IGN: Gamers Are Becoming Less Interested in Games With Deep Strategy, Study Finds

Ultimately I'm not sure how moved I am by research from a marketing firm posted on a blog. This isn't peer reviewed, so their methodology can't be scrutinized. On top of that, the "Gamer Motivation Profile", which this seems to hinge upon, isn't a validated tool.

If this were an actual study published in a peer-reviewed journal and not a blog, then I'd give it more credence.
 
I remember reading an article about the death of CRPGs in the 2000s, which instead of waning player interest, Chris Avellone (Fallout New Vegas dev) attributed the decline of CRPGs to retailers who did not want to stock up on the genre because they believe that CRPGs are outdated and should focus on the trend at the time, which are gritty fps, and that in turn cause the decline of player interest instead of the other way around.

Luckily with the proliferation of digital services like Steam, starting from 2010s we see more CRPGs being made, culminating in Baldur's Gate 3 which prove all this time it wasn't waning player interest but more so the fault of market makers.
Hey if you're a big CRPG fan Jack then if you haven't already check out the History of CRPGs book project (free to download as pdf) as it does an amazing job of covering the rise and fall of them but also covers the resurgence and indie scene in the later chapters. I read it around 5 years ago and really enjoyed it. They've updated it heaps of times since then so it's even bigger now.

Anyway yeah I see the same thing with RTS games and point & click adventure games.. they fell from mainstream and almost died out in the 2000s (or at least the media said they were completely dead) yet in the 2010s to now they've had a resurgence thanks to the classics reappearing on Steam & GoG and indie studios bringing the genres back with new games. Hell I could almost argue with @Quintillus that traditional RTS even made a mainstream return for a bit there thanks to big companies like Microsoft, EA and Blizzard remastering their 90s greats which must have done reasonably well as they kept coming and the Age of Empires remasters are still getting new addons each year, however clearly not well enough to get full blown sequels to all these games made other than AoE4 sadly.
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This is an interesting topic. Lots of good posts here.

I think some game genres just exhaust their potential more quickly than others - this is RTS and hack+loot games like Diablo, for me at least.

I don't think strategy games are in this category. I DO think strategy games have gotten stagnant for one reason - the AI still sucks. You can make the game more complex, and I'll enjoy figuring it out, but if in the end I'm still winning because my opponent is an idiot, or I'm losing because they're just cheating out the wazoo, well then blech.


Gaming needs an AI revolution.

Multiplayer has largely been the golden goose, but it can't do everything. Other humans are smart, sneaky, adaptive, ruthless... but they're also inconvenient (I want to start and stop/pause a game whenever I want) and toxic and, well, ruthless.

The types of games I crave these days are simulation-sandboxes (Mount and Blade, Rimworld, ONI, and my current time-sink, X4), strategy (Civ), survival-immersion (The Long Dark and Subnautica), and MMO (UO, EQ, then WoW).

All of these games will experience huge benefits from improvement in AI, but the one that probably needs it most is the strategy game. Civ 6 has hit the limit on what complexity can bring to the game - in many ways, it has gone a little overboard. If Civ 7 doesn't boast a next-gen AI, one that stimulates and surprises and compels the player like no strategy game before, then we will continue to see a decline in the genre.
 
Civ 6 has hit the limit on what complexity can bring to the game - in many ways, it has gone a little overboard. If Civ 7 doesn't boast a next-gen AI, one that stimulates and surprises and compels the player like no strategy game before, then we will continue to see a decline in the genre.
I think there are two big issues with this idea:

1. Continue to see a decline? What decline?

Civ 6 is the best selling game in the franchise and likely the best selling and most popular strategy game of all time.

2. Civ 6 has definitely not hit the limit of complexity. Civ 6 is arguably a lot less complex than Civ 4 or Civ 5. I think this claim just belies a lack of imagination. “AI” is definitely not the final frontier of the series. There’s certainly much more to continue to be innovated in terms of gameplay.
 
