Anyone who’s ever been called a couch potato for spending an evening on Dota 2 or League of Legends might want to send this one round the group chat. New research has found that strategy game fans score higher on IQ tests than almost anyone else, and the platform you play on matters, too.
Bookies.com put 1,010 gamers aged 18 and over through a remote IQ test developed by a team of psychologists, assessing verbal reasoning, maths, logic, and visual reasoning. Dota 2 players came out on top with an average score of 120.8, jumping seven places since last year. League of Legends wasn’t far behind on 120.2, and Counter Strike rounded out the top three on 118.3. If that competitive streak for reading odds and managing risk needs somewhere else to go, an online casino NZ players trust scratches a similar itch; the same patience and pattern recognition that win a Dota 2 match tend to carry over. Elden Ring Nightreign also did well at 117.3, according to Bookies.com, while the newest FC game finished dead last on 90.4, a full 30 points behind Dota 2.
That’s a bigger gap than it looks. Scores between 85 and 115 count as average intelligence, so most of these strategy games are pulling players well above the middle of the curve while sports titles sit closer to it. It aligns with a 2024 brain imaging study of StarCraft II players, which found that regular play of a strategy game focused on resource management and real-time response was linked to distinct patterns of brain connectivity. So maybe it’s not just that clever people play these games. Maybe the games themselves are doing some of the work.
Why Strategy Games Keep Winning
It’s easy to see why Dota 2 and League of Legends sit near the top year after year. Both demand constant decisions under pressure: managing resources, reading what an opponent’s about to do, changing a plan on the fly when it falls apart. Counter Strike runs on the same logic, just squeezed into rounds that last two minutes instead of forty. Those are exactly the skills that show up in logic and visual reasoning tests, which probably explains why the same handful of genres keep landing near the top of these surveys.
Sports games sit at the other end, but for a different reason. FC and its rivals are built around reflexes and muscle memory rather than long-term planning. That’s not a knock on the players, it’s just a different skill, and one that IQ tests aren’t really built to measure.
PC Still Rules The Roost
Console-wise, PC gamers came out ahead with an average IQ of 114.8, followed by PlayStation on 112.7 and Xbox on 107.4. Mobile and tablet gamers finished last at 100.2, though that’s still squarely within the average range.
Some of that probably comes down to what each platform is built for. PC gaming still leans hard into strategy, simulation and competitive multiplayer, the exact genres that scored highest overall, while mobile tends to favour shorter, more casual sessions. The format someone grew up on, whether that was a cartridge shoved into a box under the telly or a strategy game tapped out on a laptop, still shapes how they play now, and maybe how they think while they’re doing it.
Women Edge Out Men, Against The Stereotype
The most eyebrow-raising result: female gamers scored higher on average than male gamers, 108.1 to 106.7. It’s not a huge gap, but it runs against the old assumption that gaming skews toward men when it comes to strategic or logical thinking. According to Bookies.com, the gap held up across the whole sample rather than being dragged around by one or two high-scoring games.
How This Year Compares To Last
Dota 2 jumping from 111.7 to 120.8 is the single biggest move in the study, while League of Legends has stayed remarkably steady at the top across both years. Battlefield 6 climbed three places on last year’s Battlefield showing, and FC has now finished bottom two years running, regardless of which edition players were on. The new entries told their own story, with Dying Light: The Beast and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 both landing above 115 on debut, so narrative-heavy, choice-driven games might be worth watching next.
None of this means picking up a controller bumps your IQ overnight. But it does say something about which genre you gravitate toward. Whether Dota 2 holds top spot next year or something new muscles its way in, the pattern’s pretty consistent: the players thinking furthest ahead tend to come out on top, on screen and off it. For anyone wanting to trace how these platforms got here, Arcade Attack’s retro consoles archive is worth a look, everything from the NES to the Dreamcast.