We sat down with Jonas Schenström, CEO and founder of StoneLeap, to discuss how his team—featuring veterans from King—is rethinking game development for the modern web. From their breakout title Block Battle to their groundbreaking distribution platform, StoneLeap is blending high-performance technology with casual game design to redefine what’s possible in browser-based gaming. In this exclusive interview, Jonas shares insights on building multiplayer-first experiences, why the web is the future of gaming, and how their proprietary tech stack is helping developers launch faster, cheaper, and more freely than ever before.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us what you're working on?
My name is Jonas Schenström. I’m the CEO and founder of StoneLeap. We focus on both game development and technology development, which puts us in a unique position—not everyone fits neatly into one box. People often ask whether we’re a tech company or a game company. Hopefully, we can clarify what that means today.
Your team includes people from King. What key lessons from those studios are you using today?
All right. So my co-founder Sven was part of King from the very beginning—way back. Since then, a lot of talented people have come out of King and gone on to start companies like Mojang and others. Many of those who were part of that core group are also involved in this venture with Sven, which is pretty cool. From those experiences—going from a small studio to a large one—we've learned a lot about what to do and what not to do.
We’ve carried forward the best lessons from those early experiences—like understanding what to look for in a game and identifying the potential for success before diving into iteration. But the way you build a studio today is very different from how it was done back then. You probably don’t need 2,000 people to make a puzzle game anymore. So we're keeping things small, lean, and giving it a modern twist in terms of how we lead. Still, the core principles remain the same—what makes a game fun—and the people involved are some of the best at making those kinds of decisions.
How did the idea for Block Battle come about? Why make a multiplayer action-puzzle game?
When we first started, we actually developed a match-3 game. Match-3 games can be quite complex to code and prepare. Last year, as we were looking for funding, we needed a way to quickly showcase our technology and highlight what sets us apart from traditional casual game studios. At that point, we noticed that block games had become extremely popular. Many of the top-performing titles were simple in gameplay and offline-focused, yet still massively successful. That signaled to us that the genre had untapped potential.
So we saw an opportunity. We thought, why not take this genre and do something new with it? We decided to create a hybrid—combining the accessibility of hyper-casual block games with deeper elements like boosters, meta layers, and the kind of progression systems players love in casual gaming. We’ve also seen a resurgence of social and web-based gaming over the past year or two, which is great—because that’s how I grew up with games. You were always playing with or against someone else, and that made it more fun. So now, when we're exploring new game ideas, one of the first questions we ask is: how can we add a multiplayer twist to this? That’s a big driver for us—we just really enjoy social games. They’re simply more fun.
That’s actually one of the reasons we chose the block game genre to start with. It was simple to build, but once we added multiplayer, it became surprisingly fun to play. And that’s one of the key factors that makes a game good: it’s fun, easy to get into, and engaging right away. When you guys featured us, the game was really just meant to be a demo for investors. So thank you, Ray! But it ended up getting traction, especially in places like South America, India, and the MENA region. That was amazing to see—people were sharing invite links, and we started getting a lot of PC and desktop players thanks to your support. That reception inspired us to keep going.
We featured Block Battle on the Ray Browser game portal, and you got a lot of new players. What did you learn from that?
One of the key things was that the game was fun enough to keep people playing—we saw really strong retention even with our scrappy beta. People were actively sharing links and inviting others to join, which helped the game spread organically. We also got valuable insights into the types of devices people were using and how they were engaging with the game. Interestingly, most players started with the multiplayer mode and then gradually shifted into single-player, aiming to beat their friends' high scores. That gave us a clear idea of the player journey—how to bring people in and then keep them engaged with strong single-player content. Thanks to that visibility, we saw over 1,500 new players join during the first weekend alone. That gave us a lot of useful data to work with.
How do you see web-based games fitting into the future of the gaming industry?
