In our blog posts, we’ve focused a lot on demographic cohort comparisons and how motivations are linked to in-game preferences, usually using slices of contemporaneous survey data. But because we’ve been collecting data from our Gamer Motivation Profile for about 9 years, we can also explore how gaming motivations have changed over a long period of time. In this blog post, we’ll deep dive into a long-term trend we’ve uncovered: over the past 9 years, gamers have become less interested in strategic thinking and planning.
The Gamer Motivation Profile
The Gamer Motivation Profile is a 5-minute survey that allows gamers to get a personalized report of their gaming motivations, and see how they compare with other gamers. Over 1.70 million gamers worldwide have taken this survey. The 12 motivations that are measured in our model were identified via statistical analysis of how gaming motivations cluster together.
See how you compare with other gamers. Take a 5-minute survey and get your Gamer Motivation Profile along with personalized game recommendations.
For this analysis, we used the data from 1.57 million gamers who participated in the Gamer Motivation Profile between June 2015 and April 2024. Respondents from China were excluded because gamers in China have a very different gaming motivation profile (likely due to the historically more isolated development of their gaming industry).
What is Strategy in our Gaming Motivation Model?
In our motivation model, Strategy is defined as the appeal of long-term thinking, planning, and careful decision-making. Gamers who score high on Strategy prefer longer time horizons for planning and complex decision-making with many underlying parameters to consider (i.e., all the branching decisions and likely outcomes) seen in games like Europa Universalis and Total War. Gamers who score low on Strategy prefer more reactive/spontaneous gameplay and simple decision-making with few underlying parameters to consider, such as in games like Just Dance and Animal Crossing. A good metaphor for Strategy is the size of the whiteboard in your mind that each decision is taking to map out, think through, and optimize.
A good metaphor for Strategy is the size of the whiteboard in your mind that each decision is taking to map out.
Of the 12 Motivations, Strategy has Changed The Most
When we looked for long-term trends across the 12 motivations, we found that many motivations were stable or experienced minor deviations over the past 9 years. Strategy was the clear exception; it had substantially declined over the past 9 years and the magnitude of this change was more than twice the size of the next largest change.
In the chart below, the dots represent the average Strategy score among the gamers who responded to the Gamer Motivation Profile each month between June 2015 and April 2024 (using a rolling 3-month window). Strategy is represented on the y-axis as a percentile, with the starting date (June 2015) anchored at 50th-%tile—i.e., the initial collected data is used to define the starting norm.
The appeal of Strategy has substantially declined over the past 9 years.
Using the starting norm (i.e., the 50th-%tile) as the basis for comparison, the average Strategy score has declined to 33rd-%tile as of April 2024. Or put more plainly, 67% of gamers today care less about strategic thinking and planning when playing games than the average gamer back in June 2015.
How Big Exactly is a Drop to 33rd-%tile?
Both percentiles and psychometrics are fairly abstract concepts and the magnitude of a drop to 33rd-%tile can be difficult to grok. To help anchor this finding, here are some real-world magnitude equivalents using more familiar metrics:
- It’s the equivalent of all men age 20+ in the US losing 17 pounds in weight.
- It’s the equivalent of all adult men (worldwide) losing 1.34 inches in height.
- It’s the equivalent of everyone (worldwide) losing 6.75 points of IQ.
The magnitude of the decline in Strategy is equivalent to all adult men in the US losing 17 pounds in weight.
Gradual, Persistent Decline That Pre-Dates COVID
When we initially had an inkling that Strategy had declined, we suspected that it was potentially due to COVID (and avoiding anxiety related to thinking about the future), but when we conducted the longitudinal analysis, several things stood out:
- The decline in Strategy clearly pre-dates COVID; it is noticeable from the earliest data collection periods and the trend line suggests it started before June 2015.
- The trend line also makes clear that what we’re observing is a gradual but very persistent long-term downward trend in Strategy. Whatever the cause, it’s likely not a sudden single historical event, but part of a larger, long-term cultural/psychological shift.
- The downward trend slowed down prior to COVID (right before January 2020), regained traction during the COVID era, and then has slowed down since COVID restrictions have been lifted. So there is a potential argument to be made that COVID exacerbated or prolonged an ongoing trend.
The decline in Strategy started long before COVID.
The Decline is Identical for Both Men and Women
We’ll look at potential confounds and data sampling issues in several ways. First, let’s break down the chart by gender. Note that in the chart below, we’ve anchored the starting point of both cohorts to 50th-%tile so we can more directly compare differences in change over time—i.e., men actually care more about Strategy than women so there “should” be a gap between the lines, but this would make it harder to visually see any differences in the longitudinal trend lines.
The decline in Strategy is remarkably consistent across male and female gamers. This also means that the overall finding would be the same even if the proportion of men and women had changed over time (which it largely did not; see below).
The Decline is Similar Whether We’re Looking At US or Non-US Gamers
The decline in Strategy is also very similar whether we’re looking at US alone or non-US countries. As with the gender chart above, the starting point for both cohorts is anchored at 50th-%tile to allow for better visual comparison of differences in the longitudinal trend.
While we can’t rule out the possibility that the observed decline in Strategy is due to a change over time in one of countless demographic variables among the gamers we sample, we can rule out this possibility in terms of the most likely culprits. The charts below show our gamer sample has been mostly stable in terms of gender, age, and gamer type (i.e., identification as casual, core, hardcore gamer).
While there has been a slight decline in age in the sampled gamers (and this could have been a likely confound), the correlation between age and Strategy is small (r=.06, r-squared = .004) and could not have resulted in the observed decline in Strategy.
The other reason why the decline in Strategy is unlikely to be due to a demographic sampling confound is because we know, from previous examinations of age and gender differences in gaming motivations, that other motivations (like Competition) are far stronger correlated with gender and age. Thus, any demographic confounds in sampling would have resulted in larger effects on those motivations rather than Strategy.
But Why has Strategy Declined Over Time?
There are many seemingly-related findings in terms of our media consumption habits. For example, over time, shorter YouTube videos have garnered a higher share of overall views. The duration of shots in movies (i.e., between each cut) has decreased from 16 seconds in 1930 to 4 seconds in 2010. The average time spent on a computer app window (e.g., on a Word doc before switching to a browser window) has decreased from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds in 2016.
