Game academic Richard Bartle investigates why players quit games

Richard Bartle became famous in game circles in the 1990s when he identified the four basic players in online games: killers, socializers, achievers, and explorers. Those categories held up extraordinarily well, and it helped game developers design their games with those four audiences in mind.

Now, he’s thinking about why players drop out of games, and he made a presentation about the subject at the recent Gamelab event in Barcelona, Spain. If he figures this out, he could help the entire game industry figure out how to change their games and make a lot more money, too.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.