For games
Get your game tested
The same assessment, plus a pass that plays it. A game fails in ways a to-do application does not, and the general checks do not go looking for them: the loading bar that never finishes, the forty megabytes before anything happens, the controls no finger can reach, the save that quietly disappears.
This is not a review
We do not say whether your game is any good. Not fun, not original, not pretty, not well balanced. Those are matters of taste, nobody can evidence them, and an assessment that started handing out opinions on them would be worth less on everything else it says. What you get is a record of how the thing behaves when somebody opens it.
- Whether the game is fun.
- Whether it is original, or how it compares to anything else.
- Whether the art, music or writing is good.
- Whether the difficulty or the pacing is right.
- Whether anybody will play it.
- Multiplayer behaviour beyond what a single client can show, and anti-cheat.
What the game pass looks at
Does it become playable at all
Not whether the page loads — whether it reaches a state where input does something. A loading bar that never finishes, a black canvas, a start button that does nothing. This is the single most common way a game built quickly fails, and a check that only asks whether the server answered sees none of it.
What it downloads before you can play
Time from opening the link to playable, and the bytes it took. Authors rarely notice this: their own browser cached everything on the first run, so the version they test is not the version anybody else gets.
Whether it works on a phone
At a 360-pixel-wide viewport, with touch. Does the canvas scale, are there controls a finger can use, is anything required that only a keyboard can do. Being desktop-only is not a defect. Being desktop-only and saying nothing is.
Whether progress survives
Reload mid-play. If there is a score, a level or a save, is it still there — and still there after a second reload. Silent save loss is only ever discovered by a player who has already lost something.
What happens in a background tab
Switch away and back. Does it pause, keep running, or return broken. A game that runs its loop at full rate in a tab nobody is looking at is spending somebody else’s battery.
Errors during play, not only on load
Console errors that appear on the third input rather than the first are the ones that reach players. So we play for a while rather than loading the page and leaving.
Scored against the same rubric
A game is not marked on a different scale. Everything found here is scored against the same published rubric as every other assessment — a game that never becomes playable fails the criterion about a primary journey completing, exactly as an application that never completes its own does. There is no separate game score, no game badge, and no easier pass mark.
A few things specific to games — age ratings, purchase disclosure, which input devices are supported — have no criterion in the rubric version we publish today. They are recorded as observations and named as unscored, rather than folded into the nearest criterion that almost fits.
Before anything runs
You prove you are entitled to authorise testing of the game, and you say what is in scope. Nothing is opened before that — not for a game, not for anything. The whole sequence is written out here.