In this light, the decline in Strategy is likely not an idiosyncratic phenomenon among digital gamers, but parallels the general reduction in attention spans observed by researchers in different fields.
But because all over-time comparisons are inherently correlational, it’s difficult to pin down cause and effect. While we often blame social media for our decreased attention spans, there’s a lack of concrete causal evidence for this. Of course, it bears pointing out that causal evidence for this would be difficult to produce since it’s unethical to raise children in artificial labs. Also, the shot duration analysis in movies is a counterpoint to blaming social media entirely: this downward trend in media attention span can be traced as far back as the 1930s, although it is certainly possible that social media accelerated the underlying trend.
We often blame social media for our decreased attention spans, but there’s a lack of concrete causal evidence for this.
Another potential hypothesis is that the increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have. Put simply, we may be too worn out by social media to think deeply about things. For example, higher engagement with social media is correlated with lower math and reading scores and poorer mental health among teenagers. Of course, again, these findings are correlational and not direct causal evidence.
Implications for Making Games and Understanding Gamers
Even if the underlying cause(s) cannot be identified, it’s clear that gamers have become less interested in strategic thinking over the past 9 years. It implies that gamers are now more easily cognitively overloaded when they play games and are more likely to avoid strategic complexity. This has implications for game design and marketing. Overall, gamers now prefer shorter time horizons to plan for (i.e., the number of steps and branching outcomes they have to think through) and less complex decisions that rely on fewer parameters to consider.
Gamers are now more easily cognitively overloaded when they play games and are more likely to avoid strategic complexity.
And for those of us who study gamers, typically in the more confined context of specific game titles/franchises, this finding may help explain observed changes among Strategy-related player segments over the past decade that we would otherwise have more likely attributed to game feature changes or COVID.
What Do You Think?
- Why do you think gamers have become less interested in strategic thinking and planning? Are there other potential causes that come to mind?
- Do you feel your attention span and ability to think deeply has changed since the emergence of social media and/or smartphones?
- Are there other documented changes in our media-consumption habits or cognitive metrics that you think might be related to this?
- Have you seen similar or related findings specific to gamers and games research?
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I wonder if individuals tracked over time would show this decline. Maybe the decline is due to different cohorts of gamers coming into the sample space? Maybe older gamers are just as interested as they used to be, but younger ones are now coming into the survey and lowering the overall rating?
Good question. In the post, we touch on some potential confounds with the sampling. Age, gender, casual/core/hardcore have been fairly stable in our sampling over time. It doesn’t rule out that something in our sampling has changed, but we looked into and ruled out some of the more obvious potential factors.
Interestingly, Strategy is one of the more age-stable motivations–i.e., it’s largely uncorrelated with gamer age. So even moderate changes in age sampling would have had largely no impact on Strategy.
Could it be due to the fact that for the past 9 years the total amount of gamers drastically increased, and specifically there is a huge increase in the casual and hypercasual audience, thus reducing the percentage but not the total amount?
@Dmitry: The % of gamers identifying as casual has remained stable over time (~10%) in our sampling largely because most casual/hypercasual gamers (especially on mobile) don’t identify as gamers, are less likely to take something called a “Gamer Motivation Profile”, and are underrepresented in our sample. So our data has always centered on core PC/Console gamers.
About 70% of the sample identifies as core, 20% as hardcore, both stable over time. So the observed finding is largely based on assessing core/hardcore-leaning gamers.
“Age, gender, casual/core/hardcore have been fairly stable in our sampling over time.”
But those groups look very different today than they did a decade ago. I promise you that the group of 18-34 year old’s who identify as a “core” pc gamer in 2024 is VERY different than the group of 18-34 year old’s from 2014.
@Chris isn’t that the point?
The “median gamer” now is not the same individual as it was, regardless of age. I suggest that the population of those identifying as “gamers” has shifted dramatically for all ages.
The categories (hard core, core, casual) are a truncated Likert scale, the respondents won’t necessarily understand those categories to mean the same thing over time (even if you can assert the individual differences are a wash within any given survey instance). This would be a change, but not the same change as gamers of a particular kind having a different preference over time; this could be a definitional or compositional change in the response set. Which brings us to the implications of the survey design/execution:
Has the raw count of Strategic Enjoyers increased even though their response share in the survey has declined? e.g. were they a small segment in the world but big segment in responses? Were they a segment of eager early survey responders and you’ve simply captured them all years ago while the survey population continues to expand into broader gamer types? Are other kinds of gamers now identifying as gamers when previously there was a stigma or non-association – depressing the relative population of Strategic Enjoyers? Is PC penetration increasing over time now that we’ve moved past the annual CPU race dominating purchasing and game releases? Is a perception of a decline in Strategic Enjoyers just an overcounting in the past of the Strategic Enjoyer population that has now been rectified? e.g. there never was such a big share of population and we’ve just improved our ability to resolve the question? Have we encountered Simpson’s paradox?
Sure, humans are very likely changing in their behaviors and preferences over time. It is also likely that the selection of survey respondents is changing over time just as quickly. By 2018 350k gamers had participated in the survey, now that number is 1.7M? Does that represent a stable annual sample size, or a stable share of the population sampled. How many non-gamers get profiled to help dial in the segment sizes within your self-selected sample of a stratified population? The effect of the survey mechanics can easily overwhelm anything within the survey responses.
A survey with 200k annual respondents is nothing to sneeze at. That said, it is very easy for the layperson to shoot way past its bounds and overgeneralize the findings. The survey design is opt-in instead of random selection (a catch and release population sample would pick the place and time to do the counting, rather than letting the fish volunteer to be counted – e.g. Steam Hardware survey is a better design for assessing true population instead of trends within sampled population). That the share of Strategy Enjoyers within your sample is declining is a defensible claim. The share of enjoyers of strategic thinking within the population at large declining appears unsupported by the data. But from this writeup folks go hard into the age-old “kids these days are different” bit ascribed to whatever change or social ill is top of mind – a tendency that comes for us all by way of our just getting older. This isn’t what the data (presented) support.
@Geoff – I think there’s a bit of unintentional gish gallop here; it’s easy to come up with large lists of hypotheticals and studies (even those published in top-tier academic journals) always have limitations. Scientific research in any domain is the result of triangulation with conflicting studies across many researchers and many studies over time.
