IGN has today published an article about a recent study, called “Gamers Are Becoming Less Interested in Games With Deep Strategy, Study Finds”.
This study, which was performed by a market research institute, was focused on the motivation of gamers, and has recorded data over the last 9 years. This data is based on a 5 minute survey, which more than 1.5 million gamers have filled in. It contains 12 “motivations”, such as following the story or the joy of destruction. Most of them have stayed stable over the last 9 years, but the strategy part took a big dip. This means that compared to 9 years ago, the average gamer takes now less interest in components of games which require you to think ahead or to tackle difficult challenges. This trend seems to apply to men and women, and is visibile world wide (besides China, which was excluded during the analysis).
The study points out that it’s not possible to determine the cause of this, but that in the meantime the average attention span of people have decreased. They also mention as alternative explanation that the state of the world got worse, and that people rather prefer to relax than to be challenged.

They also ask the audience at the end a few questions, namely:

What Do You Think?​

• Why do you think gamers have become less interested in strategic thinking and planning? Are there other potential causes that come to mind?
• Do you feel your attention span and ability to think deeply has changed since the emergence of social media and/or smartphones?
• Are there other documented changes in our media-consumption habits or cognitive metrics that you think might be related to this?
• Have you seen similar or related findings specific to gamers and games research?

You can read the article by IGN here, the original study here, and obviously we want to know what you think here.