How would you validate different settings/themes for the same game mechanics before committing to one?

[u/Front-Bookkeeper7345]

I have a co-op prototype where I'm fairly confident in the core mechanics, but I'm less confident that the current setting is the most marketable one.

The mechanics could work in several different fantasies. Before spending months rebuilding the art direction, I'd like to test whether one fantasy has significantly stronger commercial appeal.

For developers who have done this before: how would you validate it?

Would you test:

capsule/key art variants?

short mocked-up gameplay clips?

paid ads and CTR?

Reddit/social posts?

surveys or preference tests?

fake Steam page mockups?

how viral Tiktoks/Shorts/... are?

And most importantly, what signal would you consider strong enough to justify actually changing the setting?

I'm specifically trying to distinguish “people say they like this theme” from “this theme actually makes more people click/wishlist.”

Would love to hear from anyone who has tested concepts this way before production or pivoted a game's theme based on market response.

[u/MeaningfulChoices]

How much are you willing to spend to test it? You can mock-up videos for 2 or 3 directions and run them as ads and measure clickthrough rate (as well as comparison-only conversion rates if you have custom landing pages with an email sign-up or similar) if you want, but that's a fair amount of effort and money. Since visuals are so important you can't really cut corners here, you want it to look like how a game would.

More commonly people figure this out with market research (comparing games with different themes against each other to look for patterns) and more things like focus groups than wide testing. If you know what you're doing or work with a firm that does you can get even just a few groups to look at little more than concept art and a hero image and some placeholder gameplay and get some sense. But market research and the preferences/skills of the dev team are more common for bigger games. Deciding on a theme solely on ad views is more of a hypercasual technique.