360 Achievements More Popular Than Microsoft Imagined 117
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."
Vista achievments on the way? (Score:5, Funny)
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YES... (Score:2)
Ah, validation (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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IIRC, wasn't there a contest when the original Punch Out (with Mike Tyson) was first released where you could win actual physical prizes? (Of course, there were other physical prizes offered in the past, including some damn expensive jeweled swords and such in the Atari days, but it's Mike Tyson that triggered the memory of so
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Re:Ah, validation (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Ah, validation (Score:5, Funny)
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+1 for you, sir.
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On the other hand, a quick ebay search on "slashdot" doesn't turn up any current auctions, which means the market may have dried up.
Alternatively, of course, it could mean that the market is pristinely untapped. You should probably put your uid up for bid and see what happens.
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If you want to improve your standing even more, tell 'em it's in binary.
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On the other hand no-one on here should be without their copy of this [ebay.co.uk] fine tome - hurry, only 10,000 copies available!
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Activision released a game comprised of all their Atari games, plus a few extras such as prototypes, freeware homebrew, and even a joke program (venetian blinds). In it, it also imple
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I was anything but confused when the controllers started having two analog sticks on the ps2/xbox/cube generation.
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It's all about the headshots and proximity mines.
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ok I realise this is the final proof that I have no life, but.. Wow that's impressive!
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> 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.
Ahh, I long for the days when you knew you were better than the next guy because a mouselook down showed his bloodied head lying on the metal catwalk at your feet. Outscoring the numb
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Obligatory "Chasing Amy" quote (Score:1)
"What do you do with the prize tickets?"
"Trade them in for prizes that aren't worth nearly as much as you paid to play the game."
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Greetings Starfighter! You have been recruited... (Score:3, Funny)
It's because every one of us has this secret hope that our Achievements will be noticed by someone, and we'll be whisked away to fly a giant CGI starship [imdb.com] full of laser beams and death blossoms.
Or is that just me?
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Damn kids! *shakes a cane* =)
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Sorry, but that's like fucking every ill-tempered, ugly chick you can find and then bragging to your friends about how many times you got laid. If that's what you really want, then more power to ya.
TW
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That's an awesome idea. I'm sure there's all kinds of things they could think of in the form of downloadable content that they could reward players with. Sure, it's called 'unlockables' when the content is already there in the game, but this would allow them to develop the content later- if no one bothers to play the game much then the developer needn't ever waste that additional money developing bonus content no one was unlocking anyway.
There are parallels t
Uh oh. (Score:3, Funny)
Good luck, my brothers. Good luck.
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-Eric
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Simple Explanation (Score:2, Insightful)
(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.
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www.tacticsarena.com The son of a bitch game got me for more than one year... (a girl friend introduced me to it so it was cool). The more stupid thing is that each month your account gets wiped and all your points are completely removed unles you *pay* (however when you pay th
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Really, I'm satisfied even with the small somewhat easy ones. Just having that little bloop and the message popping up gratifies me, and I wanna see what "feat" I accomplished, since I'm betting I'm not alone in that I love to get achievements but don't actually pursue them until I'
Lack of imagination? (Score:2)
Gamerscore = (Score:1)
Popular? (Score:4, Informative)
Of the four million people we have on Xbox Live, in one year they've unlocked over 200 million achievements; that's 50 per person.
Now, when you consider that Battlefield 2: Modern Combat has 46 achievements, Dead or Alive 4 has 45 achievements, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has 50 achievements, Gears of War has 49 achievements, Ghost Recon has 43 achievements, Kameo: Elements of power has 50 achievements, and Perfect Dark: Zero has 50 achievements it demonstrates that "50 achievements per person" is really not that impressive; a person could probably get that many achievements by casually playing a couple of the most popular games on the XBox 360.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that there is a dedicated group (probably 200,000 or so) of hard-core gamers who will do nearly anything to boost their gamer score but the numbers Microsoft is avertizing do not imply that Achievements are all that popular.
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I would suspect that for the average person to get fifty, especially when most only play a couple of games in a casual manner, is actually a surprising figure.
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Re:Popular? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Some have as little as 5 and that's fine.