I think Malachi256 has a good point. Although I don't buy into the current industry AI type ("AI will solve everything! Our AI products are great and you must have them!"), having an appropriately challenging AI in strategy games does make a difference. And, IMO, Civ IV is the high point of the series in AI. One can debate economic management, but especially in terms of managing warfare, the AI has never quite recovered from the move to 1 UPT. My opinion is VI is less bad than V in that regard, but the Civ IV AI remains a much more dangerous opponent.

I don't think the current AI hype is really the answer either, but incremental improvements that haven't happened since the mid-2000s.

As for complexity? Preference on complexity of the game vary, but when looking at it from an AI perspective, a key question is, "can the AI effectively make use of the complexity added to the game, or will it be a pushover?" If a new feature is added but the AI handles it incompetently or ignores it altogether, the game has been made easier for the human player. 1 UPT is again a good example - added because the designers thought it would add depth, but in practice it hasn't worked out well in terms of the AI handling it, so it's made the game less challenging. But there are others. The adjacencies of districts and improvements placed on the map. Arguably fun mechanic but if the AI makes poor use of it, the game's easier. The use of airplanes. Choosing effective policies. I'm not saying the AI is necessarily bad at all of these, but that if you have 40 mechanics in your game, the AI needs to be competent at most of them in order for it to provide a good challenge. If you only have 12 mechanics, it's relatively easier to reach a similar level of AI competence. And I could see the argument that while perhaps Civ hasn't reached the ceiling on complexity for humans, it may have for the level of AI effort that Firaxis has put into recent iterations of the series.

I'd love to see it reach the point where the "AI difficulty" was also affecting how many of those mechanics the AI pursued, as opposed to ignored. If Deity level was, "The AI does its best in all matters, while still playing fair, and you will have a very tough time winning", and each level below that neutralized some of the AI's evaluation capabilities, it would make for a much more interesting difficulty level progression for players.

It has been attempted before as well, I remember Galactic Civilizations II in the mid-2000s had options along these lines for its AI. I've seen it applied outside of the strategy genre as well - in the game Killing Floor, the AI opponents will shield themselves much more effectively on Hard difficulty than Normal, so you have to alter your tactics a bit to be effective, not just use the same tactics but with more enemy hitpoints. I think there's a lot of potential for Civ along these lines. If I win and turn up the difficulty, and all of a sudden the AI is much better at science production, or defends its borders more effectively, or starts making naval or airborne invasions that it wasn't at the lower difficulty, I have to think and strategize more about how to counter it more than if it just did the same thing as before but with more resources.
 
I think Malachi256 has a good point. Although I don't buy into the current industry AI type ("AI will solve everything! Our AI products are great and you must have them!"), having an appropriately challenging AI in strategy games does make a difference. And, IMO, Civ IV is the high point of the series in AI. One can debate economic management, but especially in terms of managing warfare, the AI has never quite recovered from the move to 1 UPT. My opinion is VI is less bad than V in that regard, but the Civ IV AI remains a much more dangerous opponent.

I don't think the current AI hype is really the answer either, but incremental improvements that haven't happened since the mid-2000s.

As for complexity? Preference on complexity of the game vary, but when looking at it from an AI perspective, a key question is, "can the AI effectively make use of the complexity added to the game, or will it be a pushover?" If a new feature is added but the AI handles it incompetently or ignores it altogether, the game has been made easier for the human player. 1 UPT is again a good example - added because the designers thought it would add depth, but in practice it hasn't worked out well in terms of the AI handling it, so it's made the game less challenging. But there are others. The adjacencies of districts and improvements placed on the map. Arguably fun mechanic but if the AI makes poor use of it, the game's easier. The use of airplanes. Choosing effective policies. I'm not saying the AI is necessarily bad at all of these, but that if you have 40 mechanics in your game, the AI needs to be competent at most of them in order for it to provide a good challenge. If you only have 12 mechanics, it's relatively easier to reach a similar level of AI competence. And I could see the argument that while perhaps Civ hasn't reached the ceiling on complexity for humans, it may have for the level of AI effort that Firaxis has put into recent iterations of the series.