You bring up the “Steam Hardware Survey”, but that survey is also opt-in and also has clear sampling constraints (it’s not representative of all gamers) and they don’t survey non-Steam users (per your point regarding non-gamer sampling). Your implication that a researcher needs to have access to the market-dominant digital games distribution platform to contribute meaningfully to this research suggests your standards may be unrealistically high.
It’s also unfair to compare studies against idealized studies that don’t exist. If Valve is not publishing longitudinal psychographic findings, should no one else try? The quality of research needs to be judged against similar studies in the domain, not against idealized research that doesn’t exist.
Now that I read the article, I realize that I, at least, have drifted away from strategy games. I used to play a lot of them even just 5-6 years ago. The amount of playtime in games with a strong story that handle subjects like psychology, morals and ethics, and society have increased.
I think the implications are pretty obvious.
I’m curious where that part of the strategic motivation shifted to.
Early in the article, Nick mentions that other motivations have remaines largely stable, so I think there is no shift from one motivation to another – strategic motivation has just dropped.
Great read. I also like how you tried to rule out possible causes (such as more gamers from a region or age group that doesn’t generally care for it), and like that you respond to comments to discuss all this.
I’m a strategy gamer, and here’s my 2 cents: when you are part of a community for a strategy game, the community tends to push the devs to increase complexity — and prioritize balance over fun — as the game matures. I can think of several games I was into when they rolled out, but after 2+ years of changes and “balancing” they’ve either nerfed something I enjoyed or added a system I didn’t, so I moved on. Go through this enough and you’re ready for a “diet” where other genres appeal more. TLDR; strategy is a genre where games change quite a bit from launch to maturity, and they shed players along the way. 4x especially!
This seems very possible to me. I think of myself as someone who loves strategy games, but then I struggle to think of ones I like. For me, RTSes in particular are pleasureless — not because of anything inherent about the genre itself (which actually has huge potential), but because of the competition scene that surrounds them. 4X games, fighting games, and basically every other genre that attracts competitive play are similarly ruined for me (with very rare exceptions, such as Smash Brothers) because the developers end up prioritizing regulated competition over dynamic fun.
These days, I get my strategy fix almost entirely from games like Factorio and Rimworld, which do not shy away from throwing unfair events at the player and let you really flex your creativity and flexibility.
Yes! I agree it’s a problem in other genres too, especially ones with strong competitive play. Discovering a fun tactic that makes your game memorable is another man’s “no fair!” and it’s only a matter of time before a forum war starts. It’s exhausting.
Here are also my two cents: due the genre’s nature, strategy games have the same issues some MMO’s have where they overwhelm the player with the amount of things the player has to do in order to progress through the game (e.g. heavy micromanagement). However, since those are usually single-player “hardcore” gamer experiences the devs apply a different gamedesign approach compared to MMO devs. What would be viewed in the MMO community as a chore made to extend the average playtime per player, in a strategy world is viewed as an added layer of detail or complexity that is almost universally considered beneficial to the product among the core, vocal, “pro” audience. Yes, that may lead to a product with almost endless replayability (Stellaris as an example) but the problem is that the product is going to be shaped by the core audience (which is not a bad thing in itself, but could be, if you want your game to be played every day by as many people as possible) while disregarding the more relaxed crowd. As certain things are viewed as genre-correct” approaches, the devs work hard to appeal to the crowd that claims that a certain thing done by them is correct.
Again, this is not a bad thing and may lead to the creation of some of the most groundbreaking experiences shaped and molded by enthusiasts (second-hand or not) but i think this is what you could call the fundamental issue that leads to the games evolving a certain way.
Honestly I feel mobile gaming is to blame in part for this. A “Strategy Game” really used to mean something. It took effort to produce, market, and distribute strategy games. Very few strategy games made it to the mass market. Those that did typically game from established studios that already had success producing other relatively complex games. Gaming (particularly PC gaming where strategy had it’s start) was the domain of the nerd, someone that probably started out higher on the IQ chart, shifting what was considered “average” for that market.
Now type in strategy game into your play store and see the wash of awful games you will get. Bland cut and paste games with timers loaded with pay-to-win features everywhere. I grew up playing games like Civilization, Colonization, Master of Orion, Stronghold, Silver Swords, Empire, and others. I wouldn’t be interested in the “strategy games” I might be exposed to today compared to 20 or 30 years ago. In fact I might go out of my way to avoid them. That’s not to say that great strategy games aren’t being made. They are…you just have to dig deep into the steam library to find them in most cases. There’s probably a huge cadre of people who got exposed to bad strategy mobile games and never developed the taste for the higher level options out there.
This is an interesting study, if a bit worrying for someone like me who loves strategy and depth to my games.
Are you able to see if this change is happening in individuals, or is it possibly a population effect? Have people’s preferences changed over time, or is this due to gaming as a hobby attracting new people who are less strategy-orientated?
Also, is there a split between preferred device? My impression is that strategy focus would be most popular on desktop, then console, and least on mobile, but it would be good to see if my initial take is borne out by data
Nah! Every1 knows FGs (Fighting Games) take the most skill, logical thought, and reactions!!!!!! I didn’t hear a single fighting game mentioned when discussing strategy intensive gameply!!! I can assure you that 95% of all Fighting Gamers want more strategy, not less; more options, more quick movement, more moves, more combos, more consistentcy & logic in the neutral, spacing, and footsies, NOT less!!!!! <3 :)
Fighting gamers are a relatively small niche, no?
RPG is my genre, and I believe the reason that strategy is my highest motivation—followed closely by exploration—is my love of chargen and resource management. I am the kind of person to open a spreadsheet to plan my character build in advance, and am significantly less interested in RPGs that don’t reward that level of advanced planning. I also like an RPG more, the more useful consumables are, and the more restricted resting is. Furthermore, I do like more tactical combat, or even puzzle battles; I love when RPGs have trap setting. Notably, I score a perfect goose egg on story AND fantasy. I do wish there were more games like Dune and Jagged Alliance 2, though.
