Your Player Experience (Px) Research Partner
From gameplay feel to market fit, we bring clarity to every decision by showing how players perceive your game and where design, UX, or positioning needs improvement through playtesting, UX research, and market insights.
Solutions Built Around
Real Player Experience
From the first onboarding click to the D7 decision to return, every beat of your game shapes how players experience your game.
Whether you are in Prototype → Beta → Soft Launch → Live Ops, each stage of game development brings its own questions, and each question needs the right lens.
Before You Build
Validate the Fantasy. Prove the Concept.
- Is the game concept clear?
- Does the core mechanic land?
- Would players even try this?
- Is the title ready to scale, publish or pitch?
Perfect when you need proof that your concept is worth making or pitching.
Shaping the Core Experience
Tune the Feel. Fix the Friction.
- Does onboarding make sense?
- Does the core loop feel good?
- Do controls, pacing and feedback actually work for new players?
Perfect when you're tuning the feel and flow of the game.
When Players Stay or Drop
Understand Retention - Not Guess.
- Which early beats hook them?
- Where does motivation stall?
- Does your economy feel fair or fatiguing?
Perfect when you need retention clarity, not guesswork.
Audience, Competition and Growth
Know Your Players. Know Your Space.
- Who is this game truly for?
- How do you stack up in your genre?
- What do competitors do better, worse, or differently?
Perfect when you need to define direction and opportunity.
A Complete Research Framework for Measuring and Improving Player Experience
Concept Validation
Validate your idea before you build.
Funding Readiness
Convert creative ambition into funding momentum.
Publisher Readiness Package
De-risk your publishing decisions with real player data.
Investment Opportunity Assessment
Measure creative potential with investment confidence.
Lysto's Concept Validation Study
Helps you understand whether your game idea genuinely resonates with players before you commit to full production. Early alignment between creative direction and audience expectations is one of the strongest predictors of success, so this study examines whether your theme, premise, or core mechanic generates curiosity and clarity. Players are exposed to early materials such as concept decks, visuals, written descriptions, or trailers, allowing you to capture authentic reactions to appeal and originality.
You will learn
- Whether the concept sparks a genuine interest to play
- How clearly players grasp the theme and core gameplay premise
- Which elements stand out or fall flat
- Where your concept sits within current genre trends and competing titles
- Which player types does your concept attract, and what motivates their interest
Recommended:
When you are in pre-production or early development, you need confidence before greenlighting or pitching.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Lysto's AI analyzes player feedback to track sentiment throughout gameplay sessions.
Our AI automatically tags emotional reactions such as confusion bursts, frustration spikes, delight, and "aha" moments, linking each to exact timestamps in the recording. This allows teams to understand not just what players did, but how they felt at specific moments during the experience.
At the level of an individual gameplay session, sentiment tracking provides a clear view of each player's emotional journey through the game. At the entire playtest level, the AI surfaces sentiment patterns across all sessions, showing where positive or negative reactions occurred most frequently and whether issues were systemic or isolated.
This sentiment data enables teams to identify what resonates with players and what needs adjustment before making design decisions.
Lysto's complete playtesting suite is designed to support game studios across the entire development journey.
During pre-production, studios can use Concept Testing to evaluate early game ideas before development begins. Using simple assets like slide decks, videos, or prototypes, teams can validate themes, mechanics, and player interest to understand what to build before committing resources to production.
Once development is underway, studios can run Single-Session, Multi-Session or Longitudinal Playtests, to capture FTUE, understand learning curves and study engagement patterns. For deeper qualitative insights, Moderated Playtests provide live observation and real-time interaction, allowing moderators to explore player motivations, clarify confusion, and investigate complex mechanics as gameplay happens.
After launch or during live operations, studios can continue using Lysto's playtesting services to test new content, balance changes, events, or feature updates with targeted player groups. This approach works similarly to traditional beta testing workflows, allowing teams to gather structured feedback and validate updates before rolling them out to the full player base.
Lysto's Px Platform enables studios throughout a game's development journey, whether testing a concept, capturing FTUE with a vertical slice, refining alpha and beta builds before launch, or balancing games through live ops.
Studios should use concept testing when they need to validate ideas before committing to development, rather than testing gameplay that already exists.
Concept testing is best suited for pre-production, when exploring new IPs, deciding between multiple creative directions, or evaluating features, art styles, monetization ideas, or themes before building core systems. At this stage, no playable build is required. Studios can test using simple assets like slide decks, videos, prototypes, concept art, or visual mockups to gauge player interest, expectations, and appeal.
This approach helps studios make informed creative decisions early, reduce risk, and avoid investing time and resources into concepts that may not resonate with their target audience.
Competitor playtesting involves running playtests on games made by competing studios, allowing your team to understand how players experience these titles in your genre or market.
This type of playtesting helps studios identify what works well in competitor games, where players encounter friction, what features drive engagement, and how your own game compares in terms of onboarding, difficulty, progression, or monetization.
By observing real player behaviour and reactions to competitor titles, teams can make more informed design decisions, validate assumptions about market expectations, and identify opportunities to differentiate their own games.
Need a Custom Solution?
Looking for something beyond our standard solutions?
Get in touch, we'll create a customised solution just for you.