Revealing tales from achievements and trophies

[Mimi]

trophies*

[deerokus]

The aforementioned Fallout 4 is a particularly interesting example as it is a very, very disappointing game, no surprise hardly anyone stuck with it. Also mods disable achievements, no doubt a few bought it just to play around with mods. 

[footle]

GTA V. Xbox One.

I've apparently fully modded a weapon, unlocked a vehicle, and opened GTA online.

 

So no story achievements, and barely any online ones. I remember playing mostly of it on the PS3.

 

(Fallout 4 I got bored within fifteen minutes of the first area, so I assume I have almost no achievements).

[dumpster]

Bump... And I bought Bloodstained for Xbox as it was cheap.  I completed it (platinumed even) on the PS4 when it was new and they kept on bringing out DLC for it, all free , all decent.  First some extra characters, then a whole new game that played like a 2D version.  There was so much content. I loved it and it's still great now. It's a pleasure to play and see all the updates immediately available after 1st install - a new player today is getting a bargain. Anyway I think this had my vote for game of the year at the time. 

 

Achievements then. I've been playing for the last couple of days and have 14 out of 45 achievements.  What's really revealing is that each boss carries an achievement so you can see how far each player got before giving up.  

 

In the opening cut scene you absorb your first shard.  This achievement is unavoidable and occurs 30 seconds into your first game.  81% of gamers unlocked this which makes me wonder what the other 19% were even thinking.  Apparently 1 in 5 players simply install the game then never play it.  Or, as mentioned earlier in the thread, is this shop window demos or something? 20% of installs not starting the game seems really high, even taking that sort of thing into account.

 

For those who do start the game, the best Metroidvania ever made awaits.  But whilst we know that we already lost 20% of the players, it seems amazing to me that the very first part of the game (on the ship), representing about 15 minutes of play, was enough to see off another 40% of players.  Yes 60% of players never beat the first boss 15 minutes in (and it's an easy boss). And if you think that's crazy, the second boss (Zanghetsu) was only beaten by 24% of players. 

 

You can see this dwindling return throughout the game and it must be heartbreaking for the developers.  You can see three quarters of the players just ditch the game within the first hour, with 80% lost by the twin headed dragon in the tower, only 18% getting on the train, then another 1% is lost at every subsequent boss.  

 

Once you get to the big dragon you're with the 15% of players who seem to get the game and enjoy it.  You can see 18% opened 100 chests, 20% walked 42km, 19% messed around with hairstyles, 18% slayed 1,000 demons. But with 15% beating the next boss that's around 5% of players who reach this area and don't seem to know where to go next.   

 

10% of the players completed the game, and  7% of players reached character level 50 .  There's a hardcore 3% or so that go on to platinum it all. 

 

It must be heartbreaking to put so much work into such an excellent game, only to find 75% of players gave up in the first hour and didn't see 90% of the hard work.

[SMD]

I always wondered how much of trophy stats were simply down to people not syncing or connecting to PSN. A whole bunch of my mates in the PS360 era would log on to download a game or a patch but never bother to sign in after that, they'd had switched off every synchronisation option so they'd finish games offline and never load them again.

[thesnwmn]

Simply a case of developers building games not suitable for most of the audience they attract.

 

Developers shouldn't be sad about it. They chose this. They made games long or boring to start. So many games are an utter chore of terrible tutorial levels or endlessly dull and pointless story shit to start followed by stupidly complicated structures preventing players accessing most of the game without massive time investment.

 

If they don't want to lose maybe half their players in the first hour then they should make better experiences.

 

[phillv85]

I’m one of those who didn’t beat the 2nd boss in Bloodstained, thought it was boring. I backed the kickstarter for it as well and had to be patronised by that bellend community manager. All in all it left a pretty sour taste. 
 

I have so many games to play that if a game doesn’t have its hooks into me in 30 minutes there’s a good chance it’s never getting played again unless it’s a series I know I’ll love. 

[Phantoon]

9 hours ago, thesnwmn said:

Simply a case of developers building games not suitable for most of the audience they attract.

 

Developers shouldn't be sad about it. They chose this. They made games long or boring to start. So many games are an utter chore of terrible tutorial levels or endlessly dull and pointless story shit to start followed by stupidly complicated structures preventing players accessing most of the game without massive time investment.

 

If they don't want to lose maybe half their players in the first hour then they should make better experiences.

 

I don't think it's that, pretty much every game I've seen suffers from this. It's more that there are so many games, gamers are easily distracted by shiny new things,  games are so long and attention spans are so short. What would be interesting to find out is what percentage competition is actually expected nowadays.

 

Another thing is games are comparatively cheap. In the NES days you got few of them because £40 was a ton of money in 1989. It meant you had to stick with the games you got and play the hell out of them. There's been inflation since then and game prices haven't kept up.

[SMD]

Home computer games were cheap as piss but you still completed them. The amount of entertainment was generally just less, you weren't bombarded with as much 'content' as you are now.

[Qazimod]

We got into micros super-late, and Commodore magazines were giving full games away as covermounts, at a time when the range of budget titles (~£3.99 for a cassette) was huge. Monthly magazine covermounts were essentially our Games With Gold / Instant Game Collection. Okay, maybe not.

[fat flatulent git]

I've probably contributed to some skewing of the bloodborne achievement statistics.  I got it after reading reviews, played it for a bit, quickly decided it wasn't for me, so I traded it in.  I'm not sure if I got a single trophy out of it.

 

My wife has sometimes logged in and loaded the game disk that's in the drive, not realising it has been changed since she last played, and then quit at the first opportunity.  Not sure if that counts as having played the game or not.