I'd love to see it reach the point where the "AI difficulty" was also affecting how many of those mechanics the AI pursued, as opposed to ignored. If Deity level was, "The AI does its best in all matters, while still playing fair, and you will have a very tough time winning", and each level below that neutralized some of the AI's evaluation capabilities, it would make for a much more interesting difficulty level progression for players.

It has been attempted before as well, I remember Galactic Civilizations II in the mid-2000s had options along these lines for its AI. I've seen it applied outside of the strategy genre as well - in the game Killing Floor, the AI opponents will shield themselves much more effectively on Hard difficulty than Normal, so you have to alter your tactics a bit to be effective, not just use the same tactics but with more enemy hitpoints. I think there's a lot of potential for Civ along these lines. If I win and turn up the difficulty, and all of a sudden the AI is much better at science production, or defends its borders more effectively, or starts making naval or airborne invasions that it wasn't at the lower difficulty, I have to think and strategize more about how to counter it more than if it just did the same thing as before but with more resources.
I'm kind of confused about the point you're responding to. I thought we were discussing the supposed dying interest in strategy games, and the above user's assertion that AI is the key to reversing this (and that it's the only path forward for the series since it's supposedly maxed out on complexity). I disagree with both claims.

Your post seems to be addressing the topic of "Would better AI be better?" And...sure. I agree. We'd all like more capable AI in these games, and prior games have had better AI, so we can be certain it's possible. But I don't get how that really relates to the topic at hand.

I also think that the massive success of Civ 6 has shown us empirically that "better AI" is not the hill that this series will die on.
 
I think there are two big issues with this idea:

1. Continue to see a decline? What decline?

Civ 6 is the best selling game in the franchise and likely the best selling and most popular strategy game of all time.

2. Civ 6 has definitely not hit the limit of complexity. Civ 6 is arguably a lot less complex than Civ 4 or Civ 5. I think this claim just belies a lack of imagination. “AI” is definitely not the final frontier of the series. There’s certainly much more to continue to be innovated in terms of gameplay.
1. I was under the impression that the total time-played on Civ 6 was less than 5. I know I put nearly twice as many hours into 5 than into 6, and I was under the impression that that was a broad trend - perhaps I'm wrong on that.
Sales figures matter, but they're usually a reflection of how gamers felt about the previous title, not about how good the title they're actually buying is. So Civ 6 selling well is more a reflection of how good 5 was (and how much gaming and steam in general have grown explosively in recent years). The real test for Civ 6 will be Civ 7's numbers - if they're equal to or less than 6's numbers, that'll mean 6 wasn't a grand success.

2. I think it has. I plop down a city now and I'm burdened by alllll the forward planning I have to do to maximize the success of that city - this, to me, is complexity run amok.
And there's no question, again at least for me, that the mid and late game of Civ 6 becomes uninteresting largely because the AI is just bad. It's fine as an efficiency simulator with good production values, where I'm mostly playing against myself to maximize my output... but as a game with compelling interactions with my opponents and an evolving world, it mostly fails. I highly doubt that the majority of players would say that they slog through the early game just to get to the exciting late game.

I don't agree that there's lots of innovation left to be done - I think there is iteration, and that's about it. I certainly hope I'm wrong, but I do think we're squarely in the fashion phase - where they'll make changes, it'll look and feel different, it'll probably even work different, but it won't really be an improvement. It'll just be different. And pretty. Pretty and different. That's amusing for a while, it gets the sales, but it doesn't really progress the game or the genre.
 
I remember reading an article about the death of CRPGs in the 2000s, which instead of waning player interest, Chris Avellone (Fallout New Vegas dev) attributed the decline of CRPGs to retailers who did not want to stock up on the genre because they believe that CRPGs are outdated and should focus on the trend at the time, which are gritty fps, and that in turn cause the decline of player interest instead of the other way around.

