Survey: World of Tanks is the most broadly appealing strategy game, age-wise

Game dev consultancy Quantic Foundry has updated its "strategy genre map" with new data on who plays certain strategy games, and why, culled from its ongoing survey of players.

The firm cranks out such data-driven blog posts at a regular clip in an effort to drum up business, but the fact that it updated its extant report on the strategy genre (which included the finding that Hearthstone was appreciated as more strategic, but less exciting, than League of Legends) is particularly notable because it now incorporates data from more respondents (220,000 worldwide, as opposed to 140,000 from Europe and North America) with deeper detail.

One of the new details is the age of those 220,000 respondents, and when comparing the standard age deviation of each respondent who said they played a specific game (chart excerpted below) Quantic Foundry found that Wargaming's free-to-play tank combat game World of Tanks is far and away the game with the broadest appeal -- at least in terms of how old (or young) its players are.

"The clear outlier in this chart is World of Tanks," wrote Quantic Foundry's Nick Yee. "Given the area of the map it is located in, we would have expected a youngish audience with a relatively narrow age appeal. Instead, it has the broadest age appeal of any game in our genre map (with a standard deviation of 10.3)."

By contrast, MOBAs like DotA and League of Legends had remarkably small standard deviation in player age (5 years or less) while games like Hearthstone, StarCraft and (yes) Counter-Strike fell somewhere in the middle.

You can read more of Quantic Foundry's findings, as well as a deeper explanation of its data-gathering methods, in the full blog post.