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 and women or gamers based in or out of the U.S. It was likened to other trends related to a decrease in attention span, like shorter YouTube videos now generating more views and shorter lengths of time between cuts in films, but Quantic Foundry admitted "it's difficult to pin down cause and effect" and said there's a lack of evidence to solely blame social media, as many do.
The likes of Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok, and other social media apps could have "accelerated the underlying trend", however. "Another potential hypothesis is that the increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have," Quantic Foundry said. "Put simply, we may be too worn out by social media to think deeply about things."
Regardless of the cause, Quantic Foundry said "it's clear that gamers have become less interested in strategic thinking over the past nine years," which "implies that gamers are now more easily cognitively overloaded when they play games and are more likely to avoid strategic complexity."
This trend may even affect how developers create and market games, though there are still plenty of strategy titles on the way. Capes, a gritty turn-based strategy role-playing game about villains ruling the streets and a new batch of superheroes having to rise up, launches just one week after this report was released 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 on a release date yet. A team of former Blizzard developers are working on Stormgate too, a real-time strategy game set in a post-apocalyptic future due out in the third quarter of 2024.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
