Secrets of Game Engagement

The Hidden Systems of Engagement

What makes games engaging? Welcome to our deep-dive series exploring the hidden systems that keep players returning to games over time.

How should we measure ‘engagement’ when it comes to games? Some titles are completed and set aside, while others retain players for hundreds or even thousands of hours. Conventional explanations often point to genre, budget, polish, franchise recognition, or sheer commercial scale.

However, measuring engagement is more complicated than it first appears. Large, highly visible games will naturally accumulate enormous total playtime figures simply because they attract huge player bases. Meanwhile, smaller titles can appear modest in absolute terms while sustaining unusually deep engagement among the audiences they do reach.

Analysis of Steam Dataset

To examine this more carefully, our first article analyses a large Steam dataset containing information on roughly 150,000 games, including ownership estimates and average lifetime playtime. Rather than focusing purely on total playtime, we use an average playtime-per-player metric to compare games operating at very different scales.

From there, we group games into ownership cohorts and establish a baseline level of ‘typical’ engagement for each category. This allows us to identify titles that significantly outperform their peers in terms of sustained player attention.

The result is a set of unusually engaging titles: 'outperforming games' drawn from across the wider market, from smaller independent releases to large-scale commercial titles. They are not always the biggest or most visible games on Steam. But by this measure, they are exceptionally effective at holding player attention over time.

Adding a Qualitative Layer

In our second article we add a layer of qualitative data, derived from player comments and professional reviews, to glean a deeper understanding of why these outperforming titles are so effective at engaging players.

This analysis allowed us to discern five key systems that sustain player engagement.

Five Systems of Engagement  

In the following articles, we analyse these systems, exploring how they operate in practice across fourteen titles drawn from our list of outlier games. 

While no list can ever be exhaustive, our objective is to identify some of the strongest recurring patterns that sustain player engagement across very different kinds of games.

To begin the series, we analyse a Steam game dataset to better understand how player engagement can be measured.

Follow the links below to trace the series through to its conclusion.

Series: Secrets of Engagement

The Hidden Systems of Engagement Engagement Insights from Steam Data Five Systems of Engagement Series Conclusion: What Keeps Players Playing? 1. Mastery Engines 2. Generative Social Systems 3. Creative Stewardship Systems 4. Persistent Stakes Systems 5. Fantasy Anchors