The global prevalence and popularity of video gaming continue to rise, with games rapidly advancing in graphics, controls, storylines, and device hardware optimization. Today, video games span a wide range of platforms, including desktops, smartphones, tablets, consoles, virtual reality (VR) headsets, and even smartwatches. Despite platform differences, all games are designed to engage players and foster a positive player experience (PX), driven by diverse motivations. In this digital age, players frequently share feedback through star ratings and descriptive reviews, offering valuable insights into playability and PX. Analyzing this user-generated content is essential for understanding current trends and improving player-centric game design across platforms. This study focuses on smartphone games, motivated by the widespread global use of smartphones. We analyzed 4,595 player reviews from 289 smartphone games across 33 genres on Android and iOS platforms. Our three-step process involved: (1) collecting player reviews, (2) conducting binary sentiment analysis using both machine learning (ML) and lexicon-based approaches, and (3) performing thematic analysis on reviews classified by the best-performing sentiment analysis method. We found that the lexicon-based approach outperformed the machine learning approach, achieving an F1 score of 0.91 compared to the best performing ML model’s F1 score of 0.85. While the thematic analysis approach identified 23 playability and player experience factors grouped into four main categories: in-game advertisements (6 factors), sales and customer service (5 factors), technical issues (9 factors), and game design and gameplay (3 factors). Within the game design and gameplay category, we further identified a total of 34 sub-factors distributed across its three factors i.e., game design (3 sub-factors), gameplay (23 sub-factors), and players’ subjective perspectives (8 sub-factors). This study contributes to the fields of games user research, smartphone games, and player experience through analysis of reasonably large number of player reviews from a significant sample of smartphone games. Further, this work lays the groundwork for more specialized and in-depth research in smartphone gaming domain, thereby deepening our understanding of playability and player experience of smartphone games as well as advancing the notion for a platform-centric game design.

The assessment of software application usability typically relies on a predefined set of general principles known as heuristics. However, these heuristics are often used interchangeably to evaluate games across different platforms such as smartphones, tablets, and desktops, potentially leading to inconsistent or inaccurate evaluations. Hence, there is a notable absence of a standard platform-centric heuristics to evaluate games for a particular platform. In this paper, we address this gap by developing 144 smartphone game heuristics (SmGH), spanning across six categories and accounting for technical, non-technical, and gameplay aspects. Further, we compared our proposed SmGH with four mobile game heuristics published in the literature. The aim of the comparison was to identify the overlaps and differences between SmGH and the existing heuristics in mobile game literature. Lastly, we conducted a preliminarily assessment of the utility of SmGH using gameplay analysis of 5 popular smartphone games (from 2017 to 2021, having 4.5+ average rating and 100 M + downloads) and 12 recent smartphone games (released in 2022). We obtained two important findings. First, there is a limited overlap among various mobile game heuristics in the literature. The first finding highlights an important takeaway to establish a standard set of platform-specific heuristics in both game user research and the industry. Second, popular games tend to incorporate a larger proportion of heuristics compared to recently released games. The second finding provide insights into the number and distribution of heuristics across all six categories within smartphone games, which will be beneficial for future evaluations of new and unseen games using SmGH. The second finding also suggest that adherence to platform-centric game heuristics may contribute to a game’s popularity on a particular platform and could be a factor considered by game developers. This work contributes to the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and smartphone games by advancing our understanding and application of platform-centric game heuristics and highlights the significance of SmGH as a standard and reliable set of heuristics in the design and evaluation of smartphone games.