UPDATED 13:10 EDT / FEBRUARY 11 2016

NEWS

Gamers care less and less about owning noobs as they get older, study finds

People play games for a variety of different reasons, whether its to challenge their mental prowess or to totally own some noobs, and according to game analytics firm Quantic Foundry LLC, those reasons can change significantly as gamers age.

“According to the ESA, the average gamer is now 35 years old,” Nick Yee, Quantic Foundry co-founder and analytics lead, said in a blog post summary of the report. “And that average will keep rising as the first gamer generation gets older.”

“In both the gamer and game research communities, we talk a lot about how men and women like different kinds of games or what games for women ought to look like. And yet, even though the 35+ gamer crowd is clearly growing bigger each year, it’s much less common to see discussions about how gamers change as they grow older.”

Quantic Foundry looked at survey responses from over 14,000 gamers of various ages and measured the importance of 12 different motivations for why people play games.

Quantic Foundry gamer motivation list

Image courtesy of Quantic Foundry LLC

According to Yee, out of the 12 motivations, competition saw the sharpest drop among older gamers. Perhaps more interestingly, however, is the fact that the gender gap for competition as a motivation narrows with age.

“The gender difference in Competition is large at first among younger gamers, but then disappears with age,” Yee said. “As gamers get older, the appeal of Competition declines, but this happens more rapidly for men than for women. Thus, by the time we’re past 45, the difference between men and women largely disappears.”

Yee noted that the gap between younger men and women for the competition motivation is actually smaller than the gap between younger men and older men. He explained that this suggests competitiveness in gaming is more a product of youth than of gender.

Quantic Foundry strategy motivation

Image courtesy of Quantic Foundry LLC

According to Quantic Foundry’s study, the motivation with the least change over time is strategy, which Yee described as “the enjoyment of gameplay that requires careful decision-making and planning.”

But while the strategy motivation had the least amount of change, it still trended downward as gamers age, and Yee pointed out that this was the case across the board for all of the motivations that Quantic Foundry measured.

Yee theorized that the most likely explanations for this decrease is the increasing number of other concerns for older gamers, along with the fact that individual motivations may be less important than a general desire to play games.

Yee admitted that the differences in motivations could also be explained by generational differences rather than purely by age, but he noted that the overall change for players under 35 and players over 35 followed the same trend.

If you want to read Quantic Foundry’s full report on how gamer motivations change with age, you can purchase it here.

Photo by ssbmugshots 

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