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Nah.. he probably doesn't own any games.. He can play all the XBLA demos (I think there are at least 23 of them), he can't earn achievements unless he buys the game, but for some reason, the XBLA trials count towards "games played".
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Full retail games: (those $40 and up at release)
-anywhere between a minimum of 5 achievements and a maximum of 50.
-total cumulative points must be 1000 or below (I'm not sure if there is a bottom end but the lowest I've seen is somewhere in the 600s)
-individual achievements must be worth between 0 and 500 points
Arcade or otherwise cheap games: (those below $20 and below release)
-anywhere between a minimum of 5 achievements and a maximum of
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At least in THAT game, the achievements benefit you playing WELL, not just playing through it quickly. After I stopped and started really going for the absolute best scores/times on every single track, di
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This has given me 22 achievements, and I haven't even started playing the two big games properly.
A week with five downloadable games, played casually, would easily give you 50 achievements.
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Actually, that's not true. From my experience, 'casually' playing an XBox 360 game will get you less than 5 achievements, usually around 3 tops (although this varies by game). And the easy to unlock achievements tend to be weighted accordingly, usually accounting for less than 10% of the total achive
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For example, a lot of the acheivements involve playing the game at all skill levels... some involve beating the game using a single weapon. The average player isn't going to get 50 achievments on a game, they are going to get closer to 20.
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50 Achievements is still a lot. As other posters have mentioned, you're not going to get all of them for each game you play. Some require a lot of dedication, and some, like EA's early games, allow you to gain all of the Achievements with minimal work required.
Achievements are definitely popular. They help boost game sales without a doubt. Not ne
My awesome idea (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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But it's different because the kind of people targeted by Nintendo is different.
Nintendo has stars. You get stars each time you buy some game, and by doing some things on their official web site, where you must have an account of course.
Until now, except in Japan, what you could get with stars was useless. Actually, it's still useless now.
We are waiting for Nintendo to tell us if these stars can be converted to Wii points, which would be a good move.
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But it would be a terrible idea for the business. "Spent" achievement points don't show up on a company's profit reports.
Right now, Microsoft is winning on both sides of the achievements equation-- it costs very little for them to keep the Achievements system up and running, since they've already built in a tracking system, and it obviously (as they say in the article) drives both sales and rentals.
Turning Achievement points i
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Re: Spending acheivement points is Bad.... (Score:2)
In that example you are very literally buying a high score, which is a bad idea and defeats the purpose of Achievements. I also don't like the idea of "Selling my high score" for a game. A better idea is to tie specific achievements, to specific downloa
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However, if you only play say 10-20 hours and then have nothing to do but go buy another game, they get more money.
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However, the video game world isn't perfect. All "achievements" arn't equal.
Some EA games are really easy to obtain for exemple. That would mean more points to the gamers for which to get new games online (if i follow your idea).
Because of that, you are right to say that people would buy more Wii games to get more online stuff. The only problem i see is that soon people would realize that EA games are more easy and buy mostly EA games because they give free onli
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It would be another discussion altogether, but basically Nintendo competes for your leisure time.
Every minute you would pass playing one of their "free" games would be a minute you wouldn't pass playing a Wii title.
Just as XBOX Live arcade games actually competes with the 360 games on DVD, it is the same market. Giving a "free" game on Live arcade would actually remove time you would spend playing other games.
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Animal Crossing sort of did this (Score:2)
Oh, and for those harping on "it won't make them any profit"... Some of us, MANY of us in fact, bought Animal Crossing specifically for the dozen o
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Yet again, people are already going after high scores just for bragging rights so why would they need to give an
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Achievement point inflation? (Score:1)
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Re:Achievement point inflation? (Score:5, Informative)
And the issue with "easy gamerscore" was more prevalent near launch, as the concept was still new and not all the developers put effort into creating worthy achievements. The 2K sports games, for example, had ridiculously easy achievements in the 2K6 games - NBA 2K6 and College Hoops 2K6 each had only 5 achievements, and they are easy enough that you can get all 1000 gamerscore in a single game, and a lot of people have borrowed/rented those two because they're so easy. But if you look at the 2K7 titles, there are a lot more achievements, and they're not nearly as easy.