Luckily with the proliferation of digital services like Steam, starting from 2010s we see more CRPGs being made, culminating in Baldur's Gate 3 which prove all this time it wasn't waning player interest but more so the fault of market makers.

You need to take anything Avellone says with a pretty hefty bag of salt.

Fallout 2 having an absolutly awful intro and some seriously cringy attempts at humor, 4rth wall breaks and other nonsense probably did more damage than Evil Retailers.

I think there are two big issues with this idea:

1. Continue to see a decline? What decline?

Civ 6 is the best selling game in the franchise and likely the best selling and most popular strategy game of all time.

2. Civ 6 has definitely not hit the limit of complexity. Civ 6 is arguably a lot less complex than Civ 4 or Civ 5. I think this claim just belies a lack of imagination. “AI” is definitely not the final frontier of the series. There’s certainly much more to continue to be innovated in terms of gameplay.

The crazy amount of depth you and other modders added to the mechanics in Civ6 shows that it’s not even close to a limit of complexity (in a good way).

The biggest problems I have with Civ6 is the absolutly awful 1 UPT and how laughably terrible the AI is. 1 UPT requires you to solve a sliding tile puzzle every time you move your army while making ranged units stupidly OP.

As well as being an awful mechanic, 1 UPT is awful history. Ranged fire was never strong enough to simply delete opponents at this scale till probably this century. Troop congestion being an integral game mechanic was never, nor will it ever be a factor at this scale either.

The AI, well we all know
 
I think there are two big issues with this idea:

1. Continue to see a decline? What decline?

Civ 6 is the best selling game in the franchise and likely the best selling and most popular strategy game of all time.

2. Civ 6 has definitely not hit the limit of complexity. Civ 6 is arguably a lot less complex than Civ 4 or Civ 5. I think this claim just belies a lack of imagination. “AI” is definitely not the final frontier of the series. There’s certainly much more to continue to be innovated in terms of gameplay.
1. The highest total I can find from reports is 11m copies sold for Civ 6, meaning it is roughly tied with Starcraft among strategy games for all-time sales. I'd give the edge to Starcraft as selling 11m copies in 1998 when the market was significantly smaller is more impressive. As for most popular, MOBAs are considered a subgenre of strategy games so the crown goes to League of Legends. For 4X games, Civ 6 clearly takes the crown though.

2. I think Civ 6 has the wrong kind of complexity. There are a ton of systems and many of them are convoluted. There are many things to keep track of, but at the same time, there is very little depth to the systems. Compared to older versions of the game, min-maxing has become less impactful. You have more to keep track of, but the reward for keeping track of things it is smaller than ever. I think this is what leads to the bogged down feeling some players get when playing.
 
1. The highest total I can find from reports is 11m copies sold for Civ 6, meaning it is roughly tied with Starcraft among strategy games for all-time sales. I'd give the edge to Starcraft as selling 11m copies in 1998 when the market was significantly smaller is more impressive. As for most popular, MOBAs are considered a subgenre of strategy games so the crown goes to League of Legends. For 4X games, Civ 6 clearly takes the crown though.

2. I think Civ 6 has the wrong kind of complexity. There are a ton of systems and many of them are convoluted. There are many things to keep track of, but at the same time, there is very little depth to the systems. Compared to older versions of the game, min-maxing has become less impactful. You have more to keep track of, but the reward for keeping track of things it is smaller than ever. I think this is what leads to the bogged down feeling some players get when playing.

Good points. Mods that further flesh out the mechanics definitly help with that.
 
1. The highest total I can find from reports is 11m copies sold for Civ 6, meaning it is roughly tied with Starcraft among strategy games for all-time sales. I'd give the edge to Starcraft as selling 11m copies in 1998 when the market was significantly smaller is more impressive. As for most popular, MOBAs are considered a subgenre of strategy games so the crown goes to League of Legends. For 4X games, Civ 6 clearly takes the crown though.
I think this is pretty misleading.

Starcraft sold 11 million copies by 2009, not 1998 -- 11 years after release and including the Brood War DLC

I googled to find this 11m figure for Civ 6 and all I can find is random gaming websites quoting each other.

