May

Focused on game development 
This shift allowed us to dive deep into the market's specifics and needs, thus providing a ground for all the positive methodological changes that followed. After testing gaming content, it’s clear that our tech was made for games!

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June

Launched R&D with top clients
Curious clients pushed us to innovate, asking for tests beyond standard processes — like evaluating how playable ads after video content impact install rates. These insights became the foundation for refining and improving our methodologies.

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July

Enhanced arousal, our key metric
We identified and confirmed the correlation between creative performance metrics and audience emotional arousal patterns.

Revamped ASO analysis
We tripled the testing speed and enriched our reports with a comprehensive set of valuable metrics.

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August

Boosted heatmap accuracy by 78%
Heatmaps reveal where viewers focus their attention during emotional moments. With this significant improvement, we’re proud to say our solution is now among the best on the market!

Redefined playtesting methodology with emotional response data
Our game analysis methodology now provides a valid assessment of both unconscious emotional reactions and conscious player perceptions. This dual approach ensures objective insights that are truly valuable for game developers.

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September

Testing for playable ads is available
Playable ads are one of the popular formats for mobile game advertising today. We’ve developed a specialized methodology to test and optimize their performance.

Introduced the Valence metric
Valence, which reflects the positive or negative direction of emotions, is now part of our analysis. This powerful metric enhances the insights we provide to our partners, making them even more detailed.

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October

Developed a methodology for testing creative funnels
We created a comprehensive testing approach for creative funnels, covering the entire journey: game → video/playable → end card → store. This enables us to analyze the consumer’s ad experience in conditions similar to real ad networks, identifying potential conversion points and drop-off areas.

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November

Introduced the Attention metric
Another breakthrough in our methodology! This metric enables valid evaluation of hook effectiveness, focusing not just on audience arousal but also on sustained attention, providing deeper insights into content engagement.

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December

Soft-launched the Sensemitter Platform
Starting next year, users will be able to independently set up creative or game tests, launch them, and gain valuable insights — all in one seamless platform.

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Looking Ahead

2024 has been a year of progress, innovation, and transformation. As we gear up for 2025, we’re excited to further enhance our technology, introduce more advanced testing capabilities, helping our partners create gaming experiences that truly resonate with the players worldwide. 

Contact us to explore the new ways of content analysis.

Most developers know how to study best practices from competitors and top-grossing games, but simply copying successful mechanics doesn’t always work. Game analytics tools often can’t answer the key question of why players behave a certain way. By turning to neuroscience and behavioral psychology, developers can gain a deeper understanding of players and their needs. This goes beyond just creating player profiles or segmenting the audience by behavior patterns.

In this article, Bogdan Baranovskiy, a specialist in UX research and psychology, explores the psychological and neurobiological factors behind player motivation and how first impressions impact long-term engagement. His insights are based on our observations from testing conducted over the past six months.

Why do people play games?

There are numerous theories and studies on player motivations. If you’re interested in understanding which players are likely to play your games, Nick Yee's research over the past decade is an excellent resource. However, we aim to take a closer, more focused look at the First-Time User Experience — ranging from the first few minutes to several hours of gameplay, depending on whether the game is casual or core.

Several psychological theories can help us understand early player interactions, especially before players fully discover action-oriented game features. Let’s focus on two of the most useful motivation theories, in my view, due to their broad psychological principles that exist both in real life and in games.

Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation is an internal drive fueled by personal interest, curiosity, or the satisfaction of completing a task. For example, a person might read a book simply because they enjoy learning.

Extrinsic motivation, in contrast, is driven by external rewards or pressures. People engage in activities to gain rewards or avoid negative outcomes. For example, someone might study to earn good grades or to avoid failing a course.

Both types of motivation can engage a person, but extrinsic motivation should not be emphasized in the first-time experience and should generally play a limited role throughout gameplay. Why?

Due to the “overjustification effect”, where overreliance on external rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation. For example, someone who writes for personal enjoyment may lose interest if they start receiving monetary rewards or excessive praise. The activity shifts from being personally fulfilling to meeting external expectations, reducing their internal drive. While this can be sustainable for those who earn a living through their activity, regular players aren’t being paid to play. Losing interest will simply lead to player drop-off — which brings us to an important point.