The pull-quote that “Gamers are now more easily cognitively overloaded when they play games and are more likely to avoid strategic complexity” could apply, I think, to people in general. Social, political, and cultural conditions (quite aside from the social media bugaboos) are putting an unusually heavy load on daily life over the last decade: consider the rise of mental health issues in much of the world, especially the Western countries. For hobby-as-entertainment, I cannot find it unexpected if people want lighter fare, overall, than when resources to dig deep were more available.
>consider the rise of mental health issues in much of the world, especially the Western countries.
…or consider rise in collective awareness of psychological issues being a significant impact on one’s health instead and deeper understanding of how these issues come to be. Just because we used to not know what bacteria was doesn’t mean that e.coli didn’t exist before that.
This is what happens when games integrate abuses of human cognition for the sole purpose of monetizing dopamine addiction.
Your post makes ZERO sense whatsoever.
No, this is what happens when there are more fun, easy to play games rather than glorified Excel spreadsheets sold and repackaged as a totally new strategy game experience.
Technology has changed significantly. There are less creative limitations today and more affordable tech bling to work with (say procedural destructible environments or just vibrant well made graphics). People who make games use those things to make more appealing games instead of AoE clones. People who play games like fun things, they play them, it’s not that complex.
May i remind you that some of the most iconic videogames that come to mind when you spell the word “videogame” lack any sort of deep strategtic thinking whatsoever? Super Mario Bros., Asteroids, Galaga, Pac-Man: all lack any sort of whatever “strategic thinking” is supposed to mean and yet they are not only fun but were made decades ago, disproving your point completely. If anything, i’ll add a coin to your piggybank of ignorance so you can “abuse your human condition for the sole purpose of monetizing dopamine addiction” by playing a genuine Galaga arcade cabinet if you manage to find one these days.
My point is: people like fun things, not everyone likes to think during their leisure and games (especially strategy games) used to be less complex with less planning involved in…well, playing them.
There are only 3 questions in the survey from when I went through it that relate to strategy:
Gameplay that requires long-term planning and strategy
– “Long-term” is very vague. Is a 45 min Starcraft game long term? Or short term? What about a game like Dark Souls? It’s incredibly strategic, but in realtime, not long term. It just won GOTY, but we’re not considering it as a strategic game here.
Gameplay that requires a lot of thinking and planning
– Strategy again, does not always include a lot of thinking and planning. Counter Strike has been around for many years, and is an incredibly strategic game at both the low levels and highest levels. It does not require a lot of thinking and planning. The strategies are simple and yet complex. I would answer no to this, because it’s not “a lot”, but it is very strategic.
Gameplay that requires careful decision-making
– This is a better, more neutral question that can actually reflect peoples preferences for strategy.
It looks like you’re mixing up strategy with tactical especially at the Counterstrike comparison.
Unless you’re telling me people other than pro teams do strategic planning to the point of (x and y members of enemy tean usually use this loadout, prone to this movement, usually take this route, usually will react with this if we do Z)there is little to no long term planning and emphasis on the “big picture”, which is literally in the definition of “strategy”
It’s like you mistook the planning of ground troops movement in a theater of WWII to be considered “strategic” when something more relevant would be e.g. the overall goals and consequences of securing the Normandy beach front to the tide of the rest of the war.
Thats not how the survey works, Fionn
The idea that modern gamers care less about strategy is really interesting to think about, but after taking the survey I think the numbers here are more a reflection of what games are available/popular in the marketplace than it is a reflection of changing attitudes.
The way the question is framed in the survey is ~do you enjoy ….~ or ~how do you behave…~ (not exact quotes). A person’s response to this kind of question likely won’t be shaped by their own internal/inherent preferences but rather will be shaped by their experiences in the games they currently play.
I haven’t done the research on what specific games were highly popular across these years empirically, but from my own life experience, I believe games over the past ten years have focused less on strategy and experimentation over time: (1) older popular games which focused on strategy like DOTA/World of Warcraft/Starcraft became better “mapped out” and streamers/streamed competitions encouraged players to focus on mastering “meta” gameplay rather than coming up with their own strategies, (2) new games that became popular in the last ten years have focused a lot more on fast-paced gameplay than strategy (ex: arena games like fortnite or overwatch), and (3) the new mobile medium of games has transformed the landscape of gaming substantially, and although i have relatively little experience with mobile games, I suspect relatively few mobile games would fall into the category of long-term/strategic gameplay – it would be difficult for them to do so because people often play these games in small chunks and would struggle to recall their long-term plans without extended playtime.
Long story short, I doubt that gamers and gaming preferences are changing. Instead, I think the nature of modern games and the environment in which we play them has drastically changed over the last ten years. And because modern popular games no longer emphasize long-term strategic type of gameplay, I think fewer gamers are likely to say they enjoy playing games of a strategic nature today than they were ten years ago.
“…people often play these games in small chunks and would struggle to recall their long-term plans without extended playtime.”
I completely agree. Gamers I know — including myself — play games to decompress (have fun) more than to stimuate (relieve boredom). As someone who loves strategy games but rarely plays them anymore, I feel stressed by the idea that I need to get it right the first time because I will have spent months (in real time) of short (1-3hr) play sessions on a campaign, rather than years ago when I was working less and overall had more freetime and less “cognitive overload” as it were and could play a game for 6hrs straight and really think and process and research my plan.
Oftentimes I will start even a game of Civ and I won’t be able to get back to it for a week and by then I don’t remember what my plans were and I just start a new game. That feels lame and frustrating after a while and I just stopped playing. :(
I’m very curious if the needs once satisfied best by strategy are now being satisfied elsewhere — such as creativity (design/discovery).
When I think about the way a player interacts with an RTS game or CIV and how they relate to Minecraft I could see a stronger satisfaction of similar motivations coming from a different source. Not that they’re not strategizing — it’s that their strategies are based on creative output instead of solving the puzzles created by developers.
Maybe we’re seeing the impact of more games, and more gamers, since 2024. What % is strategy games of all genres in 2024 vs. 2016? If it’s constant, never mind, but if it’s lower, then fewer games means fewer games to find and play them.
The survey itself isn’t very good. It recommended games to me that I hate. And suggested I don’t like to be immersed when I do. Immersion and enjoying a game’s story are not the same thing. E.g. I love feeling like I’m actually a part of the world and I’m able to interact with it, but I do not enjoy sitting through cutscenes.
