In fact, one of our customers’ told that supporting just one more popular Asian device model can bring an additional $5 million of revenue during the lifetime of a game.Īlso many application binaries are massive (up to 3Gb) and games consume a lot of memory, CPU, GPU and battery – all this need to be accounted for so that the real end-user experience does not suffer due to physical realities of mobile devices.įinally, a majority of games utilize sensors or other HW features that are not consistent from one device to another and if this is left unchecked there will be nasty surprises down the road. Frame rates do matter a lot and with the richness and variety of mobile devices, every model counts.
#Automation game engines driver#
Secondly, performance is often a key driver for user experience and the real performance can only be observed on real hardware.
Without access to the object level information, the automation can only utilize X, Y clicks without much feedback or validation about the internal state of the game. This leads to the problem that all of the native mobile test automation frameworks are pretty useless with mobile games. What are those challenges to automating all testing aspects of those games? Firstly, a majority of games use direct screen access in form of OpenGL or ActiveX bypassing the OS level services. Customer lifetime value for each game is heavily dependent on additional content, user collaboration etc which means that everything has to work over several app updates, back-end updates over an extended period of time to recover the initial marketing investments. The mobile game segment is fiercely competitive and users have a short attention span. If you consider that significant portion of Google Play and App Store revenues are generated by mobile games, there is an absolute need to automate as many mobile game components as possible. This may sound difficult – especially when there are bazillion different device configurations where the game must run well. Let’s start by discussing a bit about mobile game testing in general. Testing mobile game means ensuring that it is running properly, it meets its all specific requirements and provides fantastic user experiences to gamers.