Unity’s Supersonic assesses how marketable mobile game prototypes will be

You can never tell how marketable a game prototype will be. Or can you? Unity’s Supersonic division has an update for its mobile game publishing tools that let developers assess how marketable their game prototypes will be.

Unity picked up Supersonic as a division when it acquired IronSource last year for $4.4 billion. Now Supersonic has an update that could game developers from wasting time on unpromising game prototypes.

The developers still have to create a full prototype that they can release in the market, perhaps a game with ten levels. Then Supersonic’s tools assess whether the prototype is marketable. Developers can test a number of prototypes at the same time to see which one gets the best results, said Nadav Ashkenazy,
general manager of Supersonic from Unity, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“Supersonic is working directly with more indie creators that are focused on creating the game and looking for a partner that will help them to make a great business out of this game,” Ashkenazy said. “One of the biggest things that we are changing is the ability to understand the marketability power of a prototype, based on a very minor investment.”

The update builds on Supersonic’s white box approach to publishing, giving hypercasual game developers increased access to data, insights and knowledge to help them make more informed decisions. This is another step forward for Unity’s end-to-end platform that provides game developers with a comprehensive set of tools for each stage of their development journey, Ashkenazy said.

Four of the key tools included in the update are Level Analytics, Crash Center, a Marketability Tool, and Wisdom Next SDK – all of which work to automate and simplify the publishing process, allowing developers to focus on building great games that will reach the right audience. Crash Center checks the health of a game when it comes to technical matters.

The Marketability Tool analyzes a game’s marketability across different channels (like Facebook, TikTok or Instagram) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – such as creatives win rate, placement and Cost Per Install – to better predict a game’s potential to reach and attract a meaningful audience.

Developers have full transparency into what did and didn’t work well, and why, so they can decide early on which titles they want to keep investing in and, eventually, launch.

“This latest Supersonic update will further ensure that mobile game developers have access to as much data transparency at their fingertips as they need so they have visibility into what’s working well in their game and what isn’t,” Ashkenazy said. “Ultimately, we want to give them the tools they need to make their games even better and bring their vision to life.”

Ashkenazy said that figuring out if a concept or game is marketable is a key stage in developing a game. But too often it’s based on guesswork.

If you want to upload five prototypes for testing, you can do so and get the results on which one is the best. Usually, that means the one where a trailer or demo goes viral.

“For every game out there, it has always been the tension and the equation between the marketability power and lifetime value of the customer,” he said. The latter refers to how much a customer will pay over the long term. “Marketability is somewhere between art and science. Why do millions of people see an ad and click on it? Why do they like this game?”

And so Supersonic is trying to find a way to make it more of a science. It’s available today. The company has tested the updated tech on more than 2,000 games already.

“What we try to do is to remove all the hassle of everything that is not related to the game creation,” Ashkenazy said.

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