Less Than 30% of Gamers Ever Finished GTA4
Data collected by Microsoft Game Studios analysts suggests that a staggering percentage of gamers never beat the single-player campaign in the games they play.
Achievements aren't just a little extra boost to completionists and fans of a particular game, they're also a surprisingly useful tool for collecting data. For instance, since many games award an achievement for completing the single-player campaign, if you look at how many people have logged playtime in a given game and then see how many of them have that achievement, you'll get a good idea of what percentage of players actually bother finishing the game.
In a very intriguing piece ever get all the achievements [http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25818] on any given game - Fable II is the highest at what looks like ~45%, while the average player has earned less than 10% of all the Guitar Hero III achievements.
What's more interesting, though, is the graph that you see here to the right: What percentage of players have completed the single-player campaign in these various popular games? Call of Duty 4 was in the lead with ~75%, followed closely by Halo 3 and Gears of War 2, dropping all the way down to less than 30% for GTA4 and barely over 20% for Rainbow Six Vegas 2.
I'd be willing to chalk up CoD4 and Halo 3 to people who bought the games solely for the multiplayer, but even so those numbers are kind of off-putting. Is it really a good thing that half of the people who ever bought a game like Fable II actually finished it? Was it a matter of difficulty - finding that one controller-breaking part that sours you on the rest of the game - or was it just because some people (or, a lot of people, actually) just got bored?
If there was a movie in theaters that had half of the people walking out before the end, it'd be called a dismal failure. What is the failing here with games, and how can developers move to correct it?
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Data collected by Microsoft Game Studios analysts suggests that a staggering percentage of gamers never beat the single-player campaign in the games they play.
Achievements aren't just a little extra boost to completionists and fans of a particular game, they're also a surprisingly useful tool for collecting data. For instance, since many games award an achievement for completing the single-player campaign, if you look at how many people have logged playtime in a given game and then see how many of them have that achievement, you'll get a good idea of what percentage of players actually bother finishing the game.
In a very intriguing piece ever get all the achievements [http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25818] on any given game - Fable II is the highest at what looks like ~45%, while the average player has earned less than 10% of all the Guitar Hero III achievements.
What's more interesting, though, is the graph that you see here to the right: What percentage of players have completed the single-player campaign in these various popular games? Call of Duty 4 was in the lead with ~75%, followed closely by Halo 3 and Gears of War 2, dropping all the way down to less than 30% for GTA4 and barely over 20% for Rainbow Six Vegas 2.
I'd be willing to chalk up CoD4 and Halo 3 to people who bought the games solely for the multiplayer, but even so those numbers are kind of off-putting. Is it really a good thing that half of the people who ever bought a game like Fable II actually finished it? Was it a matter of difficulty - finding that one controller-breaking part that sours you on the rest of the game - or was it just because some people (or, a lot of people, actually) just got bored?
If there was a movie in theaters that had half of the people walking out before the end, it'd be called a dismal failure. What is the failing here with games, and how can developers move to correct it?
Permalink
