How to do a games UX competitor evaluation

A step-by-step competitor evaluation guide, and why you need to do one.

As designers, we’re often fighting existing assumptions about how a design should look from stakeholders, the team, and ourselves before we even get to start brainstorming.

Jumping straight into a design without checking those assumptions first can make things difficult later, but a competitor evaluation is one tool to help keep you on the right path.

Benefits of an evaluation

• See how your game compares. Knowing what areas of usability your game does better or worse at compared to your competitors should ideally be a factor when deciding what to improve, this can be especially relevant for a live title.
• Identify areas for conformity or innovation. If you see that all the competitor titles solve a design problem in the same way, should your design innovate or conform? The evaluation helps you understand the risks and opportunities.
• Check your own assumptions and memory. Even if you think you know exactly how a competitor’s game works, there’s no guarantee that the game hasn’t changed since you last played (especially for live titles), or that it works quite the same as you remember.
• Get the team or the stakeholders on the same page. I often find myself referencing these initial evaluations during feedback sessions when people are throwing around new ideas, or asking why we chose the direction we chose.

How to do an evaluation

Note: All the examples here are simplified hypotheticals for the sake of the article.

Step 1: Set your goal

A good goal will summarise the design task in a way that allows you to choose appropriate competitor titles. It will also direct your focus to the relevant aspects of the game so you can spend a couple of days on the task instead of a couple of months.

When writing a goal it helps to think about things like the purpose of the feature you’re working on, who your target audience is, or what your game’s point of difference is compared to other titles.

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Step 2: Choose your competitors

Choosing the right titles to compare against keeps your analysis relevant.

It’s also important to limit how many games you compare to avoid blowing the task out to something too costly and time-consuming. I usually aim for 3–5 titles.

Things to consider:

• Are there any household names in this genre? Or titles the rest of the team or stakeholders are already referencing?
• What platform is your title for? How is it played? (e.g. is it first person, top down, side-scrolling)
• What sort of price range are you targeting with your title? Are the competitors in a similar price range?
• How do the competitor titles describe themselves on their stores? (e.g. the steam store) Do they use keywords and tags that match the game you’re trying to make, or are they targeting a different audience?

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Step 3: Write your template

An evaluation template needs to be written up before we play those references to make sure we’re making notes of the right things, and answering useful questions.

Work backwards from your design goal to set up your template questions. In my example we’re comparing if and how the competitor games solve our “tool swapping” design challenge.

Things to consider in my example:

• Because we’re focusing on a specific aspect of the controls, I’ll also compare a control scheme overview to better understand the context of each game’s design.
• Our game focuses heavily on efficiency, so I also want to compare the cost of the player “messing up” using each system (e.g. does it take a long time to switch back? If they hit the wrong button can they ruin their task?)

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Step 4: Play the games

Now we’re at the stage that a lot of newbies might jump straight into — it’s time to play the competitor titles and fill out the evaluation template. Depending on your goals you might also take this a step further by running usability tests on each title.

I highly recommend recording your play sessions using OBS (or a similar software), then turning those recordings into notes for your template afterwards. Taking notes while you play can break the flow of the experience, especially if you’re looking at the learnability of something.

Tips while recording:

• I’ll say any thoughts I have out loud instead of stopping (and interrupting my flow) to write them down.
• For key moments or notes, I might quickly write down the timestamp to refer back to the video later.

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Step 5: Summarise

After playing the games and filling your evaluation template with all the relevant notes, you can now summarise your findings.

Things to consider in your summary:

• Is this summary only for yourself, or for the wider team? What information is going to be useful to them?
• Do the reference titles, in your view, solve the design challenge? Or is there room for a new idea?
• What are the pros and cons of each design? What aspects of each design do you want to learn from?
• Are there things that seem to be consistent/expected across all the reference titles?

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As with any design tool this is just one process to help your designs, and is best when combined with others. Referencing competitors is important for providing market context, but it’s also a creativity killer if that’s all you ever reference.