I would bet it’s more like “gaming has expanded to a larger market”. Gamers who were willing to fiddle with computers and online gaming, hell, up till the late 2000s are probably also the same type of people who are willing to be patient and fiddle with a complex game and learn where the fun is. Now playing a game is easy as 1,2,3 no matter where you get it, I’m not talking down on anyone, and I don’t care if that’s where the AAA trend is going, just that when the access gets easier the group expands to more and more casual audiences.
Also, console games have always been way more “casual” as those markets expand gamers kind of defacto have a larger preference for casual games.
I was deep into Strategy and lore – preferring games that ate hundreds of hours. Unfortunately these days my available gaming hours are reduced to a mere handful. It’s difficult to remember everything when I can only play sparingly.
Thus, I’ve resorted to smaller indie games that can be enjoyed in a smaller amount of time, with less of a learning curve. I’m a casual gamer now. What can you do?
“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.”
in other words, we’re burnt out and we just want some escapism …
Not sure if this is true. Social media shows a very distorted view on polarization. Past research shows that the vast majority of polarising content (>95%) is generated by a vast minority of users (~6%). It is shown repeatedly that the polarization found in (online) media, differs drastically from every day felt polarization.
Literally “getting off the internet” seems like a valid strategy. I think it is more likely that .odern games hijack native reward systems more than “deep strategy games” do (whatever that means). In fact the gameplay mechanics in most games are still relatively the same, just prettier, faster running. Back in the day we couldn’t have a high FPS shooter with a lot of bang simple because the technology didn’t allow for it. Furthermore games were a niche back then as well. Now games are more mainstream and the relative group is smaller, than the mainstream group.
It’s not just that. Many games these days are so detailed, it’s like having a second job that you don’t get paid to do, but instead pay them to be “allowed” to do. No thank you.
My favourite journalistic practice is when outlets lump up everyone playing video games into a single group called “gamers.”
I love 4x games, but playing a game of Stellaris for a week or more just to realize that I’ve inescapably fucked up and lost the game is disheartening. I just don’t have the bandwidth to spend 40 hours per match. Yeah, you can make 4x games run a lot shorter, but it usually feels like you’re doing something crazy to the game.
I bet it has to do with the average age of the gaming community getting older. I used to play Civ 5, EU4, CK2 all the time in college, when I have tons of free time and didnt care if I was up until 3 in the morning. Now that I have a life and a job, it takes like a week of 1-2 hour sessions to finish a game of civ 5, and the last time I played EU4, I played for several weeks and didnt even finish.
I’m in the same boat (as far as free time goes) but I have the opposite outlook. Strategy games, and other games with some amount of crunchy complexity, keep me engaged even when I’m not playing. I can spend some time on wikis, crafting theories, and cooking up plans throughout the week and that keeps me coming back.
I can’t do story games because it’s too easy to forget what’s going on when you spread it out that far. Or there’s online action games (shooters, mobas, etc) but it’s rare that I can guarantee I’ll be on long enough to complete a match.
Is your username Taako_Tuesday as in The The Adventure Zone character?
Correct! You’re the first person on Lemmy to get the reference
I have like 3k hours in EU4 (I know, still a normie pleb) and still have not finished a single game.
Someone who isn’t into strategy games will play shallow strategy games like fire emblem because its anime and allows you to date anime girls with big boobs.
Yep makes sense. I mean it’s clear people hate deep systems when something like Baldur’s Gate 3 becomes the undisputed Game of the Year /s
…and there are people who play Dwarf Fortress.
Basically Rimworld in minimal, not that hard. At least you don’t get beaten and robbed as soon as you start, like in Kenshi.
Meanwhile I have 3000+ hours in Civ6…
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.
So what’s the story with China?
goes looking for the original
https://quanticfoundry.com/2018/11/27/gamers-china-us/#post/0
The Quantic Foundry (QF) data comes (as usual) from the Gamer Motivation Profile, a 5-minute survey that allows gamers to get a personalized report of their gaming motivations, and see how they compare with other gamers. Over 350,000 gamers worldwide have taken this survey. The survey is in English and thus respondents are predominantly from North America and the Western EU.
The Niko Partners (NP) data comes from an online survey (in Simplified Chinese) of 2,000 representative digital gamers in China (from a survey panel provider), balanced across more than 40 cities in tiers 1 through 5.