The survey needs a lot more questions and they need to be much more detailed. The data you’re collecting with this survey is misleading and incomplete at best.
And with regards to this article, I have never heard of this survey. Nobody I know has taken this survey. I enjoy difficulty and long term strategic planning in games greatly, and so do most of my friends and people I interact with. To me this just suggests that whatever target market you selected to advertise this survey to has become less interested in strategic thinking over time.
I think it’s the vast quantity of games available to play today that make it harder to justify deep-learning a strategy game when they could play a simple game instead.
In 2023, there were 13k games released on Steam, in 2015, only 2.8k.
Gaming has grown steadily and significantly more popular in the past decade. I wonder whether that is reflected in the survey sample size, and how that might confound the results. Perhaps as gaming has become more mainstream, it has attracted more people who are not interested in games that require strategic thinking. Could it be that the number of gamers who prefer games with strategic-thinking hasn’t changed, but they now make up a smaller percentage of the total population of gamers than they have historically?
I’m a bit unhappy that in searching for hypotheses, this article seems to take the view that social media, either directly or indirectly through ‘polarization’ is likely to be the main cause. That idea certainly has a lot of currency, but I wish authors that engaged with it would do so more critically. We know for a fact that many stress factors have increased that can themselves at most partially be blamed on social media. Real household income has stagnated or decreased, young people face increased economic insecurity, the inability to rent or buy an appartment, let alone a house, mortality or injury from various causes has begun to increase. Minority groups are suffering from increased demonization and hate crimes. We know that any stressor has an impact on cognitive performance, poverty in particular is well studied. We can of course paint a world in which lower social media consumption would ameliorate these problems, but that is far from guaranteed. Worse, focusing on social media suggests that one might avoid these problems by reducing one’s own social media consumption, and while that may help, if we do want to blame the above ills on social media, then they are still ones that come from pervasive, not individual social media usage and wouldn’t be impacted by individual disengagement.
In sum, gaming as a leisure activity can’t help but be impacted by the difficulties in society. These are not limited to social media, and focusing on it, perhaps to seem less political by not mentioning economic issues or minority stress, seems somewhat weak.
I take a huge issue with your article. A lot of gamers are adults now that grew up in the GOLDEN AGE (in my opinion) of gaming and we do not have the time for these types of games anymore. We have families, kids, jobs, houses, etc… to take care of now. When I was younger, I sat and played strategy games all day on Saturday and Sunday. Now I am lucky if I have 20 minutes in a day to play a game. Strategy games are amazing, and I love them, but they take a ton of time to dedicate to really enjoy them. I would say there are millions of gamers out there that are not less interested in strategic thinking, but due to life do not have the time to really put into these types of games.
What about the board games? I feel like “Strategy” is one of the primary selling points when it comes to modern board games. There is also a trend for shorter playtime and a lighter ruleset, yet “easy to play, hard to master” is largely seen as the Holy Grail of game design.
A game being called a strategy game doesn’t make it somehow more strategic than a quick decision making game. In fact, strategy came from quick decision making situations like war, sports, chess etc., all stuff that wouldn’t be considered strategy according to your definition.
As one other commentator pointed out, fighting games are and have always been consistently among the highest peak of strategy for video games. Yet zero mention of that, because the simplistic method of selection here is just games based on “strategy”. Heck Pokemon battles were historically known for high level strategy, but we can’t count that either I’m sure.
Just awful stuff all around.
There’s a conflation here with Strategy (the planning/decision complexity), Excitement (fast pacing), and Challenge (mechanical skill mastery). Fighting games are “hard” because they leverage all 3, but the amount of Strategy involved is necessarily lower because there is a finite amount of thinking/planning that can go on in the micro-second response time needed to make/counter a move. For the most part, players have to fall back on learned heuristics/reactions because there is so little time to actually think/plan.
More importantly, Strategy, Excitement, and Challenge are 3 independent things. Consider that it would be programmatically trivial to make EUIV a much harder game if it could only be played at max speed without the option to pause. Such a game is more difficult not because the Strategy has changed, but because the pacing has changed.
Such a game would also not be commercially successful because it becomes cognitively overwhelming to play. In this sense, 4X/Grand Strategy games, RTS, MOBAs, Shooters, and Fighting games are making distinctive tradeoffs along the Strategy/Excitement/Challenge axes to create their own niches while staying on the cognitively-manageable side of “playable fun”.
We touch on the independent nature of these motivations in an earlier blog post on the cognitive threshold:
https://quanticfoundry.com/2016/01/20/game-genre-map-the-cognitive-threshold-in-strategy-games/
There haven’ been any good strategy games in nearly 10 years. I tried Age of Empires 4, and it was awful in comparison to Age of Empires 3. The campaign in 4 wouldn’t let me make any decisions, if I tried to do things even slightly out of order it would break the mission and I’d have to restart the map. Games like Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 were great, as was Dawn of War Soulstorm. But compare those to Dawn of War 2 which removed base building from the game, and Dawn of War 3 which attempted to add it back in, poorly. Don’t get me started on the Warcraft 3 Reforged fiasco. I’ve tried other base-building strategy games on steam, but they are all clunky to control, buggy, sometimes lacking english translations.
As a PC gamer, it feels like Strategy games just owned a larger share of the market back in the day. There are probably many factors.
I can mostly speak on RTS as that is what I usually played. That genre was carried by some heavy hitters like Blizzard and Westwood Studios. The latter has shut down and the former has moved on to more lucrative genres. RTS games are probably very difficult to monetize by today’s long term monetization practices. Making games as a business is no longer an uncharted territory. The market has been studied for decades by now and larger companies are zoning in on the most lucrative opportunities and strategy as a genre doesn’t offer much. You can’t just keep selling skins in a strategy game.
Also, once the RTS game is made, it’s pretty much set in stone, other than some balance tweaks and 1 or 2 expansion packs. The singleplayer is limited to a one and done campaign and then you have to move on to multiplayer. And the multiplayer scene is pretty much competitive only, which as it goes on, deters a lot of casuals, as the skill difference between a good player and a noob can feel much larger than in other games, as it involves perfecting both macro and micro management. They are hard to just pick up and play casually, you really have to be invested in it.
