Gamers Are Becoming Less Interested in Games With Deep Strategy, Study Finds

ign.com:

Video games with deep levels of strategy are becoming increasingly unappealing, according to a new study.

The report from Quantic Foundry collected nine years of data from the researcher's own 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 on what's motivated gamers across the years and found all of these have remained relatively consistent except one: Strategy. "Gamers who score high on this component enjoy games that require careful decision-making and planning," its summary states. "They like to think through their options and likely outcomes.

"These may be decisions related to balancing resources and competing goals, managing foreign diplomacy, or finding optimal long term strategies. They tend to enjoy both the tactical combat in games like XCOM or Fire Emblem, as well as seeing their carefully devised plans come to fruition in games like Civilization, Cities: Skylines, or Europa Universalis."

But across its 1.7 million surveys, Quantic Foundry found that two thirds of strategy fans worldwide (except China, where gamers "have a very 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 back in June 2015," the report reads.

"When we looked for long-term trends across the 12 motivations, we found that many motivations were stable or experienced minor deviations over the past nine years," Quantic Foundry said. "Strategy was the clear exception; it had substantially declined over the past nine years and the magnitude of this change was more than twice the size of the next largest change."

The trend was analysed but Quantic Foundry couldn't find any distinct separations between, for example, men