The Gamer Motivation Profile is benchmarked against QF’s existing data set (based largely on gamers in the West). In the chart below, the 50th%-tile line indicates the perfect average of each motivation in QF’s full data set. This is why the US data (a large portion of QF’s data set) hews closely to the average. The error bars in the chart are based on 95% confidence intervals.
https://i0.wp.com/quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/01-US-vs-China.png?ssl=1
Let’s take the 75th%-tile that Chinese gamers score on Competition—the appeal of duels, arena matches, and leaderboard rankings. That 75th%-tile means that the average Chinese gamer is more interested in Competition than 75% of gamers in QF’s data. Given that the US data is so close to the average, this also essentially means that the average Chinese gamer cares more about Competition than 75% of US gamers.
Similarly, Chinese gamers are also more interested in Completion—the appeal of collecting points/stars/trophies, completing quests/achievements/tasks. Conversely, Chinese gamers score below average across the Immersion and Creativity motivations (the last 4 motivations in the chart). They are less interested in being immersed in a compelling game world (Fantasy), interacting with an elaborate story and large cast of NPCs (Story), exploration and experimentation (Discovery), and customizing their avatar/town/spaceship (Design) relative to US gamers.
The Competition finding may seem unintuitive because in the US cultural context, we tend to stereotype Asians as being compliant and striving for social harmony. But the data strongly suggests this stereotype doesn’t hold true among Chinese gamers, and the higher interest in Competition can help to partly explain the popularity of games like PUBG in China. After all, Battle Royale is probably the furthest away you can be from “social harmony”.
In previous blog posts (see here and here), we’ve shown how male gamers (in the West) tend to be more driven by Competition, Destruction, and Challenge, whereas female games tend to be more driven by Design, Fantasy, and Completion.
The data from China looks very different. Of the 12 motivations, only 3 cross the threshold for statistical significance (at p < .01)—male gamers in China care more about Destruction, Discovery, and Competition. Of these 3, the differences in Competition and Discovery are substantively small (about 5 percentile points apart). Overall, the only robust difference is that female gamers in China are less interested in guns, explosions, and mayhem than male gamers. In contrast, 9 of the motivations are at least 10 percentile points apart in the US data between male and female gamers.
In the US, there’s a lot of contention around the cause of observed gender proportions in different game titles and genres, specifically as to whether these differences reflect the historical marketing/cultural framing of games for boys or deeply-rooted biological differences between men and women. The data from China suggests that even very large gender differences in gaming motivations can be almost entirely explained by cultural/marketing factors without using gender as an explanatory factor.
Age Differences Are Also Much Smaller in China
In data we’ve previously shared using QF’s full data set, we’ve shown that the appeal of Competition declines dramatically with age, and it’s the motivation that changes the most with age. The appeal of Excitement also declines a lot with age in the US. The table below presents the correlation coefficients between age and each of the 12 motivations, broken down by country.
In China, the age differences are much smaller (similar to what we saw with gender differences). None of the correlations in the China data exceeds 0.10 (what is considered a small effect in psychology research), and only 4 of the coefficients are significant at p < .01. In contrast, 7 of the coefficients exceed 0.10 in the US data, with 2 coefficients exceeding 0.25.
So while the appeal of Competition and Excitement drop rapidly among US gamers as they get older, these effects are much more muted among Chinese gamers.
Motivation Homogeneity and Making Games
When gaming motivations vary a great deal in terms of gender and age (as they do in the US), it means game design and marketing have greater difficulty in being broadly appealing to different gamers, because they will often run into breakpoints in terms of gendered or age-based appeal.
On the other hand, the homogeneity of gaming motivations among Chinese gamers suggests a higher likelihood of cross-cutting appeal of game titles. Put another way, a game designer for the Chinese market likely has to worry less about satisfying orthogonal or opposing interests among different players because most Chinese gamers tend to care about the same things (high Completion and Competition, low Discovery).
Huh.
So, first of all, regarding the Strategy thing that the derived article was talking about, it’s not that Chinese gamers prefer Strategy more. Rather, they prefer it less. But they haven’t seen that decline, and they have both different and much more homogenous preferences.
But the other stuff is curious too.
