Are you looking for an advantage in today’s mobile app and gaming market? You aren’t the only one. As the cost of acquiring new users continues to climb, mobile gaming and app developers have been locked in a competition to gain an edge. These once burgeoning categories have matured. In the case of gaming, the field is so crowded now that most trope, theme, and mechanic combinations have been tried.

As a result, the competition has gone from experience innovation to audience understanding. The better you understand your audience, the better you can market to and tailor your experience to resonate with them.

For the most part, this understanding has centered around behavioral data. In this field, the analytics tool Data.ai has emerged as a clear winner, adopted my the majority of mobile gaming studios. But if the data this service offers is so powerful, why are so many mobile games failing?

In this article, we’ll compare Data.ai and the behavioral data they offer to Solsten, an audience intelligence platform offering a groundbreaking new data set for mobile gaming studios — psychological data. While behavioral analytics tools like Data.ai provide a crucial rearview mirror, psychological insights from Solsten illuminate the road ahead. Which is the better data set for gaming studios looking to beat the competition? Let’s dive in.

The Mobile Engagement Challenge

With over five million apps in the app stores and more launching each day, capturing and keeping user attention has never been more difficult. In gaming, the challenge is even more pronounced — 83% of mobile games fail within three years of launch, and 43% are canceled during development. Even armed with mountains of behavioral data, product and marketing teams struggle to stand out and drive lasting engagement.

The reason is that while behavioral data shows you what users do, it doesn’t show you why they do it. And in a market where every competitor can access the same behavioral insights, the key to differentiation lies in uncovering the deeper psychological drivers that shape user decisions and loyalty.

Behavior and what people did only tells you the past. It’s a great place to start. However, it provides zero indication of where people and audiences are going. You need psychology to do that. Remember, behavior tells you what happened, psychology tells you what will likely happen. When you build new games or apps, you are given the task of understanding an audience or market — not building to what already exists, but to what will be. If you build what already exists, you’re building what the market already has.

Data.ai: The Rearview Mirror

Data.ai has emerged as a beacon for businesses in the gaming and app space to navigate the complexities of game and app performance metrics, user behavior analytics, and competitive benchmarking. They have become the gold standard for understanding who the completion is and what types of features are succeeding in their experiences.

Data.ai excels at showing you what users have done. Their platform integrates data from millions of apps and games to provide insights on downloads, usage, engagement, and monetization trends. You can benchmark against competitors, identify high-performing features and creatives, and track market shifts.

This rearview mirror perspective is essential for understanding the current state of play. However, when it comes to making future hit experiences, looking backward has limitations. While competitive analysis a key first step in understanding the space you exist in or want to build in, Data.ai stops short of revealing the why behind user behaviors. Why do certain features resonate with your audience? Why do some marketing messages and creatives drive more engagement than others? What new IP or art and theme are going to lead your experience to the best possible outcome?

Ultimately, analyzing past behavior can optimize existing approaches, but often leads to derivative “me too” products that struggle to make a unique impact.

Solsten: Illuminating the Road Ahead

Solsten picks up where Data.ai leaves off by revealing the personality traits, motivations, and emotional triggers that drive your audience. Solsten’s AI-powered platform goes beyond behavioral data to uncover psychological insights that explain the why behind behavior.

By understanding user psychology, you can create and improve experiences to resonate on a deeper level. Solsten empowers you to:

Drive Personalized Engagement Through Psychological Profiling

Solsten dives into the psychological makeup of your audience, allowing for a level of personalization that goes far beyond basic segmentation. This personalized approach ensures that marketing messages and product features are not just seen but felt, fostering a deeper emotional connection with the brand and experience. It’s this connection that can dramatically improve engagement rates and drive long-term retention.

Get targeted recommendations for improving user retention across different segments or personas.

Optimize Marketing Spend and Acquire Users

In the crowded digital marketplace, acquiring new users is not just about visibility; it’s about making an immediate impact. Solsten’s insights into audience psychology can inform not only retention strategies but also acquisition efforts. By understanding the psychological profile of potential users, companies can create marketing campaigns that attract and convert prospects more effectively and precisely — helping to optimize marketing spend efficiently across all channels and campaigns.

Generate New Revenue With Compelling Creatives

Capturing the attention of your ideal audience is more challenging than ever. The rising data privacy movement makes it more difficult than ever to measure what campaign your users engage with — and why. Creative optimization helps. Solsten approaches creative optimization through an audience-first approach to generating ad creative, focusing on the creative strategy and concepting phase of creative.

Instead of needing to test different creative repeatedly, Solsten provides detailed psychological data on your game’s audience, your competition’s audience, and adjacent audiences such as genre-specific or affinity-driven audiences. This data lets you deeply understand the intrinsic motivations and communication preferences of these target audiences, giving you a powerful base to build new creative concepts from that will more likely result in conversion right from the start.

Maximize Audience Lifetime Value Efficiently

Solsten allows you to deepen user and player loyalty and engagement by uncovering their core values and priorities, and designing your product to match. From marketing and FTUE to mechanics and gameplay, studios can create a meaningful journey based on the psychology of their most valuable players that will keep them retained to D30 and beyond — turning first-time users into long-term fans.

Prioritize Features for Audience Growth and Validate Product-Market Fit

With insights into the intrinsic motivations of users, Solsten enables product teams to innovate with confidence. Features can be designed or tweaked to align with what truly matters to users, increasing the likelihood of adoption and satisfaction.

Whether you’re aiming to deeply understand your live audience or look at a future audience, Solsten’s predictive capabilities allow studios to anticipate how new features will be received, minimizing the risk of costly missteps in the development process.

The Winning Combination

The most successful apps and games use Data.ai and Solsten together, combining the “what” of behavioral data with the “why” of psychology.

Data.ai is the rearview mirror showing you what’s behind you. Solsten illuminates optimal path forward based on a deep understanding of your audience’s minds. Integrating both creates a powerful toolkit to elevate your user acquisition, engagement, and monetization efforts.

Imagine being able to target high-value player personas with pin-point precision, welcome them with an emotionally resonant onboarding, and then retain them with gameplay and live ops tailored to their personality profile. That’s the power Solsten unlocks.

Get Started with Solsten

For leading apps and games, psychological insights from Solsten have become an essential complement to traditional behavioral analytics. The dual lenses of past performance and future motivations provide an unbeatable blueprint for audience engagement and growth.

While Data.ai offers critical insights into the behavior and preferences of mobile game players and app users, Solsten adds a crucial layer of understanding by diving into the psychological drivers of those behaviors. For companies aiming to not just compete but lead in their domain, the combination of Data.ai’s analytical strengths with Solsten’s psychological insights offers a comprehensive, 360-degree view of their audience, telling you what your audience did, does, and will do.

This holistic approach is not merely an enhancement to your strategy; it’s a transformative shift towards creating more meaningful, engaging, and successful digital experiences. In the mission to improve retention, engagement, and user acquisition, using Solsten alongside Data.ai is not just a strategic move — it’s a competitive necessity.

If you’re ready to go beyond surface-level data to uncover the deeper drivers of your audience, we’re here to help.