Over the 10 years we’ve been running Quantic Foundry and engaging with indie-all-the-way-to-AAA clients on a wide variety of gamer research/marketing projects, one pattern I’ve noticed is that clients often perceive survey panel samples, especially general population (gen pop) survey samples, as a sort of “cure all”. They tend to suddenly become much less inquisitive [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
[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 [...]
(This post is the second in a two-part series that recaps our GDC 2020 talk.) In the previous post, we presented a player segment model based on our entire data set of 500,000+ gamers who have taken the Gamer Motivation Profile. We explored both a 9-segment solution in depth and also surfaced what would happen [...]
(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 [...]
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 [...]