I'm really excited about the resurgence of web and social gaming, because that’s how I originally got into games. Over the past 15 years, gaming has become very single-player focused, even on consoles. But now, we’re seeing a return to social gameplay—and there’s no better platform for that than the web. The beauty of web gaming is that it's completely platform-agnostic—anyone can jump into a game through a browser, no matter what device they’re on. What we're doing at StoneLeap is essentially the next evolution of web gaming. Today, with advancements like WebGPU and multi-threading, you can build powerful, high-quality gaming experiences directly in the browser—something that wasn’t really possible before.
We’re flipping the traditional model. Usually, in casual mobile gaming, players have to find the game in an app store, download it, and deal with the limitations of that ecosystem. Instead, we start on the web—anyone can play instantly just by clicking a link or an ad. Then, if they want more features like offline play or native functionality, they can download the app directly from the game. This approach gives us—and potentially other developers—full control over the distribution pipeline. We're no longer bound by long app store approval times, restrictive third-party tools, or the 30% cut on every purchase. We can push updates multiple times a day, A/B test rapidly, and iterate based on real-time data.
Our games are also incredibly lightweight. For example, the updated version of Block Battle is just 1.7 MB. That means it loads almost instantly—even inside other platforms like TikTok or Instagram. The next step for us is to offer this infrastructure to other studios. We're building a kind of cloud platform that includes everything: ads, payments, authentication, and more—so developers can focus purely on creating great games. So yes, we create games—but we do it in a completely new way. That’s why people are sometimes unsure whether we’re a tech company or a game studio. The answer is: we’re both. We’re a tech company that builds games—and we help others do the same.
Your site mentions ‘groundbreaking proprietary technology.’ What is it, and why is it important for your games?
Right now, I’ve really been focused on distribution—because that’s where we’re doing something fundamentally different. The standard model today involves releasing your game on conventional App-stores, dealing with a 30% revenue cut, and waiting three to four weeks just to push an update. That whole system is slow and restrictive. With our approach, players can instantly access your game on any device. It’s truly cross-platform. You don’t need to worry about separate SDKs for Android, iOS, or other platforms. Everything is handled in one unified system—whether it's on mobile, desktop, or even Teslas. It's entirely up to the creators.
This also means you can launch your game instantly, gather feedback in real time, and iterate much faster. And when it comes to backend services like servers and multiplayer functionality, we provide that too. A lot of developers today are using general-purpose game engines like Unity, Godot, or Unreal. We’ve built our tools to work with those environments. All you need to do is export a WebAssembly build and plug in our SDK. That gives you access to everything—distribution, payments, ads, multiplayer—without being tied to app stores. So developers can keep working in the engines they’re comfortable with, and by adding our lightweight wrapper, they gain full control over their game’s distribution and infrastructure. It’s a faster, more flexible way to build and scale games.
Congrats on launching Block Battle! Do you have a roadmap or any updates you’d like to share?
We’ll continue iterating on Block Battle for a while—we have a lot of fun ideas and new game modes we want to explore. But we also have several other games in the pipeline that we're excited to release. These new projects will help showcase what's really possible when you build for the web the way we do. Some of those games will be more technically demanding—like first-person experiences in 3D—so people can see that, yes, this kind of high-quality gameplay is absolutely possible in a browser. We want to demonstrate that this level of quality isn’t just possible in the browser—it can become the new standard. At the same time, we’ll focus heavily on puzzle games, especially since many of our team members come from King and really understand that genre inside and out. And in just a few months, we’ll be launching the platform for the first group of studios to start building on it—just like we do. That’s coming later this year.
Any closing remarks? Something you would like to say to the players on Ray Browser?
I just want to give a big thanks for all the support during our beta release. I really love what Ray is doing—it aligns perfectly with our vision of making gaming accessible everywhere. With your platform, all you need is a browser, and suddenly you have access to a wide range of incredible games, including some pretty graphically intensive ones. The performance improvements are impressive too—compared to playing on something like Chrome, the difference is huge. We’re genuinely excited about what you’re building, and the community around it is fantastic. So again, a big thank you from all of us at StoneLeap—and if you haven’t tried Block Battle yet, now’s the perfect time. We can’t wait to show you what’s next!
Would you like to try Block Battle out? You'll get the best performance using Ray Browser. Play Block Battle and join our Discord server to find people to play with!
