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Achievements Can Drive 40,000 Extra Sales - Randy Pitchford

Tom Ivan's picture

By Tom Ivan

October 7, 2009

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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.”

SimonMaxwell's picture
On October 9th SimonMaxwell said:

Mr Pitchfork, I'm certainly not going to buy a crap game and play through it just because it has a bunch of easy achievements. Well, I did download Dash of Destruction but that was free.

edshot's picture
On October 8th edshot said:

Even my dog won't do anything unless he gets a dog biscuit for it, lol.

rahvii's picture
On October 8th rahvii said:

Well i guess there will be a lot of games with cheap and easy achievements just because that sells.

I'm aware that all this achievements systems are great and add a lot to the games (alternative goals and rewards). But it won't be long before it sucks because of commercial dessisions like this.

Hope gamers are smarter than "lets buy this game because in a day i can get a platinium trophy and lvl up my profile", and that the game actually beign good takes a priority.

DubsTF's picture
On October 8th DubsTF said:

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

Talk about designing your game to go after the absolute lowest possible hanging fruit; I can only imagine the interests and attitudes of those who would plumb such depths of loserdom. These are the discerning individuals who you want to go out of your way to include in your game's audience? Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, much respect.

Alex Walker's picture
On October 8th Alex Walker said:

Well implemented achievements are definitely a good thing, an i fully support that. Halo 3 encouraging you to play the Metagame with them is a good example.

Avatar is a bad example, but probably got a fair few sales on the strength of it having such easy achievements. The biggest impact it probably had though was in the rental market, and I'm not sure how exactly that helps the developers.

edshot's picture
On October 8th edshot said:

I don't really have a problem with acheivements and trophies per se. Developers know full well the importance that rewards play in creating that warm sense of acheivement that sells more games.

However, I feel quite often it's a system that just feels disengaged from the game itself and the fact that they're the same acheivement points and trophies for different games, they just feel generic and tacked on. Not that I feel they're a bad thing, I'm just as guilty for tat-collecting as anyone!

But I would hate for developers to become over-reliant on them as a reward mechanic. I would like to see more individual in-game rewards, such as unlocking new areas that are not essential for completing the game for example. Getting the Gold Chocobo to get the Knights of the Round, now THAT was an acheivement.

DubsTF's picture
On October 8th DubsTF said:

Avatar is a bad example, but probably got a fair few sales on the strength of it having such easy achievements.

This is what I find lamentable, and exactly what dude above is advocating.

Personally I could take or leave achievements and especially gamerscore, but there's a difference between "well implemented" or "well designed" achievements, which might encourage someone who already likes your game and has played it extensively to explore every nook and cranny or even play through it again, and "easy achievements," which represent a crass attempt to garner sales to the kind of gamerscore-obsessed moron who makes purchase decisions based on the presence of "easy achievements."

He's playing a lot. So he's a very frequent customer, and you want to be in that pile. That's just business. This guy fucking SUCKS.