Gamers are less attracted to video games that require deep thought and careful planning than they used to be.
The declining appeal of deep strategy games is the focus in the latest report by Quantic Foundry. The game analytics consulting firm’s five-minute survey, called Gamer Motivation Profile, has gathered nine years’ worth of results from over 1.70 million gamer respondents worldwide to measure 12 motivations, or the different traits in a video game that appeal to gamers.
Besides strategy, these motivations include challenge, community, competition, completion, destruction, discovery, design, excitement, fantasy, power, and story. Quantic Foundry found that strategy saw the most significant change over the years.
While more than half of the gamer respondents in 2015 found strategy interesting and appealing when playing games, now only about a third who share the same sentiment in 2024. The extent of this change was over twice as large as the second biggest change. The implication here, according to Quantic Foundry, is that gamers now experience cognitive overload more easily while playing and tend to shy away from strategic complexity.
Quantic Foundry didn’t explicitly cite any reasons why strategy games are losing their appeal, as it is “difficult to pin down cause and effect.” The firm did describe similar trends that, while not direct causes, may be correlated. These trends include people’s decreasing attention span and increasing negativity and polarization in social media. In other words, people these days seem unable to focus enough and are too exhausted by social media to play strategy games.