In our interview series, Jesse sat down with Joe Schaeppi, co-founder and CEO of Solsten. The conversation spanned everything from Polynesian surfing to player psychology. But at the heart of it was a simple truth: gaming studios can’t afford to rely on luck or guesswork anymore. AI, data, and audience understanding are reshaping how games get built, marketed, and scaled. Here are the key takeaways from the chat.
Leisure is a luxury
Joe opened with a reminder that mobile games compete for a tiny slice of players’ leisure time. During COVID, users had more free time, which fueled growth across the industry. Today, attention is harder to capture because players are juggling work, social media, other games, and short-form video content.
The first few seconds of gameplay or an ad are now critical. Games need a strong hook immediately to capture attention, making early engagement metrics more important than ever. Joe compared gaming today to ancient surfing in Hawaii. People only surfed when they had time and resources.
AI without data is empty
Both agreed that anyone can build flashy AI interfaces. What really matters is the quality and uniqueness of the data powering them. Joe compared it to medicine where a general AI cannot detect cancer better than a hospital with the best annotated dataset. Same goes for gaming, the true value is in the quality of its proprietary audience data.
For studios, this means relying solely on generic AI tools for campaign optimization or user behavior predictions can be risky. Using AI without the right dataset can mislead teams into investing in audiences, creatives, or mechanics that underperform. The most effective decisions emerge from combining proprietary data with machine learning models tailored to specific game genres and player profiles.
Build for real audiences, not for yourself
Joe said too many studios design games for people like themselves. That often leads to an audience too small to scale. Using Solsten’s profiles, studios can test whether their game idea has a viable audience before investing years in development.
It’s a bit like what Rick Rubin once said about music, that the audience comes last. Music isn’t the same as building a product or a game. Rubin’s work with established artists is about distilling what’s already working and helping them express it more authentically, not reinventing from scratch. In games, that’s like taking a proven hit like Fortnite or Roblox and refining what resonates. But when you’re building something new, you need both: a clear sense of who you are as a studio and what’s most authentic to you, and an understanding of how that fits into an existing market.
It’s called product–market fit for a reason. You can create something as visionary as Tesla, but without an “Edison” to help package and connect that brilliance to the right audience, it’s hard for innovation to spread no matter how authentic. Understanding your audience, their motivations, preferences, and behavior patterns, bridges that gap between authenticity and accessibility. For instance, a puzzle game for casual players needs a different difficulty curve and reward system than one aimed at core strategy gamers. Validating these assumptions early reduces risk and informs marketing campaigns.
Traits last longer than behaviors
There is a distinction between traits and behaviors, Joe reminded. Behaviors, like which game someone chooses to play, can shift quickly with trends. Traits, such as curiosity, persistence, or creativity, are stable over time.
Designing around persistent traits allows studios to create experiences that resonate long-term, even if player behavior changes. For example, players with high curiosity may always seek exploration and narrative depth, even as the genre they prefer evolves.
Test assumptions fast
Both Joe and Jesse stressed testing early and frequently. Studios that validate hypotheses about audience, gameplay, and creatives can avoid investing in ideas that will fail at scale.
This can look like running a small-scale ad test, using in-game telemetry to see how players interact with a mechanic, or A/B testing tutorial flows. Even before the game is built, teams can run concepts tests on Geeklab to find out which resonates best with the intended audience. The goal is to identify failing elements early and reallocate resources toward approaches that perform.
Balancing data with intuition
Data drives decisions, but intuition still matters. Experienced designers and marketers use instincts shaped by past successes and failures. Combining intuition with robust audience data and AI insights produces better outcomes than relying on either alone.
A team might spot an unexpected player behavior that data alone doesn’t explain. Using intuition and experience, they can hypothesize why it occurs, then design an experiment to confirm it. This feedback loop refines both creative and marketing strategies.
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