Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has said that easy achievements can increase a game's sales by up to 40,000 units.
"The achievement hunter, who's going to make purchase decisions around the achievements per minute to ratio - he's probably buying ten to twenty titles a year, or at least playing that many," Pitchford told OXM. "He's playing a lot. So he's a very frequent customer, and you want to be in that pile. That's just business.”
Pitchford’s advice to developers – make achievement hunting a simple process.
"The time it takes is minimal because you're designing Achievements anyway, and you can probably affect your sales by something like 10 and 40 thousand units. If you're talking about a triple-A game selling between 1 and 2.5 million units, you're talking tens of thousands of units of impact there. Unfortunately most people in the industry don't think through it that much. You have designers designing achievements, and they're the worst."
Pitchford isn’t alone in this line of thinking. Stephen Toulouse, who heads up Xbox Live policy at Microsoft’s Live Services Group, said in May that achievements help drive game sales. "It's been statistically shown that games that have achievements and implement them well sell better," he noted.
A 2007 study by Electronic Entertainment Design and Research backs up Toulouse’s claims. Focusing on the Xbox 360 achievement system and the impact it has on review scores, sales and profitability, “the results showed a strong connection between a game title’s diversity of accomplishment types with that game’s profitability – pointing to the idea that the more diverse the accomplishments available to the user, the more enjoyable the game, higher review scores, more units sold.”