Video game consultancy Quantic Foundry has published another interesting summation this week of data gathered from its "Gamer Motivation Profile" survey, which has over 250,000 respondents.
This week, the consultancy's focus is on why people of different genders play games, and the top takeaway for devs seems to be: men are most often motivated to compete, women most often want to complete things, and folks of non-binary gender are most motivated to play games in order to explore fantasies.
Looking at the results of QF's survey efforts through the lens of gender is worth doing because while the game dev community can often seem male-dominated (because it is), women and men play games in roughly equal measure, and better understanding their motivations for doing so can help shake loose any lingering preconceptions about who plays games and why.
Plus, as you look over Quantic Foundry's charts and graphs, there's a broader takeaway that devs may appreciate: when asked to rank 12 motivations (competition, destruction, completion, story, etc.) for playing games in the order most important to them, "Completion" was the only reason that consistently appeared in the top 3 motivations of multiple age/gender breakouts.
"Whether we’re comparing gender or age segments, Completion is always in the top 3," reads an excerpt of a Quantic Foundry blog post. "In this sense, Completion is a very low-risk, high-reward motivation."
For more findings and the aforementioned charts and graphs (some reprinted below), check out the Quantic Foundry blog.
