Theme selection shapes the entire game experience and marketing approach, influencing player acquisition and retention rates. This experiment tests four distinct visual themes for Seaborne to identify which aesthetic direction best captures player interest and provides the strongest foundation for both gameplay and advertising creative development.

Here we can see the potential issue with testing similar-looking designs – there was some confusion between the Anime and Sunset style. This probably conflated the final results to some degree, so it would make sense to develop the testing plan further with better naming conventions or more differentiated designs. We correctly identified the Sunset winner, but better than that we have a reason why: the players liked that it showed potential for action. We could incorporate that feedback into our next iteration with the design team, and see if different colors or scenes better evoke that sense of adventure in the audience.

Rally strongly predicted theme preferences, but still over-compensates, going too hard on winning options. Sunset/Ships was correctly identified as the winner but overshot its popularity (66% vs 44%) while missing the Cartoon's limited level of appeal. Rally's high-conviction but spikily distributed predictions shows a trend that synthetic audiences tend to get things right, but with too much conviction.