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 Airbender give 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.