Players often engage with a game because it’s genuinely enjoyable, not just for external rewards. Early interactions should offer a sense of fun, exploration, and curiosity to tap into this intrinsic motivation.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT)

Based on the Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is a psychological framework that explains human motivation by focusing on three fundamental needs, players are looking for:

• Autonomy: the sense of having free choice and control over actions within the game’s world or mechanics.
  
• Relatedness: the feeling of connection to the game world or community. In multiplayer games, this connection is easier to see (though not always easy to achieve). At the same time, single-player games can also foster relatedness through rich storytelling or by creating a sense of immersion in the game world and community.
  An interesting fact: players can now feel connected with a game content simply by watching short videos on socials or live streams of others playing. This trend enhances relatedness through subtle, non-intrusive ads.
  
• Competence: the sense of being challenged by the gameplay, at the same time being able to complete it (that is also the key characteristic of Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory).

So why do players play games?
To have fun and experience the emotions that arise when their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are met, fueling their internal drive to engage and enjoy the game.

The role of arousal in an early stage of game engagement

How can we ensure we create an immersive, breathtaking experience that aligns with players' needs and supports intrinsic motivation?

In the past, understanding player reactions and engagement could only be done through methods like questionnaires, Q&A sessions, or interviews that took place after players finished the game. While these methods provided some insights, they had a major drawback: without real-time evaluation, the data often lost accuracy. Players might forget specific details or their emotional responses might change, making it harder to get a true picture of their in-game experience.

While there are some effective measurement methods available, they’re still quite complex for evaluating the game experience as a whole.

The good news is that modern technology offers a new approach. By using emotion recognition technologies to measure arousal and Central Nervous System activation, we can gather per-second data on player engagement — and no questionnaires needed.

That is what we do at Sensemitter, where we came up with a single metric, giving it a simple and straightforward name — arousal.

What is the arousal? In psychological terms, it is a state of alertness and engagement with stimuli. 

Arousal is the level of emotional engagement of the audience during interaction with content. Players' arousal is vital for immersion, gauging how effectively it captivates and sustains players' attention.

This state has physiological markers, such as pupil size, heart rate, and facial expressions, which indicate the level of engagement with the game. Essentially, it reflects the game’s ability to impact players’ emotions and capture their attention during gameplay.

If arousal shows a rising trend, it indicates that the game is successfully capturing players’ interest and supporting the desire to keep playing.

Otherwise, if the arousal trend decreases, it indicates that players are losing interest and may soon leave the game or event. That can sound like a magical metric but we don’t share plain theory, all further information is gathered from games of different genres and can be implemented from hyper-casual to hardcore games.

Here are a few important points to note about an arousal level:

• Arousal levels vary across game genres, but they generally rise when players are engaged and decrease when they face difficulties or the game becomes boring. This trend holds true for shooters, hidden object games, and match-three games alike.
  
• Arousal can grow fast during certain interactions, especially when players feel frustrated and express their emotions. It’s important to keep the context in mind and ensure there are no rises where they shouldn’t be. This makes an arousal level highly effective for identifying these moments, second by second, throughout the entire tested flow.
  
• People can’t maintain a high level of activation and focused attention for extended periods. On average, this focus lasts 20 to 40 minutes, depending on task difficulty. It’s important to provide breaks or remember that any information introduced around the 40-minute mark may be forgotten later without reminders.
  
• Maintaining a consistent level of arousal is easier than trying to restore it after a significant drop.
  
• Ads can distract the player experience, causing a significant drop in arousal and engagement. Delaying ads and offers for a few sessions can lead to better immersion, improved retention, and, from a long-term perspective, increased sales — allowing players to fully engage with the game before feeling motivated to make purchases.

What factors in games raise arousal levels?

While this list isn’t complete, our key observations across various games and genres align closely with the psychological theories we discussed earlier.

Challenge and Competition:

• The Flow state, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, connects closely with arousal levels in games. When a game feels too difficult, players lose interest because they think they have little chance of succeeding. A similar drop in interest happens when the game feels too easy, with not enough challenge to keep them engaged. By tracking players' arousal at these key moments, we can identify exactly when engagement shifts. This approach provides a direct way to monitor player engagement, rather than relying only on indirect measures.
  
• Challenge is a key element across all game genres, not just in Souls-like or PvP games. The real difference lies in finding the right difficulty level to match players’ interests and skill levels. Arousal levels and positive emotions play the same role across genres, as players are naturally drawn to games that provide their ideal level of challenge — whether it’s a hyper-casual mobile game or a new Souls-like title for consoles and PC.