Additionally, as a side note, strategy games were much less graphically demanding than say a FPS shooter back then, which was always trying to push the limits of your PC. Which made them more affordable. And even if the performance in a strategy game wasn’t perfect, it didn’t hinder the gameplay as much as a drop in frames could affect a FPS match. Now it’s no longer the case as the most popular games don’t rely on pushing the technical limits and are focusing on gameplay instead of visual fidelity.
Maybe digital capitalism just sped up the process for the competition for attention and designing for desired time-on-machine consumer behaviour has shifted accordingly. The growth of digital distribution, growth of in-app purchases, microtransactions, the growth and spreading of mobile device use, in other words, the economic base changed the way the superstructure targets consumers.
If anything that allows people who say are into MMO’s to find more MMO’s to play rather than say sports games. Yes, perhaps more popular franchises such as Fortnite are tailored to whoever Epic thinks their average customer is, but that doesn’t stop Steam from recommending JRPG’s to their fans.
I think this has to do with mass conditioning that has been taking place in the gaming world for years. Let’s just first ask the question which type of behavior will be seen as more profitable for companies, taking note of the fact that a big portion or profits now come from in-game microtransactions. Would traits such as long-term thinking, planning, and careful decision-making be beneficial or rather the opposite? Namely, short-term thinking, emotional, and impulsive decision making?
The answer is quite clear on this one and it has been observed widely in consumer behavior studies as this social phenomenon is not just limited to gaming only. Short-term thinking, emotional, and impulsive decision making is the name of the game for these small mini-sales to put it like that. But how do you encourage behavior like this in a video game?
Well, it’s a bit like the Pavlov effect where you tweak the reward mechanisms of your games to reward certain type of behaviors compared to other ones. You see this with lootboxes or other similar forms of microtransactions where all the visual effects, and in-game rewards are designed in such a way that it very effectively triggers the more primal short-term impulse decision making part of our brain rather then the long term strategic part.
Psychologically a lot happens under the hood as well where players are being goaded into spending extra money in the game, usually by artificial barriers like time gating ways of getting certain important items for example. There exist a lot of psychological mechanisms like this and they are designed to upset the short term reward system of your brain, almost baiting it into making a person spend money to satisfy that part of the brain that has now been triggered by artificial boundary X.
Combine this with the rise of social media which feeds into this exact same type of behavior, namely short-term thinking, emotional, and impulsive decision making (looking at you Twitter). On top of that most of the big games also feed into this exact mentality. Most big games are fast paced twitch shooter type of games. There is still strategy involved but it is relegated to a lower importance compared to other aspects like Excitement and Challenge.
I think if you combine all these factors the results will indeed point to a decline in gamers that favor games that mainly employ long-term thinking, planning, and careful decision making. But that is not because of a new trend that has come from gamers themselves (some people like to interpret this as gamers getting dumber). This is the result of a mass conditioning that has been taking place in multiple parts of our society which disproportionally rewards short-term thinking, emotional, and impulsive decision as opposed to long-term thinking, planning, and careful decision-making. As a result interest in these aspects has declined gradually over the years including in gaming.
“Let’s just first ask the question which type of behavior will be seen as more profitable for companies, taking note of the fact that a big portion or profits now come from in-game microtransactions. Would traits such as long-term thinking, planning, and careful decision-making be beneficial or rather the opposite? Namely, short-term thinking, emotional, and impulsive decision making?”
Yes, it would he benedificial, see long-running MMO’s as the prime example and mobile strategy games.
I wonder how you measure who is casual or hardcore gamer.. do you simply ask them? Because most people would probably overestimate their abilities. Some people think playing a single game for 300h is a lot, some think playing for 6000h is nothing.
I also think this is due to social medias, smartphone access that creates shorter attention span and covid seems to correlate when I look at the graph drastically as well imo, but it could also simply be that you indirectly measure the popularity of these gaming genres and so strategy will be the most out of the normal automatically, because the last good strategy came out in 1999 and maybe a few years after that, but then it was silent, even from developers, there were simply no good RTS being developed in the last 20 years. I bet if you would look at the most popular genre in 2000, it would probably be strategy, but due to no innovation from devs in this area it simply isn’t as popular anymore.
Fascinating! Strategic games are more challenging to learn and master. In an oversaturated market where I don’t initially grok a dense, systems-heavy game after playing for one hour, I am most likely going to churn and try something else out, and perhaps increase my likelihood to avoid engaging with similar games in the future. To your points, we live in an age where attention is the most precious resource, and if *anything* is putting too many demands on my time and attention, my motivation to continue is low.
“To your points, we live in an age where attention is the most precious resource, and if *anything* is putting too many demands on my time and attention, my motivation to continue is low.”
No, that means that the product doesn’t offer a good proposition to you or is not attractive enough.
Say you are offered a trip to France or Italy at a really good discount, all amenities included. If you are simply not interested in travel or you are not interested in visiting any of these countries, even if the proposition is good, you’re going to reject it. But, if you do have any relevant interest and you have enough money to pay for the trip, chances are, you’re going abroad.
I’m not sure that it’s a decline or that gamers don’t want real time strategy games anymore. It’s that the games we are sold are trash, so it’s obvious no one is going to play them. There are political messages shoehorned into everything that aren’t really relevant to the story and once I even experienced a downgrade in the quality of the “RTS”. This is evidenced by the transition from “Dawn of war 2” to “Dawn of war 3”.
It doesn’t need to be made complicated. People want to play a game, not fill out a job application or answer a multiple choice questionnaire.
You know why Helldivers 2 did so well at first?
Not complicated. The story and gameplay were straightforward and there was no “bell curve” to the more advanced play. People don’t want to have to take a college course to play a game. It’s escapism, not this complicated genre spanning secret analytic.
Make cool units. Make the combat easy and enjoyable. Put just a little effort into the story, or don’t and pull it straight from history. That’s literally all that you need to do to sell an RTS.
If they re made dawn of war three in the style of dawn of war two, I’d buy that.
Hell if they re-made dawn of war three into the style of dawn of war one, i’d buy and play that, even.
Just because no one is buying Homeworld 3 doesn’t mean the RTS is dead. It just means no one trusts gaming companies anymore, and that if you want something done right you’re going to have to do it yourself.
