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."

Ah, validation

[Control Group]

The only thing that surprises me about this is that they're surprised - achievements are the first thing I said "wow, that's a good idea" to when I got my 360. It just seems obvious that in a hobby where people used to mail Polaroids of arcade machine high-score screens to each other (and to gaming mags) something like this would catch on like wildfire.

The encouraging thing is that, so far, I haven't heard of too many games (and the ones that are guilty of it are from EA...no shock there) that have stupidly easy achievements included just as a way to encourage people to buy them ($60 for a meh game, but with a guaranteed 1000 points attached). My gamerscore is a paltry 4600 or so, but even I've been lured into trying certain things over and over just to get an elusive achievement.

Looked at objectively, of course, it's ridiculous - but subjectively, it hearkens back to the console games the eighties and nineties, where you'd obsessively try to beat Facility in less than two minutes to get a new cheat code, or spend an hour jumping on Goombas to get 99 lives.

Sure, the points can't be redeemed for anything - but since when have high scores in games, or unlocking all the secrets, or beating Mike Tyson, ever been redeemable for anything? Really, all this indicates is that, while the days of gamers striving for the number one high score have been supplanted by most games being story-based (or at least, game-completion based), there's still an attracting to having a number that says you're exactly this much better or worse than the next guy.

Hell, haven't there been cases where a low slashdot uid has been sold on ebay? It's all about cachet amongst a certain type of geek/nerd/gamer, and they're surprised that a metric for providing exactly that cachet is popular?

My awesome idea

[Sciros]

Ok, I just wanted to throw this out there because otherwise I'll forget it. Personally, I was put off by Nintendo's pricing for its virtual console games for Wii. Way too high for me since I already have most of the games I'd want to play on the original cartridges and they still work. Anyway, Xbox 360's Achievements gave me an idea. Rather than paying $5-10 for a game title, players should be able to redeem a Nintendo equivalent of "Achievement Points." And the service would track what achievements were redeemed so players could only use them once. This way, in order to get more virtual console titles players would need to buy/play more games on the Wii. Nintendo still makes money, and gamers don't get the "I'm spending money on nothingness" feeling. Naturally this would require some tweaking so players can get a reasonable number of titles per however-many Achievement points, but I think it could work quite well.

Imagine if Microsoft had a similar service (well, ok, imagine it had Nintendo's old games available on it) and had you redeem something like 1000 pts (random value) for a game download? I think that would be awesome, and would likely sell a lot of consoles.

Re:Popular?

[Control Group]

Just a couple points of interest:

First, each full game is supposed to have 50 achivements totaling 1000 points. This hasn't been strictly adhered to, but it's what's supposed to happen.

Second, 360voice.com will give you a list of the top gamerscore holders that have registered their machines on the site (a sample of ~70,000). The top gamerscore is over 100k, #50 is almost 60,000, and #100 is almost 50,000. #35,000 comes in with a score of 3110 on 31 games played. The bottom of the list, of course, contains people who have scores of zero (though I did see one guy with a score of zero and twenty-three games played, which is at least mildly incredible to me).

I'm not sure what this says, and I suspect the sort of person who signs up to have his XBox 360 "blog" about his gaming habits skews the results towards higher gamerscores, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Re:Ah, validation

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Reminds me of a sci-fi story where the "Number 8", the highest still-existing human since humans began numbering themselves, and essentially a god(dess) in abilities, had f***** up an experiment royally and destroyed a galaxy and all the people in it.

If you want to improve your standing even more, tell 'em it's in binary.

Nerd Cred? Not really...

[NeutronCowboy]

I really don't care about how many gamer points I have. But what I have found is that gamer points are a great way to figure out if someone really likes a game. Someone has unlocked only 10 points on an XBox Live game? Avoid. Someone unlocked all 200? I should take a look at it. Same thing with full games: someone unlocked 800 points in The Outfit? I'll take a close look at the game.

It's essentially a way to see what my friends are playing, and how much they've been playing it. Works as a great way to figure out what I should I buy.