Video games with deep levels of strategy are becoming increasingly unappealing, according to a new study.
The report from Quantic Foundry compiled nine years of data from the researcher’s 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 has motivated gamers over the years and found that they’ve all remained relatively consistent except for one thing: strategy. “Gamers who score high on this component enjoy games that require careful decision-making and planning,” the summary says. “They like to consider their options and the 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, and seeing their carefully laid plans come to fruition in games like Civilization, Cities: Skylines or Europa Universalis.”
But in its 1.7 million surveys, Quantic Foundry found that two-thirds of strategy fans worldwide (excluding China, where gamers “have a very different profile of gaming motivation”) have lost interest in this element of video games. “67% of gamers today are less interested in strategic thinking and planning when playing games than the average gamer was in June 2015,” the report said.
“When we looked for long-term trends in the 12 motivations, we found that many motivations were stable or had little deviation over the past nine years,” Quantic Foundry said. “Strategy was the clear exception; it had declined significantly over the past nine years, and the magnitude of this change was more than twice the magnitude of the next largest change.”
The trend was analyzed, but Quantic Foundry couldn’t find a clear divide between, for example, men and women, or gamers based in or outside the US. It has been likened to other trends related to shrinking attention spans, such as shorter YouTube videos now generating more views and shorter time periods between cuts in movies, but Quantic Foundry admitted that “it’s hard to pin down cause and effect’ and said there was a lack of evidence to blame social media alone, as many do.
However, the likes of Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok and other social media apps could have “accelerated the underlying trend”. “Another potential hypothesis is that the increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness and emotional manipulation on social media has created a constant cognitive overload on the limited cognitive resources we have,” Quantic Foundry said. “Put simply, we may be too tired of social media to think deeply about things.”
Regardless of the reason, Quantic Foundry said that “it’s clear that gamers have become less interested in strategic thinking over the past nine years,” which “means that gamers are now more easily cognitively overwhelmed when playing games and it’s more -likely to avoid strategic complexity.”
This trend may even affect the way developers make and sell games, although there are still plenty of strategy titles on the way. Capes, a brutal turn-based strategy RPG about villains ruling the streets and a new group of superheroes to rise, launches just one week after this report was published on May 29, 2024.
Firaxis Games, the developer behind XCOM: Chimera Squad and Marvel’s Midnight Suns, is also developing a new Civilization game, but there’s no word yet on a release date. A team of ex-Blizzard developers is also working on Stormgate, a real-time strategy game set in a post-apocalyptic future, due out in the third quarter of 2024.
Ryan Dinsdale is a freelance reporter for IGN. He’ll be talking about The Witcher all day.
