About Nick Yee

Nick is the co-founder and analytics lead of Quantic Foundry. He combines social science and data science to understand gamer behavior in large-scale game data.
21 05, 2024

Gamers Have Become Less Interested in Strategic Thinking and Planning

By |2024-05-24T01:24:10-07:00May 21st, 2024|Analytics, Video Games|112 Comments

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 [...]

7 11, 2023

Beam Me Up: The Demographic and Motivational Appeal of Sci-Fi

By |2023-11-07T10:53:17-08:00November 7th, 2023|Analytics, Survey Findings, Video Games|10 Comments

Over lunch a while back, Nic Ducheneaut mentioned that he enjoys sci-fi movies and TV shows so much (and there’s so little sci-fi content these days) that he’ll watch any sci-fi content he comes across on streaming platforms regardless of the specific plot or subgenre (e.g., space travel, aliens, post-apocalyptic, dystopia). And that got us [...]

20 03, 2023

Playing Outside the Binary: 6 Things We Learned From 14,000 Transgender & Non-Binary Gamers

By |2023-03-24T12:47:15-07:00March 20th, 2023|Analytics, Video Games|22 Comments

Historically, any quantitative analysis of trans and non-binary gamers would run into the practical issue of small sample size. For example, in our own data set, we saw a stable 1-2.5% prevalence of trans and non-binary gamers in the Gamer Motivation Profile between 2015 and 2019. So even with a survey sample of 1,000 gamers [...]

27 01, 2023

A Matter of Perspective: Female Gamers and Older Gamers Prefer Third-Person Perspective

By |2023-01-27T11:42:25-08:00January 27th, 2023|Analytics, Video Games|18 Comments

Video games provide us with many different ways to view the game world and these vary both across genres and within the same game—whether this is top-down perspective in a 4X Strategy game or changing between first-person perspective (1PP) and third-person perspective (3PP) in an MMO. The preference for 1PP and 3PP is interesting to [...]

5 08, 2021

About one out of three men prefer playing female characters. Rethinking the importance of female protagonists in video games.

By |2021-08-05T12:19:35-07:00August 5th, 2021|Survey Findings, Video Games|78 Comments

The introduction of playable female characters into genres/franchises that historically only had playable male characters often elicits arguments in gamer forums around the low prevalence of female gamers in that particular genre/franchise and how adding female characters is pandering to a demographic that hardly plays the game to begin with. Apart from the “is-ought” fallacy, [...]

4 03, 2021

Picking Sides: How Faction Choice Creates Cohorts with Different Motivation Profiles

By |2021-03-04T10:54:47-08:00March 4th, 2021|Analytics, Video Games|5 Comments

[This post is co-authored with Chris Karzmark, a mixed-methods UX & games researcher, and recent Ph.D. graduate from UCSC in Cognitive Psychology.] Many games ask players to pick a faction. Strategy games typically put this choice at the beginning of a match (e.g., Zerg, Terran, or Protoss in Starcraft) while RPGs might offer branching versions [...]

17 08, 2020

Player Segments Based on Gaming Motivations

By |2021-12-10T00:36:29-08:00August 17th, 2020|Analytics, Video Games|18 Comments

(This post is the first in a two-part series that recaps our GDC 2020 talk.) While the underlying math can get complicated and there are many different algorithms for player segmentation, in the simplest terms, segment analysis identifies the distinct subgroups within an audience. So members of each segment share similar traits, but they are [...]

2 07, 2020

COVID-19 Reduced Appeal of Challenge and Excitement in Gaming–But Only Marginally

By |2020-09-03T12:58:38-07:00July 2nd, 2020|Analytics, Video Games|8 Comments

Did COVID-19 have any impact on why people play video games? Beyond the shared, global anxiety of watching the pandemic unfold, many countries put in place similar shelter-in-place orders in roughly the same timeframe, disrupting work, leisure, and social interactions. Certainly, being kept indoors and having fewer sources of entertainment has boosted spending and engagement [...]

10 10, 2019

Podcast: Analyzing Gamer Behavior, Psychology, and Motivations

By |2019-10-10T12:49:22-07:00October 10th, 2019|Video Games|Comments Off on Podcast: Analyzing Gamer Behavior, Psychology, and Motivations

We were recently interviewed by ironSource in a podcast where we touched on a broad range of topics related to Quantic Foundry's ongoing research in gaming motivations: How we developed our motivation model, and why we decided to focus on gaming motivations An overview of the 12 motivations captured in our framework How game companies [...]

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