Warner Bros. Games wanted to understand how younger players build real emotional connections to titles, beyond the gameplay itself. In a fast-moving entertainment landscape, the question was what actually drives relevance, immersion and long-term engagement.
For Gen-Z players, games are part of who they are: their identity, their lifestyle, their self-expression. Connection isn’t only about mechanics or genre. It comes from the cultural signals a game sends, the worlds its characters live in, how its community behaves, and how much room it gives players to project themselves.
NERDS designed a culture-first research and strategy framework to understand what shapes player connection, aspiration and engagement. We turned that insight into clearer priorities for future product, ecosystem and portfolio thinking, helping the team treat relevance and self-expression as something to design for, not hope for.