If you check one of the websites dedicated to achievements (such as Achieve360Points.com [achieve360points.com], you'll see that games have really improved their achievements over time, as most games have a few easy ones that you get early on, a good amount that you get when you really spend time in the game, and then a few that are extremely tough - though the ridiculously tough ones such as getting #1 on the leaderboard have also disappeared lately, because they just result in people gaming the leaderboards to get there instead of actually playing.
And I think it's just as impressive to see the websites that have taken advantage of having your gamer profile visible on the web, such as MyGamerCard.net [mygamercard.net], and created leaderboards and the like based on the gamerscore.
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Achievement point inflation? - Gears of War (Score:2)
They will either stop when they get their acheivement, or simply get frustrated from their single minded strategy not working. What do you care though, it just helps you get closer to the
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In practice, the way that it usually works is that each game gives you a few points for every "milestone" in the game, a few points for relatively common things, most of the points on various difficult but not impossible th
Useless, but not bad Microsoft... (Score:1)
It has come up in discussion with friends about how the Achievement system could be improved, and we all pretty much agreed on the points need to have some kind of value.
Microsoft sells "Gamerpics" through their Xbox Live service. I'm of the mindset it's absolutely ridiculous to pay real money for a 1"x1" image that becomes associated with your Gamer
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And this is a positive thing because...
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What happened to the days of picking up a game and playing it through and through? These days the often wonderful single player campaigns are overlooked for multiplayer gameplay. In a game like Unreal Tournament this is fine, as the single player offers limited challenge and reward compared to human opponents and trash talking.
This is a real kick in the pants for single
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But since I can see my friends scores and their achievements, it's compelled us to strive for the next one, then the next.
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It would really be nice to have more pics though, as once you get a solid Friends List going you start to see a lot of the same pictures (apparently I'm not the only one who doesn't like to pay Real Money/Billy Bucks for Gamerpics).
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In a round about way you have that, but it's game specific. In Gears of War, 2 of your most difficult achievements (Complete the game on Insane difficulty, and getting 10,000 kills in ranked multiplayer matches) Unlock gamer Pics. Personally I like this method as it showcases at a glance you completed something difficult, and didn't just grind easy achiev
Truely brings out the worst in people.... (Score:1)
Multiplayer Past: Avid players rack up countless hours honing their abilities to be god-like in their game of choice. Those that play casually can respect the fact that these players are very good and have dedicated time to becoming so.
Multiplayer Present: Games with achievements base
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Where 360 shines... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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the super nintendo had that crazy stupid modem thing the XBand (at least I think that is what it was called). Granted, however, this is their first one with it from the start and integrated.
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How about Wii Sports? That is a prime candidate for an achievements/leaderboard setup. (Not to mention online multiplayer) Why is there NO online functionality at all?
silly? (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes, it's just like a Lamborghini (Score:4, Funny)
except that, presumably, number of achievement points is INVERSELY related to change of getting laid.
I love achievements. (Score:2)
I'm borrowing a PS3 right now and they have a similar system. One place that it is better is that by earning their reward points you can unlock things like concept art or pics. The bad thing is that with no central identity I can't see which achievement
Nerd Cred? Not really... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I like the leaderboards, myself (Score:2)
I don't know if that's world or just US, but it's still a nerdy accomplishment.
Oh, and I stopped because I let my 360 shut off for power saving without saving my game last time, so I couldn't resume. But I know if I want to start over and play it for weeks, (you try doing more than 10 levels a day, every day, without going crazy) I can get 550 levels, w
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Sometimes the context matters
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Well, Slashdot REALLY loves the Wii, and I'm sure that's partially due to the "Apple-ness" of the product design. I think the 360 is kind of a guilty pleasure they allowed themselves, since MS still loses money on it.
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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
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1) Microsoft Hardware has always been pretty damned good. Even their first keyboards and mouses were well-designed and reliable.
2) Microsoft Games has always been pretty good. Sure they made some stinkers, but so has everybody-- on average, most Microsoft Games are very well-done.
3) Xbox is a combination of Microsoft Hardware and Microsoft Games. Therefore, you'd expect it to be very good.
You can tell if someone's hatred for Microsoft is moderately rational (having a monopoly, p