PlayStation owners have a new reason to feel smug about their console choice, and for once, it has nothing to do with exclusives. A study of more than 1,000 gamers found that PlayStation players score higher on IQ tests than Xbox players, by a margin large enough to actually matter.
The research comes from WhichBingo, home of some of the UK’s best online slots alongside its casino and bingo coverage. The team tested 1,010 gamers aged 18 and over, working with psychologists to measure four areas: verbal communication, mathematics, logic and visual reasoning. They also asked which games people play most and which platform they use, which is where this gets interesting.
PC came out on top with an average IQ of 114.8. Fine, nobody’s shocked by that. PlayStation took a solid second at 112.7, well clear of Xbox on 107.4. Mobile and tablet players finished dead last at 100.2, over 12 points behind PC. That’s not a rounding error. Something about thumb controls on a five-inch screen appears to do real damage to test performance, or maybe the people who game seriously on mobile just aren’t the same crowd who game seriously anywhere else.
Individual games told a similar story, and it’s mostly about complexity. Dota 2 jumped seven places to take the top spot this year at 120.8, pushing League of Legends down to second on 120.2 after last year’s win. Counter-Strike held third at 118.3. Elden Ring Nightreign, barely a year old, already scored 117.3. Battlefield 6 climbed three places to 111.2. A University of York study found the same pattern years ago: strategy-heavy MOBA players test smarter than average, but the effect disappears in fast shooters, where reflexes do the work that planning does elsewhere.
The gender numbers are the real surprise. Female gamers averaged 108.1, men averaged 106.7. Female players came out ahead. Anyone still picturing competitive gaming as a boys’ club is working off a decade-old stereotype that the data has quietly buried.
Worth saying plainly: this isn’t a lab-controlled study, and it never claims to be. It’s a self-selecting online survey, which means the people who bothered to take an IQ test through a gaming community aren’t a perfect stand-in for every player on that platform. A casual mobile gamer who plays for ten minutes on the train isn’t the same as someone who’s sunk 400 hours into Dota 2. That gap alone probably explains a good chunk of the platform difference. But the game-by-game pattern is consistent enough, strategy titles keep beating reflex titles, so it’s not something to wave away either.
For anyone deciding between a PS5 and an Xbox on the strength of this alone: don’t. IQ tests measure IQ tests, not which console makes better games, and buying a DualSense controller isn’t going to raise anyone’s score. But if you want the honest breakdown of what separates PC gaming from console gaming beyond the numbers, it’s worth reading how PC and console gaming actually differ in practice.
What the study actually nails down is smaller and more interesting than “PlayStation beats Xbox”: strategy and memory-heavy games attract sharper players than twitch-reflex games do, on every platform, every time this kind of survey runs. That’s a pattern worth trusting more than the console rivalry it got attached to.
