3 Key Takeaways from our Gamer Motivation Data

It’s crucial that as a game developer you have a strong understanding of the dynamics of different gamer motivations and the impact of variables such as gender and age. Ultimately, these inform the design and mechanics of your game, and help you reach and broaden your target audience. In this post, we’ll take a look at three key takeaways from our survey data from 400,000 gamers, all of which should be considered when designing your game.

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1. Female gamers are easier to design for

Relative to the men in our data, the gaming preferences of female gamers change less with age. Females as a group are also more uniform in their gaming preferences, in terms of what they like and what they don’t like.

This is shown in the graph above, in which each column represents a primary motivation. See how their preferences are more concentrated to a few motivations in comparison to males.

Specifically, the top three motivations comprise 47.7% of female gamers, a significantly higher proportion than their male counterparts. Equally, the bottom ranking motivations for females cover a far smaller proportion of gamers. By contrast, the primary motivations for male gamers are more diverse and evenly spread out, with the top three comprising just 36.2% of male participants.

From a game developer’s perspective, female gamers are more straightforward to design for: targeting their top three motivations — fantasy, design and completion — will appeal to almost half of this demographic. In contrast, designing for male gamers often means picking your battles wisely. Of course, these preferences aren’t set in stone and may be an artifact of how men and women get into gaming, but survey data of current gamers highlights these differences in homogeneity in terms of gaming motivations. Think about incorporating these top three mechanics in your game to maximise your target audience, and improve metrics such as retention and LTV.

2. Age and Competition: a volatile relationship

We set out to find which motivation was most significantly impacted by age, and discovered it was competition — the appeal of duals, ranked leaderboards, and matches. We mapped this out on the chart above. Each dot is the average of the thousands of people from every age who took our survey — the higher the dot, the more important the motivation of competition is to them.

The chart shows that competition has a non-linear relationship with age — the decrease is not a steady, consistent one. Rather, it drops significantly between the ages 13–30, and eventually plateaus at the age of 40.

This has practical implications for game design. For instance, if you’re developing a shooter game, the data suggests you shouldn’t assume a millennial audience (people born between 1981 and 1996) will be motivated to play based on competition-focused mechanics — unlike Gen Z, which is a safe bet. With the appeal of competition rapidly decreasing with age, it would be smart to add mechanisms that cater to other motivations such as community or completion, to broaden your game’s appeal and maximize downloads.

This also has ramifications outside the gaming industry, for example in gamification, which is the application of game-design elements in non-game contexts. Competition is commonly leveraged yet our data suggests it’s likely a poor motivator for most corporate employees above age 30. Businesses using gamification as an education tool should rethink how to effectively engage their employees.

That said, as the chart below illustrates, the relationship between age and competition becomes much steadier between the ages of 40 and 60, and, interestingly, male and female gamers become homogeneous in this age cohort despite the sizeable disparity between 13 and 40.

3. Completion is the most stable motivation

If competition is the most volatile motivation, sharply impacted by age, then completion is the least volatile. Hardly impacted by age or gender, completion is also the most consistently appealing motivation across all demographics we measured.

As shown above, the act of completing missions and collecting things in games has a strong appeal across all genders and ages we surveyed. Games that cater to this cohort are task-oriented and clear, with predictable conversion mechanics between time and reward. MMOs, particularly in the Asian market, scored very high for the completion motivation, with Dragon Nest, Lego Dimensions, and Aura Kingdom featuring heavily in our survey.

Gamers who score high on completion are driven by quantifiable, consistent rewards that clearly show progress. If your game is heavy on competition-based mechanics, adding elements of completion, whether in the core loop, meta game or live ops, can serve to balance out the volatile appeal of competition and cater your game to a wider spectrum of gamers, and help strengthen retention rates and LTVs.

Here’s a reference sheet PDF for the model

This reference sheet includes an overview of the motivation model, as well as the details for the low and high ends of each motivation.

What do you think?

Is there anything you’d like to see us explore in future surveys and blog posts? And if you’re a game developer or designer, how have you tailored your games to different genders, ages and motivations in the past? Have these takeaways been useful? Let us know in the comments below.