Gamer Motivation Insight Report

(New 2024 Version)

A sweeping, detailed, up-to-date analysis of gaming motivations and game preferences by gender and age in this 77-page report based on 520,000+ gamers:

  • Easy-to-read charts on how the 12 gaming motivations change across gender and age.
  • Get concise explanations of what each demographic cohort looks for in games.
  • Understand the motivation anchors and safe differentiators for each demographic cohort.
  • Detailed reference tables of popular games and genres for each demographic cohort.
  • Use these cohorts to develop personas and tailor effective messages.

We generated this report using data from 520,000+ gamers between the ages of 13 and 64 collected between January 2022 and December 2023.

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Explore the Content in Our Detailed 77-Page Report

Identify Key Motivation Changes & Inflection Points

Gaming motivations vary across age and gender, and this variance looks very different depending on the motivation. Some motivations remain very stable across the age span, while others decline dramatically with age. Use the charts and analysis in this section to understand important inflection points when motivations suddenly change, as well as identify periods of relative stability.

This section contains detailed charts and explanations of how each of the 12 motivations in our Gamer Motivation Model changes between the ages of 13-60 and broken down by gender.

Nick Yee and Nic Ducheneaut have over 40 peer-reviewed papers on gaming and virtual worlds. Our research on online gaming motivations research has been cited over 4,500 times. Our current Gamer Motivation Model was developed via factor analysis of survey data, and this report was generated using data from over 520,000+ gamers.

We created a Gamer Motivation Profile where gamers could complete a 5-minute survey, get their personalized motivation profile, and share it online. Our traffic comes from a combination of organic searches (we’re top ranked for “Gamer Motivation”, “Game Recommendation”, “Gamer Type”, etc.) and social media sharing.

Survey data from 524,949 gamers was used to generate this report. 73% of the respondents were male, 22% were female, and 6% were non-binary. The median age was 23, with a range from 13-64, and a standard deviation of 7.09.

12% of the respondents self-identified as casual, 69% as core, and 19% as hardcore. In terms of platform, 80% regularly game on PCs, 53% on consoles, 33% on smartphones, 26% on handheld consoles, and 8% on VR.

The sample has the following regional distribution: North America: 39.8%, Western Europe 20.7%, South America: 9.5%, Eastern Europe: 6.0%, Southeast Asia: 5.3%, Scandinavia: 3.7%, Southern Europe: 3.5%, Australasia: 3.5%, Central America: 2.9%, East Asia, 2.6%, Middle East: 1.7%, Africa: 0.7%, Central Asia: 0.1%

Respondents to the Gamer Motivation Profile come from organic searches for gaming-related terms (we’re top ranked for “Gamer Motivation”, “Game Recommendation”, “Gamer Type”, etc.) as well as social media sharing from gamers who share their motivation profile results. No financial incentive is provided to our respondents. Respondents primarily take the survey to get an accurate assessment of their gaming motivations and this creates a high quality data set from highly-motivated respondents (compared to the typical issues related to low-effort respondents in panel-based financially-incentivized surveys).

Overall, our data sample leans towards a core PC/console gamer audience and is most robust in tracking the trends in the core gamer population.

Learn What Matters To Each Demographic Cohort

We partition the audience into 10 demographic cohorts (by gender and age) and analyze each cohort. We provide the data at multiple levels of granularity and always start each section with a concise summary of the most important findings. Understand the broad differences between demographic cohorts before diving into the more detailed analysis for each cohort.

We use the following age ranges to define cohorts in the report (further broken down by gender):

15 – 24
25 – 34
35 – 44
45 – 54
55 – 64

Prioritize Game Features and Messaging Based on Motivation Profiles

We provide the motivation profile charts for each of the 10 cohorts. These charts surface the motivations that each cohort over-indexes and under-indexes on relative to the full dataset. Use these charts to prioritize game features for specific audiences and to tailor messaging to specific demographic cohorts.

Comparison charts across gender within each age cohort help clarify the largest differences and commonalities in each age range–these map to important design challenges and opportunities in terms of coverage and satisfaction.

Navigate Uncertainty with Maps of Coverage and Risk

Our Motivation Rubric Maps surface the game features that are considered core and necessary for each cohort (i.e., low risk, high coverage) and those that can be used as differentiators (i.e., high risk, lower coverage). These maps provide empirical guidance to maximizing audience cohort, minimizing risk, and making the best bets in terms of differentiating your game in a crowded gaming landscape.

In the report, a Rubric Map is provided for each of the 10 demographic cohorts.

Here are 3 take-aways from this example map:

  • The low appeal of Competition and its very low variance means that if we’re designing a game for this cohort, a core design constraint is that competition is minimized and that the player can choose to experience the game in a non-adversarial path.
  • Blending a rich world setting with chaotic mayhem is a safe bet for this cohort. Similarly, this cohort is looking for slower-paced, more accessible gameplay.
  • Players in this cohort vary considerably in how much they care about Strategy and Community. To maximize coverage of this audience, it’s important to provide a variety of options (or branching game modes) that vary on strategic complexity and social interaction. Alternatively, the game team may decide to focus on a niche within this cohort—e.g., a game that leans more both towards Strategy and Community, and understanding that doing so means they will alienate some gamers in this cohort that don’t want these things.

Reference Popular Games Within Each Cohort

We provide both concise summary tables and detailed charts of the popular (and unpopular) games for each demographic cohort, and the psychological gaming emphasis that drives each cohort.

The QF Score is an odds ratio that adjusts for games that are pervasively popular within the gaming community and would otherwise always show up near the top in terms of raw percentage of mentions.

Unadjusted raw percentages are the simple frequencies of each game title listed as a favorite divided by the total sample size. But this method would mean that highly popular games (like Fortnite or Skyrim) tend to dominate the lists and make it difficult to see and analyze games that are disproportionately popular within each cohort. The game lists we provide divide the local frequency by the baseline frequency. Thus a QF score of 2 means this cohort mentioned a game title at twice the baseline frequency.

Identify Popular Genres Within Each Cohort

We cross-reference IGDB meta tags to analyze the popularity of game genres within each demographic cohort.

In the Gamer Motivation Profile survey, we don’t ask about genre preference directly. Instead, we ask gamers to list game titles they enjoy playing. We maintain a clean, canonical list of game titles by cross-referencing with IGDB, and IGDB also provides  metatag information for all games (e.g., genres, themes, platforms).

By looking up the genre tags associated with each game in each cohort’s popular games list, we can infer the popular genres for each cohort.

Table of Contents

Our 77-page report begins with an executive summary and an overview of the trends and opportunities. After a very brief description of our Gamer Motivation Model, the main report consists of 7 sections that explore how age and gender intersect with gaming motivations, popular game titles, and game genres.

This report is provided by Quantic Foundry LLC for the sole use of the recipient. Use is only authorized for internal purposes. Prior written permission from Quantic Foundry is required should the recipient wish to pass on the Report in any form, electronic or otherwise, to any third party.

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