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[Mephisto]

Note: This is a straight copy/paste of something I posted on a social networking site, but I thought we could get some good discussion about it on here.


Something always strikes me as odd when I look at global achievement stats on Steam. Even when said achievements are story-related and you can not progress without gaining them, said achievements never have 100% acquisition rates with the community.

Just as a few examples, I was looking at the Saints Row 3 achievements. 93% of players have "Dead Presidents." You literally are thrown into a firefight right at the beginning of the game before you even customize your character. At the end of that scene, you gain the achievement. Even more striking is Mount & Blade: Warband where around 53% of players bothered to kill the one or two bandits at the very beginning that you're required to kill to progress.

For a bit more of an extreme example, no achievement in Total War: SHOGUN 2 has higher than a 72% acquisition rate and the vast majority are sub-10%. I know achievements aren't everything, but some of them are dead simple. During one of the gaming sessions I used to take part in, a few of us fired up this particular game and attempted to play multiplayer. Someone said something to the effect of "bet you can't win a skirmish with just archers." Bam, four achievements that not very many people have. In my first non-tutorial battle.

Am I one of the few people who doesn't want to buy a game if I won't play it? What else would lead to people spending so much money on games just to not play them? Maybe it's my upbringing in a household where we made just enough to get by, but I don't really understand the rationale. Unless you get them on sale, you're paying $30-50 per new game. Total War at least has the excuse of being one of the more unforgiving strategy titles out there. The only guy I know of with an excuse for not playing all of his games at least once is the guy who won a copy of everything on Steam this past Christmas.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

It was something I always found strange with Steam achievements. The conclusion I came to that it was a combination of the game still being in lot's of people's back list, people buying the game and never playing it and finally the people who only run Steam in offline mode.

I suppose there would be a percentage of people who buy a game out of "guilt" when they've pirated it in the past but they don't really have any intent on replaying the whole game.

[Blargityblarg]

Some can go down as hardware incompatibility; I've got a few games in my library that just plain don't run on my machine.

That said, I have more games there that I haven't really played, and a few that I've not touched at all. The Humble Indie Bundles contribute to this, as do pack sales.

[Thendash]

Sometimes achievements come out after the game is released. I have 0 achievements in all episodes of half life 2 and both Red Orchestras, but I've played them all quite a bit.

[Ozyton]

You buy a game because it's on sale or cheap then find you don't have time to play it or you're already enjoying the games you have so you don't bother with the other ones.

In the case of Warband and many other games with multiplayer, you don't have to play singleplayer. Some people may get the game just for mods or for the multiplayer (I don't think achievements are tracked in mods?).

I bought quite a lot of games I haven't gotten around to playing. Much of it has to do with the job I've got nowadays. However, before I had a job I would play the same few games time and time again, completely forgetting aboot the other games, since I was getting enough enjoyment out of them I didn't have much of a reason to play the others except for the fact that it would be different.

[Seriyu]

I was thinking about this the other day, but I honestly thing part of it is that it's very easy to never see the game, and even on the game screen, it really doesn't shove itself in your face, so you may never get that "urge" to play it like you would if you saw box art or heard music, or whatever. So while you know you have it, it never really shows itself beyond it's name and a very obscured and subdued screenshot, so you never get the feeling like you have to play it.

[Toady Two]

Achievements don't register is you play in offline mode.

[10ebbor10]

Also, sometimes Steam just glitches out and the achievments don't register correctly. (For example, according to steam a friend of me has earned the second storybased achievment in portal before the the first one.)

That and offline mode/backlog/ stuff

[Alg]

Unless you get them on sale, you're paying $30-50 per new game.

That's your answer, right there. People (and that includes myself) buy a lot of games dirt cheap during the sales, and then don't play them (or just try them quickly) for a long time, if at all.

[Enzo]

People have mostly covered it.

Achievement glitches, offline play, games that don't run on your system, and most importantly a backlog of super-cheap games from sales. I sure as hell am not paying $30-$50 per game, I don't think I've payed anywhere near that much for any Steam game. Because frankly I don't care enough about getting the newest killer app on release day when I've got a dozen older/indie games I'd probably have more fun with, which I got for super cheap, and honestly the newest games won't run on my system anyway.

[Shadowlord]

Internet disconnects while playing. Oops, you don't get any achievements! Sucks for you! That and people not buying it for the singleplayer/multiplayer/whatever the achievement is for, or not caring about the achievement, or just not ever trying the game. I have a bunch that I've never played, or tried and then uninstalled because I didn't like them at all (mostly Humble Bundle games), although I am considering uninstalling SoaSE: Trinity with only "2 hours played" (of which 30 minutes was the broken registration window).

[Frumple]

Some can go down as hardware incompatibility; I've got a few games in my library that just plain don't run on my machine.

This and offline are my big ones. There's... four? Five? Games in my steam library (which is something just shy of half of them, iirc) that are simply non-functional on any computer I have access to. Another couple are insufficiently functional, i.e. they run, but barely or do horrible things to th'computer's CPU, so I don't exactly play much. Everything else, I've sunk in at least a few dozen hours, though in a couple cases before I got the game on steam or most of that time offline.

I will "invest" if I've got some loose funds and there's particularly good sales going on, though -- buying a game I'm not able to play or aware I won't be playing much for a long while doesn't bother me when it's digital. I'll get around to it sooner or later, whenever I've got better hardware access. It's not going anywhere, and if it does, I'm a lot less troubled by re-aquiring something I've actually purchased.

[Dutchling]

This are all games in my library which I haven't played so far, and a good part of them have been in my library for over six months. There are probably 5-10 more games which I played for half an hour and after that lost interest. I have also never been interested in achievements so I only get them 'accidentally'.

Code: [Select]

STALKER: Call of Pripyay
Psychonauts
Portal 2
Metro 2033
Medieval II: Total Wars Kingdoms
Lone Survivor
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
Evochron Mercenary
Dungeons of Dredmor
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Braid
Bastion
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Alpha Protocol

[fenrif]

I buy nearly all my games in the sales. With the exception of brand new stuff  that I want to play multiplayer with friends (Torchlight 2 for example). This means that I have a huge backlog at any given time, with most of my games not even having been installed.

Also sometimes I rebuy games in the steam sales that I allready own on another system, or have beaten before, just because it's cheap enough that I don't mind rebuying it for the convenience of having all my games in one place. I just bought Just Cause 2 in the summer sales because I wanted to try the bolomod. I bought New Vegas because it came with all the DLC, which I've not played before. I may not play these games for another year or two, but it's good to know they're there. And it's not like they're terrible expensive to buy in the first place.

[Levi]

I tend to keep a big queue of games that I buy during sales to play and I slowly get to them.  There have been games that I don't play over a year after I buy them.  Probably a lot of the missing first achievements are from people like me.

I have heard a few people on the steam forums claim that they "collect" games only to have them, not to play them.  I think that is bloodly insane and I hope its not true.