Why you need to consider age when designing your game
Much focus is placed on gender when designing games, but age is an equally important factor that is often overlooked. In fact, for game developers and marketers, one of the most valuable takeaways from the results of our survey of 400,000 gamers is the impact of age on gamer motivations. Its impact is wide-ranging, and below we present five key findings from our data set to deepen your understanding of what makes older and younger gamers tick.
- Older gamers want fantasy and completion
For gamers over 36 years old in our sample, the most common primary motivations were fantasy and completion, while the least common were excitement and challenge.
Let’s dive a little deeper to understand what this actually means so you can design games to cater to this audience. Older gamers who score high for the fantasy motivation want to be part of the game world. A type of psychological teleportation, it hinges on the gamer’s willingness to be transported to an alternate reality and the richness of that alternate world: its lore, its scope and its visual design. Popular games among those with high fantasy scores include Fallout and Dragon Age, which are categorized by their compelling alternate worlds and deep storylines. On the other side of the spectrum are either abstract puzzle games like Candy Crush Saga, or games with 3D yet generic graphics which have minimal world-building and lore, such as Counter-Strike and Street Fighter.
Older gamers who score high on completion are driven by quantifiable, consistent rewards that clearly show progress. 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. Games on the low end of the completion spectrum, such as Victoria II and Kerbal Space Program, are more sandboxy, meaning gamers are encouraged to roam, decide what they want to do, and define goals for themselves.
In addition to completion being the second most common primary motivation for 36+ gamers, it is also the most age stable motivation in our model — meaning it’s the most consistently popular motivation across all ages. It’s also higher for women. Completion should therefore be factored into all games as a way to satisfy a broad range of ages.
2) As gamers get older, the appeal of competition declines
Out of the 12 gamer motivations in our sample, the appeal of competition declines the most with age. This decline is most rapid between ages 13 and 35, going from being the number one primary motivation for gamers aged 13–25, to the ninth most common among 36+ gamers. Quantifying the decline of competition with age from another angle, we found the steepest drop was among female gamers between the ages 13 to 20.
This may be due to specific aspects of gaming culture. For example, some online gaming communities, especially competitive ones, can be hostile towards female gamers. For young female gamers, these experiences may impact their enjoyment of competitive game genres, and cause more competitive female gamers to leave the gaming community altogether.
Interestingly, age impacts the appeal of competition far more strongly than gender. The chart below demonstrates this: the difference in competition’s appeal between the youngest and oldest male gamers is more than double the largest difference between male and female gamers’ score.
The industry tends to emphasize the size of gender differences when designing games, but as gamers get older, there are motivations like competition where gender preferences become nearly identical in the 40–60 age range. In this sense, older gamers can be easier to design for because the large gender differences among younger gamers minimize with age.
3) Older gamers are more likely to adopt VR
Alongside the Gamer Motivation Profile, we ran a survey between November 2016 and February 2019 focusing on VR adoption, and collected responses from 2,375 gamers. For gamers who were adopters, we asked about their satisfaction and their frustrations. For gamers who were not adopters, we asked about their purchase intent (in the next 6 months) and their concerns.
We found that gamers over the age of 36 were the most likely to adopt VR, and those between 18–25 were the least likely. Given the considerable cost of purchasing VR devices, one could attribute this to an increase in disposable income.
Interestingly, we found the gamers who are already using VR devices care most about excitement and destruction in their experience, which points to a tension in terms of market adoption. Excitement is one of the motivations that drops the quickest with age, and destruction also declines. Thus, as increased disposable income among older gamers ought to drive higher adoption of VR, the key appeal of VR gaming is actually decreasing among these gamers, effectively constraining the market of gamers who can afford VR.
4) Younger gamers choose the dark side
RPGs (role-playing games) create deep narratives where players are able to immerse themselves in a compelling world and get lost in their “role”. As developers seek to expand the boundaries of these immersive worlds, characters have become increasingly customizable. Not only can players choose their character’s appearance, base stats and abilities, but also their ethics and moral code. We identified the impact of age on the decision to choose a ‘good’ character, a champion of the helpless, or an evil, power-crazed tyrant.
First of all, we found that roughly 80% of gamers avoid the evil character path, with ‘good’ and ‘morally ambiguous’ characters comprising roughly 40% each of our player sample. Bear this in mind for creatives — playable or video ads for this genre should reflect this player preference and emphasize the ‘good guy’. Those who opted for ‘dark and evil’ were a minority, whose average age (22.7) was the lowest out of the RPG sample. However, within the 13 to 24 age group, ‘dark/evil’ was still the least preferred gameplay route, despite being higher than any other age group. So don’t worry, not all young people are hell bent on taking digital revenge on this cruel, unforgiving world.
5) Younger gamers prefer aggressive close-range combat
Many games balance risk versus reward, strategy versus action, and one of the genres where this relationship can be seen most clearly is in First Person Shooters (FPS). In the game Destiny, for example, players can choose between weapons that are better suited for certain styles, from sitting back and methodically picking the enemy apart (e.g., scout rifles, sniper rifles) to jumping directly into the action and killing things quickly, but exposing themselves to additional risk in the process.
With destruction being the most common primary motivation among teenage gamers, it comes as no surprise that this cohort prefers the close-range, high-risk combat gameplay in FPS games, whereas gamers with an average age of 27.3 favor a stealthy, long-range approach. This could be particularly useful when segmenting user acquisition campaigns: when targeting teenagers, focus on creatives that depict close-range combat, and for older gamers incorporate gameplay such as stealthy snipers.
Final word
The insights we’ve shared here should not be viewed in a vacuum, but rather combined with other insights into variables like gender to paint a fuller picture of gamer motivations. Doing so will help you effectively segment and personalize your ad campaigns, and design your game in a way that caters to the preferences of your target audience.
