Game studios invest significant resources in creating experiences that resonate with players, but traditional user research methods often fall short in providing deep, actionable insights. Solsten addresses this challenge by offering a comprehensive suite of player research capabilities built on a unique psychological profiling system. Solsten’s services cover the entire game development lifecycle, from concept to launch and live operations.
What sets Solsten apart is a proprietary database of psychological profiles, built over six years of working with game studios like Sony, Supercell, and Activision, representing 3.4 billion people globally. This allows us to recruit research subjects who accurately mirror the motivations and personas of a game’s target audience, providing insights with unparalleled precision.
By combining robust research methodologies with psychologically validated data, Solsten helps studios minimize risk and ensure their games resonate with intended players, optimizing for motivation, satisfaction, and long-term retention.
In this article, we’ll look at six powerful ways Solsten elevates games user research, helping studios minimize risk, optimize player satisfaction, and ultimately create games that resonate deeply with their intended audience. From recruitment to churn analysis, we’ll explore how Solsten’s psychologically-driven approach can transform your game development process and give you a competitive edge.
Precise Player Persona-Based Recruitment
By leveraging psychological insights and tools, Solsten can significantly improve the playtester recruitment process. Instead of relying solely on demographic factors or general gaming habits, Solsten recruits participants who truly embody the psychological traits, motivations, and preferences of a game’s target audience. This ensures that playtesting feedback comes from people who are most representative of core player personas, leading to more relevant and actionable insights.
By using Solsten’s mapping to link your playtesters to specific player personas, you can parse their feedback and behaviors through a psychological lens and identify patterns, trends, and insights that are specific to each key audience segment. This persona-driven analysis lets you make more targeted, evidence-based design decisions that cater to the distinct needs and preferences of your core player types.
By tracking the persona distribution of your playtester sample over time, you can also ensure that you’re gathering a representative and balanced set of insights across all your key audience segments — and filtering out feedback that isn’t relevant. If you notice that certain personas are underrepresented in your playtesting feedback, you can adjust your recruitment strategies to target more participants who align with those specific psychological profiles.
Using Solsten’s psychological mapping capabilities in your playtesting process helps you infuse your user research with a deeper understanding of the psychological factors that drive player engagement and satisfaction. This persona-driven approach to playtesting lets you make design decisions that are more closely aligned with the intrinsic needs and motivations of your core audience segments, resulting in a game that resonates more deeply and drives longer-term player loyalty and retention.
Transparent Feedback Attribution
The ability to map research results back to specific player personas provides unprecedented visibility into the source of our feedback. Rather than treating all playtester input equally, Solsten can understand which insights are coming from which segments of a target market.
This transparency allows Solsten research to contextualize feedback within the psychological framework of each player type. For instance, we can differentiate between criticism from a “Competitive Achiever” persona versus a “Casual Dabbler” persona, understanding that these different player types may have vastly different needs and expectations from a game.
Persona-Driven Decision Calibration
With full visibility into the psychological profiles behind research subjects, Solsten empowers studios to make more nuanced decisions about how to act on feedback. Rather than designing to the average player or trying to accommodate every piece of input, studios can calibrate their responses based on the strategic importance of each player persona.
For example, if there’s conflicting feedback about the difficulty curve of a game, that feedback can be weighed against the psychological profiles of the players providing it. The decision can then be made to prioritize the input from our core “Mastery Seeker” persona over that of more casual players if a game is primarily targeting a hardcore audience.
Early Product-Market Validation
Psychological insights unlock the ability to validate product-market fit more robustly and earlier in the development process. By testing concepts, prototypes, and features against psychologically relevant player profiles, studios can gain confidence that they’re building something that truly resonates with their target audience.
This early validation can save significant time and resources by allowing for course-correction before investing heavily in development. It also provides a more reliable predictor of market success, as testing is done against players who genuinely represent the target market, not just in demographics but in psychological makeup.
In-Depth Churn Analysis and Prevention
Solsten’s research team also specializes in churned player analysis. The ability to track down churned players and conduct understand why they left your game is immensely valuable for long-term success and sustainability.
Studios often have a difficult time reaching and incentivizing these disengaged users to provide feedback. Once a player has stopped engaging with a game, they are less likely to respond to traditional survey invitations, participate in interviews, or join playtesting sessions. This leaves studios with a significant blind spot in understanding the full player experience, particularly the factors that contribute to churn.
Solsten’s ability to reliably track down churned players and gather their insights at scale provides a wealth of actionable data to inform retention strategies and game optimization efforts. Here are some of the key benefits:
Identify Churn Drivers
By systematically collecting feedback from churned players, Solsten can pinpoint the specific factors that led them to disengage from a game. Aggregating and analyzing this churned player data at scale lets us identify consistent patterns and trends in the reasons behind player attrition. This helps studios prioritize development efforts around addressing the most critical churn drivers and implementing targeted improvements to boost retention.
Segment Churn by Persona
Integrating our psychological insights into churned player analysis lets go beyond surface-level reasons for disengagement and understand how churn varies across different player personas. We help studios identify the unique retention challenges and opportunities for each of their key audience segments. This persona-driven churn analysis helps studios craft targeted retention strategies and game optimizations that cater to the specific needs and preferences of their most valuable players.
Win Back Churned Players
Tracking down and engaging with churned players also opens up opportunities to win back lapsed users through personalized reactivation campaigns. By understanding the specific reasons behind each player’s disengagement, studios can tailor outreach and incentives to address their individual pain points and motivations.
By demonstrating that you understand and value the needs of your churned players, you can increase the likelihood of reactivating and retaining them for the long haul.
Predictive Churn Modeling
Analyzing churned player data at scale can also inform the development of predictive churn models that help studios proactively identify and intervene with at-risk players. By correlating churn feedback with in-game behavioral data and psychologial profiles, studios can flag players who are exhibiting early signs of disengagement.
With these predictive insights, you can implement targeted retention interventions like personalized incentives, tailored content recommendations, or proactive outreach from a community team. By using churned player analysis to anticipate and mitigate potential churn risks, you can significantly improve your overall retention rates and player lifetime value.
In an industry where player acquisition costs are rising and long-term retention is key to profitability, the ability to systematically understand and mitigate churn at scale is a true competitive advantage. By integrating churned player analysis into our games user research practice, Solsten helps studios create experiences that not only attract players but keep them long-term engaged and invested.
Targeted Game Design for Core Personas
Perhaps most importantly, integrating psychological insights into our research helps studios move beyond creating general experiences that appeal broadly but resonate deeply with no one. Instead, studios can focus on building games that are truly great for specific, psychologically-defined player segments.
By understanding the unique psychological needs, motivations, and preferences of your target personas, you can craft experiences that are deeply satisfying to these players. This approach may result in a game that’s not for everyone, but that creates intense loyalty and engagement among its target audience.
Conclusion
Solsten’s psychologically-driven approach to games user research offers studios a significant competitive advantage. By recruiting more relevant playtesters, providing context for feedback, enabling informed design decisions, and validating concepts more reliably, we help studios create games that forge deeper connections with target audiences. Our comprehensive churned player analysis further enhances long-term player retention and game optimization.
Ready to elevate your games user research?
Book a demo to see firsthand how Solsten’s psychological insights can transform your development process. Our team will walk you through real-world applications tailored to your studio’s needs.
