Video games that involve deep levels of strategy are becoming less and less appealing, according to new research.
Quantic Foundry's report collected nine years of data from the researchers' proprietary Gamer Motivation Profile tool, which tracks how appealing different aspects of games are to different people. Categories include destruction, excitement, competition, community, challenge, strategy, completion, power, fantasy, story, discovery and design.
Quantic Foundry looked back at what motivates gamers over the years and found that everything has remained relatively consistent except for strategy. “Gamers who score high on this factor enjoy games that require careful decision-making and planning,” the summary states. “They like to think through options and possible outcomes.”
“These can be decisions related to balancing resources and competing objectives, managing diplomacy, or finding the optimal long-term strategy. Not only do we tend to enjoy combat, we also tend to enjoy seeing our carefully laid plans come to fruition in games like Civilization, Cities: Skylines, and Europa Universalis. ”
But through 1.7 million surveys, Quantic Foundry found that two-thirds of strategy fans around the world (excluding China, where gamers have a “vastly different gaming motivation profile”) have lost interest in this element of video games. “67% of gamers today care less about strategic thinking and planning when playing games than the average gamer in June 2015,” the report reads.
“We looked at long-term trends across the 12 motivations and found that many motivations have remained stable or experienced slight fluctuations over the past nine years,” Quantic Foundry said. “Strategy was the notable exception: it has declined significantly over the past nine years, and the magnitude of this change was more than double the next largest change.”
Although this trend was analyzed, Quantic Foundry could not find a clear distinction between, for example, male and female gamers, or between gamers inside and outside the United States. This was compared to other trends related to decreasing attention spans, such as today's YouTube videos becoming shorter. However, Quantic Foundry acknowledged that “it is difficult to determine cause and effect” and, like many companies, said there was a lack of evidence to blame social media alone.
However, things like Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok, and other social media apps may have “accelerated underlying trends.” “Another potential hypothesis is that the increased negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation on social media creates a persistent cognitive overload on our finite cognitive resources. Quantic Foundry said. “Simply put, we may be so exhausted by social media that we can't think deeply about things.”
Whatever the cause, Quantic Foundry says, “It's clear that gamers have become less interested in strategic thinking over the past nine years,” adding, “This is due to gamers being cognitively overloaded when playing games.” “This suggests an increasing likelihood of avoiding strategic complexity.” . ”
This trend may even impact the way developers create and market their games, but there are plenty of strategic titles still in development. Capes is a grueling turn-based strategy role-playing game about a villain taking over a city and a new group of superheroes rising up in 2024, just one week after this report was published. It will be released on May 29th.
Firaxis Games, developer of XCOM: Chimera Squad and Marvel's Midnight Suns, is also developing a new Civilization game, but no release date has been announced yet. The former Blizzard developer's team is also working on Stormgate, his real-time strategy game set in a post-apocalyptic future, scheduled for release in the third quarter of 2024.
Ryan Dinsdale is a freelance reporter for IGN. He will talk about The Witcher all day long.
