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."

Comments

Vista achievments on the way?

[guysmilee]

Do i get points for running IE7 instead of Firefox? I better boot my other partition ...

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?

Re:Achievement point inflation?

[Saige]

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.