1 03, 2019

Older Gamers Who Can Afford VR Tend to Care Less About the Gaming Motivations Linked to VR Adoption

By |2019-03-03T16:34:11-08:00March 1st, 2019|Analytics, Video Games|8 Comments

[This post is co-authored with Jennifer Day and Chris Karzmark, both PhD students at UCSC in Cognitive Psychology.] At first glance, gaming and VR seem like a natural pairing, especially with their shared emphasis on action-oriented and immersive content. But gamer adoption has been slow and enthusiasm among developers is also waning. In this post, [...]

27 11, 2018

Chinese Gamers are More Competitive and Completionist, More Homogeneous in Gaming Motivations Than US Gamers

By |2018-11-27T17:22:36-08:00November 27th, 2018|Analytics, Video Games|8 Comments

Since the beginning of the year, Quantic Foundry and Niko Partners have been working together on a series of survey-based projects. Niko Partners is a market research and consulting firm covering the games markets in Asia. In one of these projects, we used the Gamer Motivation Model as part of a larger study to create [...]

1 08, 2018

What Men and Women Consider Hardcore Gaming Are Not The Same

By |2018-08-02T12:44:23-07:00August 1st, 2018|Analytics, Video Games|19 Comments

In our talk at GDC 2018, we explored what gamer motivations would look like if we defined “casual/core/hardcore” gamers using different assumptions—e.g., by self-identification with labels vs. by gaming frequency vs. by specific game titles they play. In this blog post, we’ll focus on the slice by self-identification with labels, but we’re hoping to cover [...]

24 01, 2018

Visualizing How Steam Tags Are Related

By |2018-01-26T11:42:55-08:00January 24th, 2018|Analytics, Video Games|11 Comments

We recently linked up the game titles from our data set with available metadata from places like Steam and IGDB. As part of this, we’ve been playing around a lot with Steam tags. In this blog post, I’ll show you what happened when we tried to visualize how Steam tags are related to each other. [...]

29 08, 2017

Just How Important Are Female Protagonists?

By |2017-08-31T12:58:17-07:00August 29th, 2017|Analytics, Video Games|27 Comments

The availability of female protagonists in video games and the push for more playable female characters has been a hot topic in recent years. For example, articles on the gender breakdowns at E3 or reasons that game companies provide for not having playable female characters often engender a great deal of discussion. In this blog [...]

12 07, 2017

Solo Board Gamers: Who Are The 1%?

By |2017-07-12T10:45:23-07:00July 12th, 2017|Analytics, Board Games|17 Comments

Given that most board games are primarily designed to be a social activity, solo board gamers at first glance seem like misplaced unicorns. On the other hand, BoardGameGeek has annual awards for solo games, its catalog takes care to tag the opportunity for solo play and solo variants, and many games do support solo gameplay. [...]

23 03, 2017

Competition Is Not The Opposite of Community

By |2017-03-23T13:06:20-07:00March 23rd, 2017|Analytics, Video Games|8 Comments

As many of you know, Nic Ducheneaut and I focused on MMOs when we began our careers in games research. And in both the research and gaming communities of these online games, there’s a commonly-held assumption about how gamers fall along the social spectrum. In its most basic form, the spectrum has warm, fuzzy, social [...]

19 01, 2017

Beyond 50/50: Breaking Down The Percentage of Female Gamers by Genre

By |2018-06-14T13:04:44-07:00January 19th, 2017|Analytics, Video Games|137 Comments

You’ve probably heard the often-quoted statistic that about half of video gamers are women, illustrating how gaming is now a mainstream activity enjoyed by both men and women. This finding comes from the yearly ESA report, and has fluctuated between 38% and 48% in the past decade—currently estimated at 41% in the 2016 report. Oddly, [...]

Go to Top