Are gamers getting older? It would be interesting to see how this breaks down by age.
I’m getting older. I have 3 kids and no time. 10 years ago I had no kids and 3 time. Now when I play, I just put it on the easiest setting and play it like an interactive movie.
I hear this. My life is survival mode. Games are for turning off that part of the brain for a little while.
That’s too bad. Lotta good thinking games.
I think the problem is that games with deep strategy are timeless, no real need for a new release.
Stares at most PDX games having increasing player counts
How much of this is the lack of people wanting to play strategy games vs the lack of good strategy games
Exactly! I absolutely love EU4 and am excited about the likely next installment. Unfortunately, I’m less excited about their other recent launches, because the depth of strategy just isn’t quite there.
But then I look around and can’t really find a comparable game. There’s Total War, but y strategy there is pretty weak and more about battlefield tactics than actual grand strategy. Civ exists, but it’s in a pretty different category (and not really my thing; I do like Civ IV though). I own a lot of strategy games, but most are kind of shallow. I love complex games with a lot of moving parts, which yields a lot of variation game to game, and that just isn’t all that common outside of PDX games.
I cant get past eu4 mid game. I get early wins, can’t keep up in much, get swarmed by 30k artillery groups and 100+ fleets.
For armies:
- Fill combat width, esp the front line, and ideally the back line (back line is essential in end game)
- Keep up on tech, including your mercs - need to rehire every few decades
- Choose good battles - terrain matters (e.g. don’t attack into the mountains), stack size matters; retreat if you’re caught in a bad battle
- Get some buffs - morale is most important early game, discipline and combat ability starts to matter more by mid game; you should focus on one or two areas to specialize (so idea groups and policies should synergize with national ideas)
- Have good leaders - should have high army tradition, so your leaders should all be 2-3 star generals
Usually by mid game, I’m steamrolling everyone and am the biggest great power, even if I started small. Consider watching some streamers/YouTubers, many do a good job explaining things as they go.
For navies:
- Watch battles and retreat if you start seeing red on your side - naval battles have a domino effect, so if you’re seeing more red on their side, consider continuing, you might capture more than you lose
- Morale is the most important factor here - if you’re outnumbered, check individual ships and leave the low morale and damaged ships in port
- If you’re filling combat width, the easy strategy is to get a bunch of heavies - don’t worry about the inland sea malace (heavies are fine in inland sea, galleys suck in deep water), if you can out-gun them, you’ll probably win
- Pick your naval doctrine carefully - if you get galley combat ability, consider going all galleys and go over force limit as needed - it’s cheaper to be over force limit with galleys than at force limit with heavies
- Naval leaders don’t matter all that much, they can break a tie, but that’s about it; individual ship morale is king in navies
- It takes a long time for AI to repair boats, so popping in and out of port can be a great way to whittle down their navy and eventually win - make sure to retreat as needed to not lose boats
- If you have naval dominance, destroy their navy entirely (occupy provinces with their boats, engage, repeat until it’s dead)
- Don’t fight with light ships, they’re a liability (see 2, they get morale hammered); transport ships are really hardy, so use them as a bullet sponge if you need to fill combat width
Enemy fleet size doesn’t matter at all. You can defeat 100+ ship fleets if you can beat the ships that engage (like 20-30), you just need to get it to start to domino. So commit to either galleys (with galley combat naval doctrine) or heavies, and if you start to lose, retreat, repair, and reengage.
By the mid game, it’s easy to absolutely dominate if you play the early game well. Your goal in the early game is to build a power base, which means:
- expand your borders a bit by taking good land - centers of trade, defendable mountain passes, etc
- reduce autonomy
- get good synergies in your idea groups
- border the countries you want to engage in the middle game
- build the right buildings
So by mid game, you should be a regional, if not global, power, and your time will be spent gobbling up land and converting wrong religion land. I usually stop playing about 1650-1700 because I’ve usually already accomplished my goals. Late game, the game should be pretty easy, except the 2-3 big powers you’ve neglected all game.
Do you have anything recommended?
Yeah, pick a big nation, ally another big nation, and only fight battles you know you can win. If you and your ally are big enough, you shouldn’t get attacked.
It’s a complex game, so consider lowering the difficulty if you’re having trouble as a big nation.
Strategizing feels dangerously close to work for me.
