360 Achievements More Popular Than Microsoft Imagined

GameDaily is hosting an article looking at the phenomenal popularity of Achivements on the Xbox 360. Even the marketing team that came up with the idea is floored by the incredible popularity of what CliffyB referred to as 'nerd cred'. From the article: "Achievement points are changing the way gamers play. While the tendency had been for people to play a game through to the end and then toss it into a closet, many gamers are now going back and playing them again, this time to unlock achievements to boost their Gamerscore. Or if they only played the single-player version, to go back and play the multiplayer or online component. Or to go out and buy games they would not ordinarily have purchased. Or to rent games."

Simple Explanation

[endianx]

360 Achievements More Popular Than Microsoft Imagined

Because Microsoft has no imagination ;-)
(Sorry, couldn't pass that one up.)

Having played many a MMORPG myself, I have seen how addicted people get to, well, just numbers. The goal is to have higher numbers than other people. That makes you special/better. Doesn't matter if the numbers mean anything or not.

Where 360 shines...

[C0rinthian]

I don't think there is any disagreement that Microsoft absolutely nailed their online service. I have a 360 and a Wii, and I find it rather disappointing that the online utilization of the Wii is so poor compared to Live.

Just an example: Rayman Raving Rabbids - You can post your scores on an online leaderboard! To do so, you need to copy a code from the screen, go to your computer, and enter the code in a website. Come on, codes? Are you kidding me? This wonderful Wi-Fi enabled white box can't upload my high scores for me?

I love the Wii, but damn, Nintendo needs to catch up with their online service.

Re:Popular?

[HappySqurriel]

I don't doubt that in many of the games there are a lot of very difficult to obtain achievements but I was trying to point out that (like all statistics that use the mean average) they are easily manipulated by a small group of people. Suppose (for argument's sake) that there are 250,000 XBox 360 owners who have completed 24 games to obtain 48,000 points each and each of these games had 25 achievements (on average) giving each player an average of 600 achievements; this would mean that the rest of the userbase would need about 10 achievements on average to hit the 50 achievements per user number that Microsoft is advertizing.

I think if they (truely) wanted to demonstrate how popular it was they would tell us the median number of Achievements/Gamerscore rather than the mean; that single user who has a gamer score of over 100,000 points will skew the mean by quite a lot.

Re:Slashdot really loves the XBox...

[ectal]

I think as much MS hate as there is around here, the thing with the 360 is that it is a good product. A very good product.

The Xbox LIve features alone--single account for multiplayer, achievements, the arcade, etc.--make it a great console. And fortunately, the story doesn't end there.

So as someone pointed out, some might see it as a guilty pleasure. Others might just partition Xbox and MS into different areas of their brain/taste matrix. But it's hard for a geek or nerd type to dislike the 360.

And I'm the presumably unusual (around here) example of someone who has gained a huge amount of respect for MS because of the 360. I think there's a chance they're beginning to understand what solid products and customer satisfaction are (though it'd be nice if they could hire people who can speak in complete sentences for the Xbox support phoneline...).