[…] report from Quantic Foundry collected nine years of data from the researcher’s own Gamer Motivation Profile tool, which […]
[…] report from Quantic Foundry collected nine years of data from the researcher's own Gamer Motivation Profile tool, which tracks […]
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[…] report from Quantic Foundry collected nine years of data from the researcher’s own Gamer Motivation Profile tool, which […]
The question for me is, what do people think of when you ask them if they’re interested in “strategy” games. One gamer’s Fire Emblem is another’s Civilization. While both may be accurately called “strategy games” they remain complete distinct and very different experiences that appeal to different people in different ways.
Beyond that, there’s so many external factors at play in addition to this … the simple fact of how many “strategy” games get made these days, who they’re advertised to and how they’re even advertised at all. By all accounts, this study would imply strategy games are a dying market, but then you have outliers like the recent Unicorn Overlord—a game made by people that just wanted to make a game they wanted to play, with no real regard for the market implications—which was unexpectedly successful even among critics and players alike who said they usually did not play strategic games because of a fear of the complexity and a (supposedly) inability to be “good” at “those kinds of games”.
That is of course, an outlier, as stated, but the point remains. This survey feels like a correlation in search of a cause … but a correlation of what, exactly? The implication that social media somehow made gamers … well, not dumber, but more prone to “cognitive overload” is an explanation of sorts, but one that can’t exactly be measured or proven to any reasonable degree, especially over a 9-year period when people grow older, and tastes change, and market trends lean away from one genre towards another, and the economy takes a dip, and a pandemic hits, etc. etc. etc…
Ultimately, I think that’s my problem here. This study IS absolutely showing there’s *something* about this that’s true *somewhere*, to *some* extent, to *some* people. But *what* is true to what is being measured against which population? I appreciate the work that’s been done here, but I feel like the assumptions being drawn are, frankly, egregious. There’s more work that needs to be done, but I worry that clickbait headlines about “STUDY PROVES GAMERS ARE DUMBER” will end up drowning out the signal in noise. And that’s unfortunate.
Just a quick clarification that we didn’t ask gamers if they’re interested in “strategy games”. We asked them how interested they are in long-term thinking and planning when playing games. So this gets at gaming motivations specifically rather than interest in playing/buying specific game titles. For example, you can play Sims 4 very strategically if you choose to even though it’s not a “strategy game”. Similarly, you can play Civ VI reactively and just watch the world burn in disaster/zombie mode even though it’s a “strategy game”.
Here, here. Found a conclusion and worked backward from it while not collecting enough ancillary data to make the claims remotely valid.
[…] A report from Quantic Foundry that was published Tuesday found that 67% of gamers polled cared less about strategy in games than they did in 2015. It notes that not only is the drop identical between men and women, but that it predates the COVID-19 pandemic and doesn’t seem to correlate depending on country. So, people being locked inside playing video games aren’t to blame for the lack of interest. If anything, the turn has been a gradual, downward trend over the past nine years. […]
[…] Raport z Quantic Foundry opublikowany we wtorek wykazał, że 67% ankietowanych graczy mniej przejmowało się strategią w grach niż w 2015 r. Zauważa, że spadek nie tylko jest identyczny w przypadku mężczyzn i kobiet, ale występuje przed pandemią Covid-19 i nie wydają się być powiązane w zależności od kraju. Zatem ludzie zamknięci w domach i grający w gry wideo nie są winni braku zainteresowania. W każdym razie zwrot ten miał charakter stopniowy i spadkowy w ciągu ostatnich dziewięciu lat. […]
[…] A report from Quantic Foundry that was published Tuesday found that 67% of gamers polled cared less about strategy in games than they did in 2015. It notes that not only is the drop identical between men and women, but that it predates the COVID-19 pandemic and doesn’t seem to correlate depending on country. So, people being locked inside playing video games aren’t to blame for the lack of interest. If anything, the turn has been a gradual, downward trend over the past nine years. […]
[…] report from Quantic Foundry collected nine years of data from the researcher’s own Gamer Motivation Profile tool, which […]
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[…] report from Quantic Foundry collected nine years of data from the researcher’s own Gamer Motivation Profile tool, which […]
What a flawed study. There are zero follow-up questions or even motivational ones that determine why people don’t play as many strategy games. It then takes data from a separate phenomenon and tries to correlate it to its findings yet does not establish a link between those surveyed and their consumption along that metric. It also arbitrarily separates games into singular categories when something like League of Legends, Valorant etc. all have deeply strategic elements.
Seems like you had a conclusion and worked backward. When the most likely reason is the genre is stale and is priced to the point of unlocking all characters and factions for something like Total War Warhammer is almost another $300 on top of the game price for all three games. Meanwhile, you have League of Legends, Path of Exile, and Valorant all free to play. Which are highly strategic beyond only defining them as a turn-based game like CIV.
“There are zero … motivational [questions] … It also arbitrarily separates games into singular categories …”
We didn’t analyze gamers’ interest in specific genres or put games into singular genre categories. The analysis is based on analyzing motivations for playing video games. You’re doing what you’re accusing us of; you’ve misconstrued our analysis to push your own conclusion.
[…] companies have access to an entire statistical section that shows the direction to take. Recently, Quantic Foundry, group specialized in video game scienceshared the results of an exercise in which 1.57 million players participated in a period that […]
[…] or XCOM franchises are becoming increasingly unappealing to modern gaming audiences. A study from Quantic Foundry collected data using the researcher’s gamer motivation profile (GMP) tool over the last nine […]
1) 20 years ago the number of hardcore players was greater than now or not?
2) advertising and popularization of strategies against spectacular action games
3) has the number of console gamers increased compared to the number of PC gamers over the past 20 years?
4) I wouldn’t want to play Civilization or XCOM on a gamepad on a huge TV.
5) a console is often purchased for joint leisure, and a personal computer is purchased for oneself.
My honest idea is that gaming raised more attention regarding ESPORT.
We know how Stacraft 2[Strategic game] is in big decline due to other game outperforming it.
More kids are willing to join games like LoL/Dota2/CS and other games that they can play with friends.
They see strategic games boring and not interesting. It’s also easier to blame other meanwhile in strategic games you only can blame yourself for your mistakes. Also new strategic games require more compute power and people don’t have machine to run this type of games. Also strategic game is mostly related to PC and alot people shifted into console and mobile.
What about other games? You can run lol on crappy laptop.