[Popo]

I’m playing and enjoying Sable courtesy of Gamepass at the moment. Since leaving the starting area, every single achievement has counted as rare… which suggests to me few who installed and played it did so for long enough to get out of the starting area. 

[gossi the dog]

16 hours ago, dumpster said:

Bump... And I bought Bloodstained for Xbox as it was cheap.  I completed it (platinumed even) on the PS4 when it was new and they kept on bringing out DLC for it, all free , all decent.  First some extra characters, then a whole new game that played like a 2D version.  There was so much content. I loved it and it's still great now. It's a pleasure to play and see all the updates immediately available after 1st install - a new player today is getting a bargain. Anyway I think this had my vote for game of the year at the time. 

 

Achievements then. I've been playing for the last couple of days and have 14 out of 45 achievements.  What's really revealing is that each boss carries an achievement so you can see how far each player got before giving up.  

 

In the opening cut scene you absorb your first shard.  This achievement is unavoidable and occurs 30 seconds into your first game.  81% of gamers unlocked this which makes me wonder what the other 19% were even thinking.  Apparently 1 in 5 players simply install the game then never play it.  Or, as mentioned earlier in the thread, is this shop window demos or something? 20% of installs not starting the game seems really high, even taking that sort of thing into account.

 

For those who do start the game, the best Metroidvania ever made awaits.  But whilst we know that we already lost 20% of the players, it seems amazing to me that the very first part of the game (on the ship), representing about 15 minutes of play, was enough to see off another 40% of players.  Yes 60% of players never beat the first boss 15 minutes in (and it's an easy boss). And if you think that's crazy, the second boss (Zanghetsu) was only beaten by 24% of players. 

 

You can see this dwindling return throughout the game and it must be heartbreaking for the developers.  You can see three quarters of the players just ditch the game within the first hour, with 80% lost by the twin headed dragon in the tower, only 18% getting on the train, then another 1% is lost at every subsequent boss.  

 

Once you get to the big dragon you're with the 15% of players who seem to get the game and enjoy it.  You can see 18% opened 100 chests, 20% walked 42km, 19% messed around with hairstyles, 18% slayed 1,000 demons. But with 15% beating the next boss that's around 5% of players who reach this area and don't seem to know where to go next.   

 

10% of the players completed the game, and  7% of players reached character level 50 .  There's a hardcore 3% or so that go on to platinum it all. 

 

It must be heartbreaking to put so much work into such an excellent game, only to find 75% of players gave up in the first hour and didn't see 90% of the hard work.

 

It was on Gamepass. I assume a lot of people would have downloaded it, played for 30 minutes and then uninstalled.

[SomethingWitty]

There’s also the fact that any game that appeared on rewards as simply ‘Play xxxx’ will have had stats screwed by people starting up to the title screen via cloud gaming and quitting out again. I think Sable was one such case…

[Timmo]

15 minutes ago, gossi the dog said:

 

It was on Gamepass. I assume a lot of people would have downloaded it, played for 30 minutes and then uninstalled.

 

I played about half of it but it just felt cheap to me and I got bored. Liked Hollow Knight a lot more.

[Majora]

If a game ever appears on Gamepass/Playstation Plus/Games with Gold, it will massively skew the achievement stats because so many people with no real interest in the game will boot it up and ditch it early on. Or, as mentioned previously, will boot a game up just to get some MS Reward Points for it. 

 

I do find it interesting to look at achievement obtained stats and see which games retained players better than others but the stats don't mean an awful lot for games that have appeared on subscription services anymore. 

[Rsdio]

Obviously Game Pass skews everything that way but Sable's also a weird one in that the performance is really bad on pretty much everything and it was very buggy at launch (maybe still now, judging by Steam reviews), I imagine a lot of people started it then went 'Errr, maybe I'll wait and see if there's a patch'. The animation style seemed to put many off too.

[dumpster]

Interesting views here and I can see how Gamepass might skew things.  But with Bloodstained specifically, it's such a brilliant game I find it hard to believe people might not like it because I think it's wonderful. Different strokes for different folks I guess.  Really interesting to be able to look a the numbers and see how many people gave up so quickly.  

[carlospie]

22 minutes ago, dumpster said:

Interesting views here and I can see how Gamepass might skew things.  But with Bloodstained specifically, it's such a brilliant game I find it hard to believe people might not like it because I think it's wonderful. Different strokes for different folks I guess.  Really interesting to be able to look a the numbers and see how many people gave up so quickly.  

I want to buy it for Xbox but it's £15 now!

[SozzlyJoe]

Conversely, I am always impressed by just how many people get platinums, given how much busy work is involved to get most of them. No matter how much I like a game, I nearly always tire of it long before I get anywhere near the plat. I mean, just to take a random example FF7 Remake has nearly 3% of players getting it. That is pretty impressive.

[carlospie]

Anyone that plats ff15 deserves a knighthood 

[DeciderVT]

52 minutes ago, SozzlyJoe said:

Conversely, I am always impressed by just how many people get platinums, given how much busy work is involved to get most of them. No matter how much I like a game, I nearly always tire of it long before I get anywhere near the plat.

Usually I can't stand trophies at all but Fallout 4 was a game I loved so much that I got within spitting distance of the platinum trophy during my playthrough. There was something mildly funny about the tipping point for that last trophy, which involved filling a grim post-apocalyptic settlement with dozens of cat pictures to get over 99% satisfaction from the residents.

[Monkeyspill]

I have achievement/trophy notifications turned off. I rarely look at them unless I’m trying to figure out if I’ve missed something.