The only official figures released for Civ 6 from 2K that I can find are:
(1) 1 million copies sold in less than a month of release
(2) in 2017, projected to be "on track" to sell more than 8 million copies

All of that is before the game came out on iOS, Nintendo Switch, PS4/PS5, Xbox, and Epic. There's absolutely no way Civ 6 hasn't sold way more than 11 million across platforms, especially if you consider the expansions to be separate releases for an apples-to-apples comparison with Starcraft.

The only other real number we have to go off of is current player count on Steam, which is a huge underestimation given how many platforms it's on. Civ 6, 8 years after release, is still in the top 30 games with most current players on Steam. I think that speaks volumes to this game's wide reach.
2. I think Civ 6 has the wrong kind of complexity. There are a ton of systems and many of them are convoluted. There are many things to keep track of, but at the same time, there is very little depth to the systems. Compared to older versions of the game, min-maxing has become less impactful. You have more to keep track of, but the reward for keeping track of things it is smaller than ever. I think this is what leads to the bogged down feeling some players get when playing.
I don't really think it's all that complex, so I hope you don't think I was saying that. I agree everything is pretty shallow, but I disagree that minmaxing is less impactful. I think minmaxing absolutely breaks the game in a worse way than any other game in the series, and that's not a good thing.
 
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I'm kind of confused about the point you're responding to. I thought we were discussing the supposed dying interest in strategy games, and the above user's assertion that AI is the key to reversing this (and that it's the only path forward for the series since it's supposedly maxed out on complexity). I disagree with both claims.

Your post seems to be addressing the topic of "Would better AI be better?" And...sure. I agree. We'd all like more capable AI in these games, and prior games have had better AI, so we can be certain it's possible. But I don't get how that really relates to the topic at hand.

I also think that the massive success of Civ 6 has shown us empirically that "better AI" is not the hill that this series will die on.
What interested me enough to reply was the mentions of AI and complexity, with multiplayer also alluded to. IMO, it's a balancing act - more complexity can make games more appealing to players (although it can deter newcomers), but if the AI doesn't keep up, it can make the game too easy and thus less appealing for solo players.

Going on the IGN premise of interest in strategy games declining, would I argue that insufficient AI is a cause of that? Tough to say. I can say that in long-form strategy games (i.e. play over multiple days, not one session), I tend to abandon the games when there's no longer much of a challenge, and the worse the AI is, the quicker that arrives. Whether that extends to a macro level, though, would require a study. And we have a diverse enough body of games that my guess would be strategy gamers simply migrate to another game when the become bored with an existing one.

As for Civ? It will survive even if Firaxis does not make its AI any better. But when I look at the order of which strategy games I've played the most over the past decade, it's EU4, then HOI4, then around the same amount CKII/Vicky II/Civ III, and then Old World/Civ IV/Civ VI. No small part of why I play more of the Paradox games is that I often have to work for success, and sometimes I fail or have significant setbacks. Civ's still the 8000-pound dinosaur in the room, but it has a lot stronger of competition than it did when Civ V was released, and improved AI (and diplomacy) could help win back series veterans who now play other developers' games more.

And yes, Civ VI is a sales success. But it's at 86% positive reviews on Steam, versus 96% for Civ IV: Beyond the Sword, or 91% for Civ III, and I'm not sure that it creates the degree of fanaticism that inspired the site's name as frequently as its predecessors. If Civ were the Mad Max series, VI would be a Beyond Thunderdome or perhaps Furiosa, but it would lift both the Civ series and the strategy genre if Civ VII were instead a Fury Road.
 
