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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."
Do i get points for running IE7 instead of Firefox? I better boot my other partition ...
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?
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
360 fans seem to have been bitten by something akin to the MMORPG "leveling obsession".
Good luck, my brothers. Good luck.
Living With a Nerd
(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.
I skimmed through the article to find the numbers and this is what I got:
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.
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.
I like basketball!!1!
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.
All Xbox Live Arcade games are required to have 12 achievements worth a total of 200 gamerscore. All retail games are required to have between 5 and 50 achievements, worth a maximum of 1000 gamerscore.
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, 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, and created leaderboards and the like based on the gamerscore.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
I'd say this is really immature and pointless, but I'm afraid it would adversely affect my karma rating.
-Dave
It's nerd cred, man! ... You can compare it to the feeling you get when you pull up to a restaurant in a Lamborghini. People go, 'Oooo, he must be somebody.'
except that, presumably, number of achievement points is INVERSELY related to change of getting laid.
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
...by the Star League, to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Kodan Armada.
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 full of laser beams and death blossoms.
Or is that just me?
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
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...).
http://nerdcartoons.com/