Microsoft has been making a renewed push to impress PC gamers for a while. There hasn’t been a flood of gamers rushing to the Windows 10 Store in lieu of Steam just yet, and some developers are still cranky about how the Universal Windows Platform has played out so far.
But what do gamers think? What do they really want from Windows 10? That’s what Microsoft wants to find out.
These questions, of course, are being asked in a survey. It popped up on the Windows Insider Program overnight and isn’t afraid to canvass a whole range of topics, including people’s feelings on Nintendo, esports, building PCs, virtual reality and more.
What caught my eye, though, was the hitherto unknown metamorphosis of the Civilization franchise into an RTS:
Can’t say I’ve ever been nuked by Gandhi in real-time. And I wonder how Blizzard and Hi-Rez feel that Microsoft felt the original DOTA was more worthy of a mention than Heroes of the Storm or SMITE.
The rest of the survey wasn’t as fun, but there were some questions in there that could have some interesting ramifications.
Microsoft announced they were bringing automated tournaments to Xbox Live at E3 this year. It’d be a very, very smart move if that system could be brought to Windows 10 somehow.
I can’t imagine a flood of 5’s will change Microsoft’s stance on the Kinect. These responses will probably get fed back to the Xbox team and drilled into their internal analytics somehow. Wonder if it’ll have any effect on the way some games are marketed?
If you want to take the survey yourself, or just send a whole lot of trash responses to the maker of Windows 10, you can do so here. Just remember real people end up dealing with those replies, so be nice.
Comments
8 responses to “Microsoft Polls PC Gamers, Calls Civilization An RTS”
What a terrible survey. Any market researcher worth their salt knows you need at least 7 points in likert-style scales before you can start doing anything interesting with the data!
Also, since when is The Sims more of an open-world game than GTA?
I’m sure the market research market is a bit more segmented than all agreeing on specific scales.
Not really, actually.
From a statistics perspective you should have 7 points before you can consider the variable continuous, and if it’s continuous you can start doing fun stuff like regression and relationship analysis. The more granular you make the scale the better, and personally I prefer 11-point scales, but 7-points is a fairly widely used cut-off particularly in psych studies.
As an interested amateur can you expand on this a bit? I’m guessing you mean that there is some arbitrary threshold where the error associated with the assumption of continuity is considered small enough. Kind of like how Poisson distributions can be safely assumed to be Gaussian when the rate is greater than 20, but not when less than 10.
No worries! It’s actually surprising how much of statistics is based on arbitrary limits. 30 is basically the magic number in terms of sample sizes, because…. well… because. And 95% confidence is the golden because… umm….
And yeah, anything below 7-points is usually considered ordinal rather than continuous. Why 7? Because…. because. But it’s an industry standard, and where there’s some debate as to whether 5 points is enough, I can’t see a reason why they wouldn’t just bump it to a 1-7 scale instead of a 1-5.
Cool, thanks for taking the time.
My pleasure! It’s always nice when someone actually pays attention when I start mumbling about statistics instead of watching their eyes glaze over.
Did anyone else try and fill in the survey on this page before realising it was a jpg?