Xbox 360 games with easier Achievements sell more
Hey, Xbox 360 owners, how much do you care about Achievement points? Personally, I regard the whole Achievements deal as another cock-waving contest that gaming doesn’t need, but I also know some cow-brained people really care.
Boss of game developer Gearbox (Brothers in Arms) Randy Pitchford knows this as well. In an interview with Official Xbox Magazine, Pitchford revealed that games with easy Achievements tend to sell more copies.
Games such as Avatar: The Last Airbendergive 1,000 Achievement points for less than a minute of gameplay, and are thus hugely popular with Achievement junkies, despite being mediocre at best.
Indeed, sales of such games can rise considerably when simple points are up for grabs – by upto 40,000 copies, reckons Pitchford. He even admits that developers are aware of this, and construct easier Achievement goals to try and boost sales:
“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.”
If anybody doubted Microsoft’s genius in creating Gamerscores, point them to this post.
