How to approach marketability for your mobile games?

How to approach marketability for your mobile games? Do you go full-blown scientific within current commercial sentiment, approach it differently with more research-based means, or through some other means and methods? 🎯

Overall there are many schools on this, whilst I’ve recently been part of myself on these two:

1. Very scientific process from concept and marketability testing to proving marketability first – followed by product as quickly as possible, at the earliest stage possible. 🧪
– Aiming for good marketability through e.g., intuitive and understandable mechanics with e.g., a mix of satisfying, skill-requiring, entertaining, and emotional appeals; on top of which investing further into the product once marketability is nailed.

2. Very product/market/audience/competitor/USPs/etc. -led approach with a thorough understanding of everything and tailoring theses-honoring games and messages and Ads/creatives out of that for the players. 🎮
– Aiming for an attractive premise and promise of a game, by honoring built theses, which results (hopefully) in both marketable and well-performing products at the first market entry.

The first is more suited e.g., HyperCasual / HybridCasual games, and the like, whilst the second is more, within the current commercial sentiment, suited for Casual Games, Midcore Games, and further. Of course, e.g., Hybrid Casuals can still definitely benefit from 2nd point, as they get further – but here top of the funnel approach seems to be pretty standard nowadays given current commercial sentiment in the industry. Casual, mid-core, etc. could also benefit, to some extent, from 1st point, but overall the longer you develop such a type of a game, the more you’ll be burning your findings (/”golden cohorts”) from a scientific approach to some extend, as consumer trends, taste, etc. tends to evolve; which is crucial to understand if you’re mixing the approaches — which needs thorough understanding and further research on how you build your game so that the outcome is still engaging and attractive for both your marketability as well as product performance. 💡

Hope these are useful to to know. And, anyhow, super interested to hear how nowadays folks operate on this end⁉️