Mobile games have become increasingly high-stakes over the last few years. Successful games make billions, but most games launch to failure, and few get a second chance from either platforms or players. Most developers test their games in various ways, from individual playtest sessions to geo-locked launches in Canada and Australia. But many games still launch with poor retention, monetization, tech problems, or some combination of the three. What's going wrong? Kongregate has now put more than 20 games through test markets, learning valuable lessons along the way. At this year's Game Developers Conference, I gave a talk about creating the best test strategies, taking into account budget and schedule along with the benefits and pitfalls of various methods and the psychological traps that teams fall into as they evaluate results. The talk is illustrated by case studies and metrics from Kongregate's portfolio including AdVenture Capitalist, Spellstone, Raid Brigade and more. Effective Testing of Free-to-Play Games from emily_greer.

These are the slides from Anthony Pecorella's talk about idle games at GDC this year. Idle Chatter - GDC 2016 from Anthony Pecorella

Emily gave a talk at GDC this week sharing both numbers and lessons learned in our first year of publishing games on mobile, including how monetization differs between iOS and Android, problems and pitfalls with mobile data, and what's most important to success in mobile. Check out the slides here: GDC 2014 Core Games, Real Numbers: Going Cross-Platform from emily_greer

Anthony gave a talk at Casual Connect Kiev that rapidly went through some of the major lessons and design elements that Kongregate has learned over the years. It also pointed out a few differences that we have observed in games designed in Eastern Europe with an eye on how to improve some metrics for these talented developers. You can see the full talk here, posted by Casual Connect: If you want to flip through or download the slides, check them out below. F2P Design Crash Course (Casual Connect Kyiv 2013) from Kongregate More questions? Leave a comment!