Difficulty aspects of a game vary with game design and core gameplay. All users of the same game are not equally efficient in playing the game. Play testing reveals the difficulty faced by users while playing the game.

Game balancing is improvised after collecting this data from the play testing result. This has a direct impact on game polishing.

This section typically reveals the use of gameplay controls by users. For example, it reveals whether a gameplay mechanism supports few gameplay controls such as swiping, tapping on different buttons, choosing options, and so on. The developer collects data on all of these during play testing. Even the reaction time of each action may be considered.

Depending on this data, the developer can have an idea of the ease of game control. Whether the user can use the control properly or not determines the success of the game. Sometimes, developers change the game control if they encounter a serious issue with regard to user actions.

All the user actions during UI browsing are recorded during the play testing phase. The UI flow and navigation style of the game are validated throughout this process. Sometimes, a UI section may be overlooked by the user. It is very difficult for developers to identify such UI sections from a user's point of view, although developers can easily browse those segments as they themselves have implemented those UI sections. Such cases indicate that the section of UI that is overlooked by a decent number of users is not highlighted enough by any means.

There may be several sections in the UI that are not a direct part of the main game flow, such as the leaderboard, offer wall, achievements, help, settings, IAP screens, secondary game mode, and so on. If a user does not visit such UI sections for a long period of time, which cannot be predicted by the developer, then the developer may choose to change the UI style or find out an alternate solution. The success of metagames mostly depends on this kind of polishing. Game monetization can also be improved a lot.

There are several game monetization models available. The basic three types are premium, free, and freemium. Developers adopt any model for the game to generate revenue.

As the name suggests, premium games are basically paid games. This means the full game is bought by the user in the first instance. So, in this case the user does not need to pay while playing. A free game is completely free to play and has no provision for paying to gain any advantage while playing. The developer can plan revenue through game advertising. User actions and behavior during gameplay can help place advertisements strategically. Users have an option to pay after starting to play the game in the case of the freemium model. The developer designs the metagame to make users pay for the game to gain advantage or increase game progression speed.

In the play testing stage, the developer monitors users when they are paying for the game. In the freemium model, the developer defines stages where the user should pay to progress faster or more smoothly. This plan is validated through play testing to project future revenue.

As we have already discussed previously, from the optimization point of view, smooth gameplay is one of the major segments of game polishing. Initial testing is carried out on a few restricted devices. However, in the case of play testing, it is much more reliable to focus on real-time scenarios with a real device to validate smooth gameplay. However, a variety of hardware configurations are available on Android. The developer must decide the test configuration and set the benchmark before play testing.

The developer can take note of real-time FPS, crashes, and other performance data through play testing. The game is then further optimized to achieve target playability.

Not each and every game is easily understandable. It is a proven and common behavior of users that they do not pay attention to a separate game instruction section to understand the game. Instead, they directly jump into the gameplay. Hence, most of the time, it takes a considerable amount of time for a normal user to understand the gameplay.

Some developers use an interactive tutorial to help users understand game controls, gameplay, and game objective. Sometimes, it is mandatory to finish the interactive tutorial to continue playing the game. This is the best possible solution to the problem.

However, there are several ways to design the interactive tutorial. The game might not be understood through a poorly designed tutorial. It is not always possible to predict the time taken by the user to adopt to the gameplay. Thus, it becomes very important to know whether the user understands the game within the planned time or not through play testing. This has a great impact on user retention.

User retention prediction is directly associated with predicting the game revenue, which signifies the commercial success of the game. If a user plays the game for the first time and never comes back, it means the user is not retained. User retention has a few segments: daily retention, weekly retention, monthly retention, and so on.

During the play test phase, developers count the number of users who are playing the game repeatedly and the number of users who left the game. Developers even collect data about the time and the specific point in the game where the user left it. This may reveal an issue with the game model. This issue can be rectified to retain more users.