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.
10 02, 2016

As Gamers Age, The Appeal of Competition Drops The Most. Strategy is The Most Age-Stable Motivation.

By |2016-10-17T20:02:33-07:00February 10th, 2016|Analytics, Video Games|81 Comments

When I first started running large online surveys of gamers in the days of EverQuest, I was a 20-year-old undergrad psych major. I remember looking at the age distribution of those online gamers where about 20-30% were over the age of 30 (and a fair number above 40), and thinking to myself, wow those gamers [...]

20 01, 2016

Game Genre Map: The Cognitive Threshold in Strategy Games

By |2016-10-17T20:02:33-07:00January 20th, 2016|Analytics, Video Games|97 Comments

The Gamer Motivation Profile allows gamers to take a 5-minute survey to get a personalized report of their gaming motivations. Currently, we have data from over 140,000 gamers worldwide. In the survey, we also ask gamers to list their favorite game titles. This allows us to pivot between gamers and games--we can use the aggregated [...]

5 01, 2016

Gaming Motivations Align with Personality Traits

By |2016-10-17T20:02:33-07:00January 5th, 2016|Analytics, Video Games|9 Comments

In our last blog post, we presented a visual clustering of gaming motivations based on data from over 140,000 gamers, showing how they group into 3 high-level clusters. Here’s that map again below for ease of reference. In this post, we’re going to explain the unintuitive Action-Social cluster and show you that gaming motivations are [...]

15 12, 2015

The Gamer Motivation Model in Handy Reference Chart and Slides

By |2016-10-17T20:02:33-07:00December 15th, 2015|Analytics, Video Games|27 Comments

A total of over 140,000 gamers worldwide have now completed the Gamer Motivation Profile. Statistical analysis of how motivations cluster together is consistent with what we reported earlier. Want to know how you compare with other gamers on these motivations? Take a 5-minute survey and get your Gamer Motivation Profile. To make the Gamer Motivation Model [...]

18 10, 2015

The Path to the Game Recommender Engine

By |2016-10-17T20:02:33-07:00October 18th, 2015|Analytics, Video Games|5 Comments

Try out the Game Recommender Engine! Around the time when we figured out how to identify the most popular games for each gaming motivation, we realized we had solved almost all of the analytic components needed to provide personalized game recommendations to gamers who take the Gamer Motivation Profile. In our feedback surveys, this was [...]

4 09, 2015

Game Audience Profiles

By |2016-10-17T20:02:33-07:00September 4th, 2015|Analytics, Video Games|10 Comments

When we started developing the Gamer Motivation Profile, we wanted to make sure we had a way of debugging any potential issues with the motivation scores. So as a reference point, we asked gamers to list their favorite video games (up to 3). The data we received from over 100,000 gamers allowed us to do [...]

28 08, 2015

Gender Differences in Gaming Motivations Align with Stereotypes, but Small Compared To Age Differences

By |2016-10-17T20:02:35-07:00August 28th, 2015|Analytics, Video Games|11 Comments

The following findings are based on data from 107,100 gamers who have taken the Gamer Motivation Profile since late June. Gender Differences We’ll first focus on gamers from the US (n = 51,283). The chart below plots the gender means across the 12 gaming motivations measured by the Gamer Motivation Profile. The y-axis represents z-scores [...]

11 08, 2015

How the Guild Name Generator Works

By |2016-08-11T16:26:50-07:00August 11th, 2015|Analytics, Video Games|Comments Off on How the Guild Name Generator Works

Between 2006 – 2012, much of our gaming research focused on World of Warcraft. During that time, one side project we worked on involved an analysis of over 22,000 guild names in World of Warcraft. We found that a basic grammar was able to parse about 90% of the names. This allowed us to create [...]

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