FAQ
What is the scope of Quantic Foundry’s client experience in the gaming industry?
From casual mobile games to AAA franchises, Quantic Foundry has worked with over 200 game developers and publishers to deliver actionable insights to:
- Identify target audiences for early game concepts.
- Boost player acquisition and retention for live games.
- Surface unmet needs in existing genres and games.
- Prioritize features for games in development.
This information is publicly available on our website.
What is the sample size and scope of game titles covered in the development of the Gamer Motivation Model?
Quantic Foundry’s data and the Gamer Motivation Model is based on over 2 million gamers across 4,000+ game titles covering all game genres.
Does Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivation Model assess psychological drivers or behavioral preferences?
This is somewhat of a false dichotomy. Quantic Foundry is assessing psychological traits that differentiate gamers and drive how they choose and engage with video games.
In psychometrics, particularly with abstract constructs like personality traits and motivations, it is standard practice to construct survey questions that focus on more grounded everyday behaviors to make it easier for people to understand and respond. The responses to these statements are then statistically modeled to assess the underlying latent traits. Thus, in validated instruments to assess the Big 5 (the current gold standard in personality assessment), there are many behavioral statements like the following:
- Leave my belongings around
- Start conversations
- Talk to a lot of different people at parties
- Spend time reflecting on things
This reliance on behavioral statements is true not only for the Big 5 but almost all personality trait measures (see Appendix A in this paper). In short, the methodology of using survey statements on behavioral preferences to model psychological traits is standard practice and established in psychometrics. And finally, it is often easiest to explain an abstract psychological trait by providing examples of how it is expressed in everyday behaviors (for example, see the descriptions of each Big 5 factor on the Wikipedia page), and doing so doesn’t render it “just observed preferences” rather than a psychological trait.
Some market research vendors offer hundreds of traits in their audience profiles. Why does Quantic Foundry only assess 12 gaming motivations?
From a data science and psychometric perspective, the inclusion of hundreds of traits is a failure of dimensionality reduction and not a selling point. Because of the high-level of correlations among personality traits, there is rapid diminishing returns beyond a small handful of traits. This is the key empirical finding of the Big 5 research paradigm in the field of personality psychology: the vast majority of personality trait differences can be distilled into 5 factors. Similarly, in our empirical research based on data from over 2 million gamers, the vast majority of gaming preferences can be distilled into the 12 motivations in our model.
Does Quantic Foundry offer consulting services or custom research?
Quantic Foundry is a boutique agency that works with clients on both short-term and long-term projects based on their specific business needs, research questions, and where they are in the development cycle. Our services are highly tailored to individual clients, whether in terms of consulting projects or ongoing support. These include custom client projects such as developing bespoke motivation models for specific gaming niches, testing new game concepts and unmet needs within a target genre audience, conducting psychographic segmentations directly on a client’s player base, or developing new metrics and visualizations for audience overlap between game titles.
How do Quantic Foundry’s reporting and services provide actionable insight for industry clients?
Our Gamer Motivation Model describes gaming motivations in plain-English, well-understood terms and has become widely adopted and referenced in the gaming industry across design, marketing, and business roles specifically because it bridges gaming motivations and potential game features and mechanics to engage them.
Helping developers quantify and rank the unmet motivation needs in their games is directly actionable in terms of design improvements. For example, identifying the unmet motivation needs across the player segments in the audience of a live services game helps a developer/publisher prioritize features under development, model ROI of each feature based on audience coverage and spend, and tailor messaging to engage current and lapsed players.
Additionally, our motivation model and data across thousands of game titles allow developers/publishers to not only make design improvements but to make sure they’re creating the right game for the right audience to begin with, whether this is identifying shared motivations for a genre mashup concept, identifying which motivations are fixed pillars and which motivations are more flexible and can be used to grow the audience of an existing franchise, and to examine evolving trends in gaming motivations over time to anticipate audience shifts.
What makes Quantic Foundry’s data unique?
Quantic Foundry’s data is based on intrinsically-motivated respondents whose primary goal is to get accurate gaming profiles and gaming recommendations for themselves. They are not financially incentivized and this leads to much higher data quality. More importantly, our data comes entirely from real gamers.
Some market research vendors use AI to dramatically inflate a small human respondent data sample to create a much larger data set. For example, they might collect survey data on a small handful of questions and then have AI confabulate responses to hundreds of other traits/questions that were not directly assessed. Instead of directly stating their sample size, they use misleading phrases like “representing billions of people globally”, hoping you mistake “representing” for “actually having data from”. We’ve seen companies frame this data hyperinflation as an “innovation” and use slippery marketing buzzwords such as “AI-powered assessments” to obfuscate what they’re doing. But these aren’t innovations at all; they’re admissions of not having the actual data in the first place. It’s the same marketing trick as a drink labeled “made with real orange juice” which is technically true even if it contains less than 1% juice.
Knowing where your data comes from and how it’s being processed will be critically important in the coming months and years as AI permeates the market/user research world. As we are bombarded with buzzwords and fads, all touting innovation, now more than ever is a good time to check that your data sources are organic.