Learning new mechanics:

• In every game we’ve tested, we observe a similar trend: tutorials and new mechanics boost arousal levels when introduced and while players are learning them. From a neuropsychological perspective, this is linked to dopamine release, as well as activation of the Reticular Activating System (RAS) and amygdala — key players in memory, engagement, and skill learning, which are essential for positive emotions. Dopamine, released during the learning process, acts as a reward signal, reinforcing behavior and motivating continued engagement with new material.
  
• Implementing new mechanics is common across all game genres — from character development in RPGs to new facilities in city-builders. And it was brilliantly executed in one of 2021’s most beloved games, It Takes Two, which won both Game of the Year and Best Family Game awards. This game tackled a major challenge for game designers: making gameplay enjoyable for both newcomers and experienced players. It Takes Two introduces a fresh mechanic in every location for players to learn and master while adding competitive minigames with entirely different gameplay along the way.

Novelty and Exploration:

• Arousal and engagement can be heightened through new or unexpected elements that introduce surprise, mystery, or exploration. Otherwise, when a game becomes too predictable, players may lose interest. But how does this loss of interest work?
  When a goal becomes predictable, our brain prepares for dopamine, and our body produces it even before the goal is achieved, which dilutes the ‘dopamine hit’ into smaller shots. Instead of a strong emotional response and heightened engagement with new and unfamiliar game objectives, this produces a milder sense of satisfaction. While this may suffice for some gamers, others aim for more powerful sense of success.
  
• Novelty and exploration don’t necessarily make Open World games better or more profitable. The same sense of discovery can be achieved through story, narrative twists, or even deep lore. Making players feel like part of the world, with the ability to make impactful decisions and encounter surprises, is key. For example, in Ghost of Tsushima, players first encounter foxes as they guide them to hidden shrines, offering a sense of mystery and delight. This initial interaction feels fresh and engaging, creating a bond between the player and the game world. However, as players repeatedly follow foxes to similar shrines, the experience becomes predictable, and the excitement fades over time.
  Similarly, in mobile games like Genshin Impact, early exploration of new areas and characters creates excitement, but repetitive tasks can reduce engagement if not refreshed with new content (really new, not the same predictable mechanics).

Social Interaction:

• It’s no secret that social elements can boost arousal. What’s often overlooked is that these social effects don’t only occur through direct in-game interactions. They also happen outside the game. Feeling like part of a community is a powerful factor that should be considered when designing achievements and assessing potential risks.
  
• A lot of games support community-building through features like competitions, clans, leaderboards, chats, and forums. Clash Royale and Brawl Stars, for example, have created strong communities by encouraging players to join clans and compete together. However, if you succeed in building a community, it’s essential to keep social group dynamics in mind.

Narrative and Emotions:

• Neuroimaging studies show that watching or interacting with characters activates the same brain regions involved in our own emotional experiences. In essence, humans respond to digital experiences much like real-life situations and can even identify with characters. This bond enhances engagement with the game and fosters a desire to return to those emotions.
  
• Story-driven games use this method to hook players. However, narrative can be added to almost any genre, creating the extra feel of progression or boosting the first session engagement.  This leads to an immediate emotional connection and encourages players to continue for the emotional payoff.

The Power of First Impressions

Successful games that hook players from the very first session achieve this not by simply replicating popular mechanics but by tapping into the psychological and neurobiological aspects that drive player motivation. By understanding intrinsic motivation and addressing the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, developers can significantly influence how players perceive and engage with their game.

At its core, people choose to play games to experience specific emotions and fulfill personal desires, not just to pass the time. Focusing on elements that elevate arousal — introducing meaningful challenges, offering opportunities for learning, providing novelty and exploration, fostering social interactions, and crafting compelling narratives — helps tap into the fundamental reasons players stay engaged. It is important to remember that maintaining a growing trend in arousal is essential, and it’s a key to retaining players — once arousal is lost, it’s much harder to regain.

At Sensemitter, we are actively exploring new ways to help developers understand and enhance player engagement through innovative technologies. Here, you will find our massive study on the mobile hit Royal Match, where the insights discussed in this article and demonstrate how a science-backed approach can elevate game design and retention over the long term.

Want to learn more about how Sensemitter can improve your game? Contact us via this link.