Achievements in games have certainly grown into their own thing. Some games reward you for booting it up, others for finding a ping pong ball in an ocean. Your mileage may vary here.

What achievements also provide is a sort of meta evaluation of a game’s quality. As many provide an achievement for completing a tutorial as well as completing the final mission, you get a sort of metric as to how many people bought, played, and completed a game. Now, obviously you won’t get the actual number of players, but you will get an indication on stickiness. That is, a game’s ability to keep you playing.

I get that people buy games on sale and it stays stuck in the library for a while. Devs generally want larger purchase volumes, where long-term stick is more related to micro-transactions & DLC (excepting indie developers who want word of mouth). Call of Duty only wants you to stick around to sell you cosmetics after all. It is however a fascinating set of metrics to see where players simply drop off from a game. Control Resonant has an absolutely massive drop off right after the first zone, a point I personally found confusing in-game. That’s honestly too bad, cause that game absolutely rocks.

Other games simply never stick the initial landing, creating a hard bounce for new players. MMOs all have this issue after a while, but other games? Outer Worlds 2 has 90% hitting the tutorial and drops to 45% for completing it. From there, it drops to 20% for completing the game, meaning if you made it through the first planet, you’d stick til the end.

I’m fairly certain that these types of metrics are a big deal for the bean counters in the AAA space too, especially when it comes to sequel-itis. If players bounced in one area but stuck in another, you’re likely to see more of that in the next version *cough* Ubisoft *cough*.

I like stories from numbers. You can interpret a lot, and try to match up to the media lines companies put out. Plus for most of us, if you’ve actually bought a game, you should probably play it.