The Science of
Gamer Motivation

Quantic Foundry is a market research company focused on gamer motivation. We combine social science with data science to understand what drives gamers.

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The Science and Data Behind Our Gamer Motivation Model

Our Gamer Motivation Model

Data From Over 1.65 Million Gamers

We used established psychometric methods and data from over 1.65 million gamers to develop an empirical model of gamer motivations. Want to learn more?

Dashboard Access to All Our Audience Data

Game Audience Dashboard

See our new dashboard in action in the video demo below. We walk through all the main reporting and graphing features of the dashboard.

Features At a Glance

  • Convenient online dashboard based on real-time data.
  • Complete access to our catalog of over 3,500 game titles.
  • Based on data from over 1.65 million gamers.
  • Generate Audience Reports based on individual or multiple game titles/franchises.
  • Filter an audience report by gender, age range, gamer type, or gaming frequency.
  • Visually explore related game titles using our dynamic graphing features.
  • Use reverse lookups to identify games that fit a specific set of criteria.
  • Download a PDF overview of the key features.

Data-Driven Insights About Your Audience

Audience Reports

Use Empirical Data to Inform Your Game Production & Marketing Decisions

Whether you have an existing game title/franchise or have a new game in development, we can provide data-driven insights about your audience.

Here’s What Our Clients Are Saying

Clients and Testimonials

Thanks to Nick’s team we now better understand what motivates our players. We have restructured our production and marketing strategies based on their great insights.

Simon Sicko (CEO), Pixel Federation
Quantic Foundry’s audience report of Idle Clicker gamers helped us sharpen our communications by identifying primary player motivations. By aligning our marketing messages to these motivations, we became more effective in identifying and communicating with our players.
Eric Jordan (CEO), Codename Entertainment

Quantic Foundry’s Audience Dashboard helped us bring two projects through pitch and conception phases.

Maciej Binkowski (Head of Content/Publishing Director), Artifex Mundi

Quantic Foundry’s custom profiling service helped our game teams drive new features that we’re locking down for the next year or so. QF’s motivational framework also gave us concise and impactful language that could be consistently shared across game teams and titles, helping us understand how our players differed even within the same franchise.

Phoebe Tang (Analyst), PopCap
We were in the midst of exploring a new game concept and reached out to Quantic Foundry. They took the time to understand what we needed, and put together a customized report that was valuable and actionable.
Jeff Pobst (CEO), Hidden Path Entertainment

Quantic Foundry’s report provided many useful insights which made us re-think a few assumptions.

Matt Lowe (Lead Designer), Splash Damage
I was so excited about the release of the Motivation Insight Report. It is a great reference and provided exactly the information we were looking for.
Marguerite Dibble (CEO), GameTheory

A team that has been analyzing game data and innovating game analytic methods for over a decade.

Our Team

Nick Yee and Nicolas Ducheneaut have been studying games and gamers for over two decades.

They leverage their broad experience in academic, commercial, government, and game industry research in gaming to analyze game data and generate actionable insights.

Nick Yee
Nick YeeCo-Founder & Analytics Lead
Nicolas Ducheneaut
Nicolas DucheneautCo-Founder & Technical Lead

Nick Yee and Nic Ducheneaut both have academic backgrounds that combine social science with data science. They received their PhDs from Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley, respectively, and began working together in 2005 at the Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC). Their shared interest in developing innovative methods to study online games—whether it is creating empirical frameworks of gamer motivations or mapping social networks in World of Warcraft—resulted in more than 40 peer-reviewed papers. Their work is widely-known and widely-cited among game researchers; for example, Nick Yee’s paper on online gaming motivations has been cited over 4,000 times.

Seeking to apply these insights and methods directly within the game industry, they joined Ubisoft in 2012 where they founded the Gamer Behavior Research group. Their fluency in different methodological approaches allowed them to combine and derive actionable insights from diverse data sources, which accelerated collaboration between design, marketing, and analytics teams. In order to meet a broader industry demand for their unique skillset, they formed Quantic Foundry in 2015.

Contact Us

Email us directly at team@quanticfoundry.com, or use the contact form below.

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