And yes, Civ VI is a sales success. But it's at 86% positive reviews on Steam, versus 96% for Civ IV: Beyond the Sword, or 91% for Civ III, and I'm not sure that it creates the degree of fanaticism that inspired the site's name as frequently as its predecessors. If Civ were the Mad Max series, VI would be a Beyond Thunderdome or perhaps Furiosa, but it would lift both the Civ series and the strategy genre if Civ VII were instead a Fury Road.
I don't think comparing these on Steam reviews is really going to give you an accurate metric of the popularity of these games - I imagine a large chunk (I'd guess a comfortable majority, though I have no stats on which to make that assumption) of the reviews for the older games are from people coming back to play games they already enjoyed previously and leaving a review. I can't imagine anyone who bought Civ 3/4 on release and didn't like them would buy them again on Steam just to leave a negative review. Even for newer players who are coming to them for the first time, you're getting the fully patched version with all expansions included, so you're going to have the very best view of the game you could, as opposed to the contentious release period of just about all the Civ games I've been around for (Civ 3 onwards). Even if we just look at recent reviews for Civ 6, it's at 89% positive reviews - I would call that similar enough to the Civ 3 rating that I wouldn't want to make any conclusions on the basis of this data.
 
I strongly object to the opinion that old strategy games had clear and entertaining interfaces 😅

The problem there is as it always was. Conveying the range of tactical possibilities contrasted against the strategic planning on limited screen space. This isn't to say old games didn't do a good job, but it's a harder solve from a genre that typically was seen as more niche than, say, FPS, and so received a fraction of the market share (which like it or not is directly tied to innovation over time in said spaces).

The main issues, from my perspective, is that games are designed to be more accessible than ever, and to demand more of your time (individually) than ever. As always, there are good and bad examples of both (an F2P game is the peak of "accessible", but it trades that for often exploitative monetisation, especially in the mobile space where it's been proven that even games with upfront costs struggle to succeed as it's too much of a barrier for entry for something that's perceived as "mobile"). This shift in the market has come at a cost for strategy, which is stuck with the problem of catering to a very longstanding community (in most cases that I've observed - CivFanatics is far from the only example) while at the same time trying to make their titles accessible in a good way.

It's a hard solve. You're going to see more misses than hits as studios try and figure this out. The good news is that the grand strategy (4x?) space pulls in more numbers (just look at Civ on Steam, for example) than say RTS or any other related genres, so the studios in Civ's space (including Firaxis) will be able to figure things out quicker (again, it's partly a resource game).

There are a number of other factors that contribute, but they're outside the scope I'm keeping to as they get drastically off the topic of games, very fast :)

(and I'm discounting publisher meddling as this is a static fact of the industry, no denying it - I'm trying to keep my analysis to the problem the developers / actual development teams are facing with regards to target demographics)
 
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I think Age of Empire players still enjoy the game they love even after the HD versions came out, the game rules stayed the same.
Obviously with 2 billions smartphones on the market, I quite understand the curve is going towards '5 seconds videos' more
than ever... that doesnt mean to me that gamers that are used to tactical, deep gameplay, now all of a sudden changed
their likings and get absorbed by one minute gameplays titles.

The trend also reflects my personal feelings towards open world games, particularly Zelda Breath of the Wild has detached so much from
the old Zelda games, that I never felt to go out and but a Switch, just to play the latest Zelda.
I have bought the NDS Zelda games, which have still the OG dungeons.
The Zelda fanbase would like a return to the old dungeons playstile.
I also played othe open world games, generative world, etc. that feeld so empty, and takes so much time just going around
that after a couple of hours of just exploring, and doing repetitive stuff, I abandon the game.

And usually i fire up a retro-console, and start playing some of the old Arcade games, like the coleco Lady bug, sort of
Pac-man but harder I used to play on the cabinets when I was a child.
And I totally undersatnd newer generations, despite the fact now have basically a supercomputer in their pockets,
strive for a more Arcade experience, if that is what -Non tactical- means...
 
The Ara graphics are really ugly to me. I don’t know how anyone think it looks great.

It’s like a generic upscale of Civ 5 with a totally unmatched material-themed UI.
The map is flat.
No wide rivers.
Ocean tiles looks all the same.
Cities has no clear borders.

Civ V has hills that looks like hills. Ara seems a flat Eartyh google earth upscale more than a civ V upscale.
 
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