Notes on The v2.3 Sample
It is difficult to get a representative sample of gamers across genres and platforms due to the breadth and variation of gaming. Recent controversies have also shown that what constitutes a “game” or “gamer” is itself a matter of debate.
Here at Quantic Foundry, we recognize the generalizability problem and hope to work on it in two ways. First, we’ll provide descriptive statistics around each sample so readers can interpret the findings with the sampling biases in mind. Second, we’re hopeful that the profile tools will allow us to attract more representative samples of gamers over time.
Overview
The v2.3 sample consists of 239,205 gamers (counted as unique IP addesses). The Gamer Motivation Profile allows gamers to take a 5-minute survey to get a personalized report of their gaming motivations, and see how they compare with other gamers. The 12 motivations that are measured in our model were identified via statistical analysis of how gaming motivations cluster together.
Traffic Source
Gamers primarily found the Gamer Motivation Profile via social media sharing (67% of all traffic) on Facebook (91% of all social media traffic) and Twitter (4.9% of social media traffic). Referrals from other websites accounted for 26% of all traffic, primarily from an article on Ars Technica (62%). The remainder (5%) was from organic search.
Country
Gamers from 191 countries participated in the Gamer Motivation Profile. The countries with the largest number of participants were the United States (105k), Canada (12.7k), United Kingdom (11.6k), Brazil (8.5k), Australia (7.3k), Italy (7.2k), Poland (6.1k), Indonesia (6k), Denmark (5.4k), Philippines (4.6k), Germany (4.2k), Sweden (3.7k), Singapore (2.8k), France (3.0k), Netherlands (2.7k), Spain (2.1k), Russia (2.1k), Malaysia (2.1k), Turkey (1.9k), Chile (1.9k), Norway (1.7k), followed by a long tail of other countries.
Gender
81% of the sample identified as male, 18% identified as female, and 1% identified as other. Among those that identified as other, the most common descriptors (open-ended text-field) were agender, genderfluid, genderqueer, transgender, and non-binary (in that order of frequency).
Age
Age ranged from 13 to 77. The median was 25, with a standard deviation of 7.84. The 25th percentile was 21 and the 75th percentile was 30.
Gamer Type & Hours Played
11% of respondents identified as casual, 68% identified as mid-core/core, and 21% identified as hardcore.
Respondents were asked how many days in a typical week they regularly game for at least 30 minutes. 7% indicated 0-1 day, 18% indicated 2-3 days, 25% indicated 4-5 days, and 49% indicated 6-7 days.
Platform
Respondents were asked to indicate platforms they regularly gamed on (and could select more than one platform). 55% selected console, 83% selected PC, 36% selected smartphone/tablet, and 26% selected handheld console.
Genre
Respondents were asked to enter up to 3 favorite game genres. We created a lexicon based on the top 80 entries and used fuzzy string matching to code all the entries. We then collapsed related categories. For example, “FPS, “First Person Shooter”, “1st Person Shooter”, “Shooter”, and all Third Person Shooter variants were collapsed into one single “Shooter” category.
The most commonly mentioned genres were: Shooter (24%), MMO (21%), RPG (19%), Action-Adventure (18%), and Strategy (16%).
Sample Bias
Compared with the ESA 2015 factsheet of all gamers, our sample has a far higher proportion of male gamers and the average age is far lower. Also, our sample consists of a higher percentage of core gamers (the top game genre in the ESA sample was social games) with a skew towards PC gamers and RPG gamers.