Solsten’s audience intelligence platform offers game developers unprecedented insights into player motivations, behaviors, and preferences through first-party psychological data. Using patented psychological clustering technology, Solsten is capable of assessing human cognition at scale, providing a powerful tool for game developers.
This article will guide you through the process of implementing Solsten’s Traits, from initial integration to extracting actionable insights that can transform your game development and marketing strategies.
The Value of Psychological Insights in Game Development
Solsten measures over 300 psychological traits including personality, values, intrinsic motivations, and socio-cultural attributes. By understanding these underlying motivations and preferences of your players, you can:
- Design more engaging gameplay mechanics
- Create more compelling narratives
- Optimize monetization strategies
- Significantly improve player acquisition and retention
- Truly personalize marketing creative
- Enhance overall player satisfaction
Solsten’s platform provides these insights through sophisticated psychological profiling, allowing you to make data-driven decisions throughout your game’s entire lifecycle, from concept to live operations.
The Integration Process
Integrating Solsten into your game’s ecosystem primarily involves implementing Solsten’s psychological assessment. The process is remarkably easy. Solsten provides you with an assessment link that is served to players via an in-game pop-up or interstitial. There’s no API or SDK necessary. It really is this simple to start collecting psychological data from your players.
Collecting and Processing Assessment Responses
Once integrated, Solsten begins collecting responses through the psychological assessment. This is an adaptive psychological assessment backed by an increasing item bank of validated questions.
Typically, 10% of the Daily Active Users (DAU) take the assessment within the first day in a clean and valid way. For games with at least 10k DAU, the assessment will be 95% representative at a 5% confidence interval of a population well over 1M of its ideal Audience.
The assessment is a closed-loop system, redirecting players back into the game upon completion. It is a scientific instrument that validly measures cognitive traits and removes bias from the data collection process, unlike traditional surveys that simply capture sentiment.
Solsten’s AI processes responses quickly, often providing initial insights within days of the assessment going live. However, for more robust and reliable insights, it’s recommended to run the assessment over a longer period to account for variations in player behavior and to build a more comprehensive psychological profile of your player base.
From Insight to Action: Practical Scenarios
To see how Solsten’s insights can be applied, here are a few scenarios:
Design New Game Features
A casual puzzle game publisher used Solsten’s insights to create “Crew Events” based on their players’ high altruism scores. Instead of establishing a leaderboard of solo players, Crew Events put players into teams so they could compete cooperatively, aligning with their psychological profile.
Optimize User Acquisition
Solsten’s persona data shows that your most engaged and high-LTV players share certain psychological characteristics. You can use this information to refine your user acquisition strategy, creating marketing campaigns that appeal to these traits and targeting platforms where users with similar profiles are likely to be found.
Improve Retention
Solsten’s insights indicate that players who churn early often score low in ‘sense of progression’ satisfaction. This could lead you to redesign your early game experience, introducing more frequent rewards or clearer progression milestones to keep new players engaged.
Measuring Impact and ROI
Solsten can help predict and understand the “why” behind your metrics, not just track them. To gauge the effectiveness of your Solsten implementation, consider tracking the following KPIs:
- Player engagement metrics (session length, frequency)
- Retention rates (D1, D7, D30, D180)
- Monetization metrics (ARPDAU, conversion rates)
- User acquisition efficiency (CPI, ROAS)
Solsten’s Methodology
Solsten’s approach to psychological assessment is rooted in scientific rigor. The platform uses machine learning to continually improve the assessment over time, pushing trait exploration as well as assessment validity and reliability beyond current scientific baselines.
Reliability is measured through test-retest, with Solsten’s questions achieving alpha values between 0.7 and 0.95 with a mean of 0.85. This means users would answer all questions 85% exactly the same even months later, making it suitable for medical contexts and far more reliable than many popular online assessments.
Data Privacy and Security
It’s important to note that Solsten acts as a data controller for all psychological data derived from their assessments in partner games and products. This ensures that sensitive player data is handled with the utmost care and in compliance with data protection regulations.
It’s All About Validity
Implementing Solsten is more than just integrating a new tool — it’s about embracing a player-centric approach to game development and marketing based on robust psychological insights. By putting these insights to work throughout your game’s lifecycle, you can create more engaging experiences, optimize your marketing efforts, and ultimately drive better business results. The scientific rigor behind Solsten’s methodology ensures you’re making decisions based on reliable, valid data about your players’ psychological profiles.
