design give an exceptional experience to the target audience?
• Does the game provide a fun factor to the folks playing it?

What are some of the most common game bugs or bottlenecks?

Some common bugs include:

• Technical bugs refer to the conditions when the game does not function desirably owing to unstable network or internet connections.
• Interface bugs occur as game graphics are misunderstood, the game components are in the wrong place, and the space arranged for the text does not fit appropriately.
• Compatibility bugs refer to glitches when the games do not work properly in various Operating systems or devices despite being built to support all.
• Performance bugs: Situations like slower performances and the game’s frames per second (FPS) declining exceptionally on high-end section devices during a character attack animation are a few performance bugs.
• Localization bugs: The bugs found in the untranslated texts or strings constitute localization errors.
• Balance and logic bugs: These bugs do not allow gamers to finish their tasks.

Importance of Investing in Game testing

The primary purpose of game testing is to ensure that the final product meets the expectations of players and developers alike. Considering game testing platforms to test your games helps them identify problems or issues with the work they may have missed before launching. 

It allows time to fix the glaring problems before releasing games onto digital marketplaces like Play Store and App Store, saving time and money.

Here are 5 Reasons for investing in Game Testing Platforms:

1. Quality Assessment 

Every gaming app developer wishes to deliver the best user experience to their esteemed clientele or customers. Hiring a pioneer game testing platform like Browserstack is one of the perfect ways to achieve this. QA engineers will intelligently assess the quality of the applications by efficiently identifying loopholes and probable defects.

2. Video Game Ranking

Game testing from a reliable cloud platform can affect a video game’s ranking. When a new game is to be released, testing intensely and profoundly affects how clientele views it. QA’s will consider a detailed list of the parameters before giving the final verdict.

3. Optimize Improvement Areas 

Most video gaming apps are subject to frequent upgradation during their time in the market. The majority of gaming companies also thought of releasing sequels and series. Game testing from a trustworthy platform could easily identify the weak zones that must be improved to give the games a prolonged life in the market. 

You can effortlessly debug gaming apps on real devices without the annoyance of maintaining device labs.

4. Increased Accuracy via Regression Testing

Repetitive game testing can result in an over-familiarity to the point where defects or bugs go unnoticed. This is why automation is king when it comes to regression tests and visual regression testing for highly visual products like gaming apps.

5. Better Cross-device coverage

 Today, it is significant to launch your gaming app on multiple platforms, be it console, desktop, or mobile. Device fragmentation is a real concern here. This error is evident on mobile: hundreds of varied Android phones exist, and Apple has been launching new iPhones almost yearly. 

That’s where the automated game testing platforms can shine, as the test case can run on varied hardware in parallel. Investing in BrowserStack can open the gate to improved device coverage and test efficiency. 

Prerequisites for Game Testing

 1. Requirement Elicitation

The game testing phase begins with a descriptive understanding of varied facets of the game. This counts the characters counted in the game, the notion behind the game, principles, and mechanics that would be applicable.

 2. Preparation & Design

Understanding the necessities makes it simpler for the QA’s to design a robust game-testing strategy. This step includes planning an exhaustive document that counts the complete details of the game-testing strategy. 

For instance, timelines details, no. of testing cycles, kinds of testing that would be executed, the procedure to record errors, priorities, risk, etc.

 3. Designing Test Cases

The game developers generally prepare the testing environments that QA testers require so that game verification can start. QA specialists prepare the test cases that would be utilized to perform the test process.

 4. Performing Game Test Cases

This phase includes testing a game in varied settings, which assists in detecting more bugs in the product. Some typical test stages are alpha, beta, and content testing.

 5. Reporting Test Outcomes

In this significant step, a bug report is drawn up with all the bugs found. This assists in guaranteeing that the game delivered to the consumer is as much as possible bug-free.

 6. Mitigating the Errors or Bugs

All the errors are kept as a record, so it is simpler for the testers and software developers to execute their next action plan. If a blocker problem is found, this bug is discussed by the whole QA team in cooperation with the game development team.

Types of Game Testing

One-third of the world’s populace is addicted to gaming apps. So you need to ensure every new game release is effectively tested. Various types of game testing are crucial in this regard.

1. Functionality Testing

Functional Testing examines whether the gaming app functions as per the predefined requirements. This means all major key functions, such as Scorecard, Game Algorithm, Player Login, Gaming backgrounds, game’s graphics, content, etc., are working as expected. 

The test cases are designed based on distinct possible real-time scenarios, which test several functions right, from the basic to advanced ones. 

Functionality tests have benefits over in-game testing:

• Assist in validating the game’s performance.
• You can ensure that the game performs as per the needed document.
• Vital aspects that assist in user engagement, like visuals, audio, graphics, and texts, can be verified.
• The network issues, installation procedure, etc. can also be verified and resolved.

Automate your Functional Testing

2. Compatibility Testing

Thinking about compatibility problems is another concern for expert game testing platforms as it is vital to make the app compatible with several devices, such as mobile phones and PCs. Graphics troubleshooting, hardware or software, and timely detection are the crucial things that help users get a great gaming experience. Verifying the game’s compatibility on different gaming platforms can widen revenue generation.. 

• Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing helps determine the gaming app’s compatibility with a real device cloud platform on distinct browsers. 
• QAs can execute manual application testing on these devices or perform automated app tests via Appium. 
• They can leverage various debugging and testing options to execute tests, record and share outcomes, and mitigate errors in real-time.

Try Compatibility Testing

3. Regression Testing

Regression Test is yet another type of testing that testers perform on a gaming app or website to recheck the complete functions and Interface from scratch. It also highlights if any bugs or flaws display while testing.  So, whenever new lines of code or features are added to the gaming app, regression testing helps eradicate all forms of bugs to leak into production.

Advantages:

• Re-run the previously conducted testing
• Helps in comparing the earlier results with existing results and detects errors, if any
• Crucial to QA (Quality Control)
• Saves time by detecting errors at the initial phase

4. Localization Testing

Localization testing is a significant concept when it comes to targeting the game for international markets. From game content, and titles to texts, you must test everything on real gadgets. It must be easily readable by several users from various countries.

 It should be particular to the Arabic localization (Right-to-Left text support, MENA region (Middle East/North Africa), Bi-directional displays), Pseudo-localization testing, and local time/date, currency, address formats, and local requirements. 

5. Security Testing

It is a powerful game testing method that scrutinizes security issues in the gaming app. It also analyzes the threat of app hackers, viruses, and unauthorized access to sensitive data. The critical reason to get security testing is that 3rd party codes may contain bugs that need to be eliminated on time. Or else, it can result in crashing issues or hacking by hackers.

6. Performance & Load Testing

This type of testing determines your app’s constancy and reaction under a precise workload. It has various attributes under it:

• Load Testing
• Stress Testing
• Stability Testing
• Volume Testing
• Concurrency Testing 

BrowserStack’s real-device cloud enables QAs to implement performance testing on real-time browsers, devices, and platforms to guarantee optimal performance via rigorous testing. 

The Future of Game Testing

Earlier game testing was just restricted to teams that were exclusively dependent upon manual testing to evaluate the stability of a gaming site or app. But a fresh trend of automated game tests has progressed over the past few decades. 

• QA teams have found a whole new prospect to facilitate a rapid testing and deployment cycle using automated platforms like BrowserStack
• It saves time and gives accurate results even for QA engineers who are into manual testing.
• It’s simple – if the game doesn’t work as the gamers expected, they will be faster enough to uninstall the game and shift to another.

Hence, testing a gaming website is crucial for testers to make certain the performance and browser compatibility of the gaming app/ site on multiple platforms by testing and resolving the bugs.