If this is the fidelity of market studies convincing devs to bet the studio on the 4th Civilization clone this year that would explain a lot
My take: our culture (western) has trended more towards being spontaneous and having instant gratification. Games that have a high degree of strategy (both RTS and TBS) have historically low sales and thus the market has trended towards satisfying the wants of our culture.
Outlier in all of this however are action RPG games that have a mixture of both challenge and strategy, such as games developed From Software (Elden Ring, Armored Core, Dark Souls). These games are not only challenging and strategic, they also require more player input during combat and punish players for attacking too many times in succession (button spamming).
branching and development are not strategy at all, but stuff you got to learn. once you understand that, you can see that this stuff is boring and stupid for strategic minds. those who learn the most win, not those who like to think. its like a vocabulary test versus understanding.
(just exagerating a little here to get the point transported)
the best strategy (and longtermplaning) games are dead simlpe, like go.
so maybe its not overload or social media or people getting dumber but games getting dumber by putting in more and more senseless branching, instead of fresh ideas and mechanics?
[…] deviennent de moins en moins attrayants pour le public des joueurs modernes. Une étude de Fonderie quantique a collecté des données à l’aide de l’outil de profil de motivation […]
My personal theory is that there aren’t as many social rewards for Strategic Thinking anymore. With the rise of competitive games came a rise in meta gaming, and I think it bullies out certain other types of play, such as Strategic and Creative.
With the release any remotely competitive or strategic game, there are guides on how to play the game ‘correctly’, with hours, or even before release. And these strategies start to dominate the community. In Team Competitive games, you can be ostracized for not playing the established meta of the game, even if you have good reason to play off meta. So at the high end of a strategy game, it becomes less about strategy, and more about your ability to execute a particular meta.
I remember even in the release of the latest Diablo game, I saw a lot of people I knew not even try to make their own build, or read their skill tree. They just followed a meta build they found online because they didn’t want to ‘play wrong.’
Been thinking about this for a day and think I could have worded what I was saying a little better.
In the time period shown here, we’ve seen the rise of social media and thus the rise of gaming influencers.
I often feel like the overall affect of this is that gamers are looking for someone to tell them the ‘correct’ way to play, as opposed to thinking about what they’re playing.
I thought your initial comment was clear and insightful. Thanks for sharing this!
So why don’t you try to publish this study so we can get a grasp of the scientific quality of your work?
Feel free to review the 35+ published peer-reviewed academic articles on gaming and virtual worlds I have authored to evaluate my scientific background: http://nickyee.com/cv.html
Also, we’re a market research company in the commercial sector and this is a blog.
[…] lentement dans l’obscurité, si l’on en croit une nouvelle étude réalisée par Quantic Foundry en est une indication. […]
I think the very easy explanation is that strategy games has lost almost all of its budget the last 20 years because of marketing from GPU companies and computer advances in graphics compared to physics and AI. But you can look at games like Baldur’s gate 3 and you will see that the demand is still there just very few quality releases. That will of course skew you questioner if people have grown up without good games in the strategy department.
[…] Quelle: Quantic Foundry […]
I have to wonder how many other people still love Strategy games or thinking deeply but are mentally burnt out?
I loved Unicorn Overlord and deeply avoided any media that might affect how I approach the game or think about the strategy so I know I don’t like thinking or Strategy less than I did 10 years ago but also I have a hard time finishing campaigns for Total Warhammer 3 or Civilization style games just because after sitting down for 3-5 hours my brain is done and I’m kind of over the experience. It is not a bad game, but my brain is made of pudding and I am at the core a big dumb idiot.
Sometimes after working my 8am to 6pm job that requires problem solving, I just need to veg out with Warframe or something that doesn’t require me to be a thinking functional human.
I believe the questions: “Getting every possible star / trophy / unlock in a game” and “Completing all possible missions and achievements in a game” might cause some confusion among people answering.
specially because throphies and achievements are the same thing in Playstation and xbox worlds, but they are represented in different questions.
As an Xbox player, I do enjoy a lot ” “Completing all possible missions (…)” but I rarely complete ” (…) achievements in a game”
Achievements here being the actual pop up message in Xbox system. as for me they are 2 different things.
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[…] industria del gaming ha experimentado un importante cambio. Un estudio reciente realizado por Quantic Foundry investigó cuán atractivos son los diferentes aspectos de los juegos para los usuarios y sus […]
Early adopters. What is the absolute number of players still interested in strategy games, based on your sample percentages? 2015 vs 2024 must be roughly a 50% increase in number of gamers.
Note that we’re not analyzing the “% of gamers interested in Strategy games”, but the appeal of Strategy as a gaming motivation. But that aside, there’s also the additional complexity in your question because what the market refers to as “Strategy games” has itself shifted over the past decade. For example, RTS used to a mainstream genre, and it’s been relegated to a niche genre. Many commenters on our Reddit post also debated whether Strategy games have gotten simpler over time. So it’s possible for the “% interest in Strategy games” to remain roughly the same in the face of an overall decline in Strategy (the motivation) if the market has been accommodating these trends (e.g., via internal playtesting/UX research).
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Who is to say what strategy means in games, I would argue that games like Dota 2 and CSGO would fall into this article as use of strategy but the examples say otherwise. The use of strategy has changed over the years, it is no longer long term planning alone but rather a combination of short term reaction based games + long term planning incorporated into one. You can not win high ranked competitive games like Dota, CS, Battleroyals without planning ahead and using different strategies.
The game type of things like Total War, Age of Empires and the like has become stale, and the interest fall off is mainly due to lack of innovation and the deterrence of game quality over all in the industry. No one wants to play strategy games anymore because they just suck. The only one I would put in that class that did well is Baldurs Gate 3 and that won game of the year, so there is definitely interest still.
Dota 2 and CSGO absolutely fall into the continuous spectrum of how we define Strategy. Note that there are 12 motivations in our model. We cover this tradeoff between reaction speed (Excitement) and long-term planning (Strategy) in an earlier blog post: https://quanticfoundry.com/2016/01/20/game-genre-map-the-cognitive-threshold-in-strategy-games/
[…] I came across a study on preferences among gamers. As it turns out, gamers nowadays enjoy any kind of strategic aspect in their games a lot less than […]