By Jim Rossignol on May 8th, 2009 at 1:18 pm.
Steam has opened up its Global Gameplay Stats, listing the percentage of all players who have earned achievements in various Steam titles. It makes for some interesting reading: only 30% of people who bought World Of Goo have finished it, while only 76% of Portal owners have got to the fully-functional Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device stage. It’s like a monument to incomplete gaming experiences, and reminds me of Lego Star Wars creator John Smith getting up on stage to sing an ode to games he’d never finished, at the Nordic Game convention last year. I wish I could find a recording of that.
“while only 76% of Portal owners have got to the fully-functional Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device stage.”
wut
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Pomp you’d be surprised how many people fail to even get past the first level of games they own. Something like half of people manage to see games endings, I remember reading that somewhere, possibly on the internet.
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I never completed Audisurf…
…I have lots of lots of mp3 to watch. But I don’t like music.. soo…
note to self 1:
never put level (chapter) achievement on my games,
http://steamcommunity.com/stats/SpaceTrader/achievements/
it will look, like only 24% of the players like my game enough to play the level 2.
note to self 2:
http://steamcommunity.com/stats/Multiwinia/achievements/
make achievements very easy, to look like tons of people are playing it and having fun….
http://steamcommunity.com/stats/DefenseGrid:Awakening/achievements/
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http://steamcommunity.com/stats/EternitysChild/achievements/
This is just bizzare?
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@Adam: I suppose only a 85.4 of the guys that has buy EC have started it, or something. Or maybe have started it online. Maybe is a game people like to play offline, for some reason…
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@Adam
Heh. I’m guessing it gives you the achievement when you start the game up.
EDIT: Tei is in my mind D:
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It’s kinda sad that under half of the people who bought Aquaria made it past the first level (the demo area).
Stats like this are rather depressing overall.
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This helps me feel like less of a failure.
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Surely the “only 76% of Portal owners have got to the fully-functional Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device stage” statistic can be largely explained by people just buying the Orange Box, and then only playing the other 2 games?
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@Adam 85.4% purchased the game, the rest only played the demo?
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Heh, apparently only 0.1% of players have finished Emipire: TW’s tutorial.
http://steamcommunity.com/stats/EmpireTotalWar/achievements/
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It’s probably part due to the Orange Box. Some bought it for Half-Life, some bough it for Portal, some bought it for Team Fortress 2.
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I haven’t gotten around to installing Empire : Total War yet but haven’t the Total War demos always been open ended? In Rome : TW, I seem to remember that once you get to a certain point in the tutorial (after combat and city management basics), you are given the option to continue or move on to the real campaign. That could possibly explain why so many people never reached the ‘conclusion’ of the tutorial.
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Well, I don’t remember unlocking any achievements during my first playthrough of Portal.
If they were really added at a later state, this would at least explain some of those.
Though I really never did finish the last chapter of WoG…
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How long until they add a Steam score to the achievements?
I’m impressed that only 85.4% of people successfully purchased EC. Wut?
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A quarter of people have never conquered a region in Empire. Might be interesting to give an achievement for “Has started a campaign game (including tutorial)” so you can compare people who have actually played the campaign (it’s possible that some people who have it either haven’t played in online mode since installing it or haven’t gotten around to playing it in campaign mode, rather than just getting lost and confused and giving up).
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Huh? Only 85% of people who have this game on Steam bought it? Is it shareware? If so, that’s a pretty awesome conversion rate.
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Obviously Portal should only have been 10 minutes long and Gabe Newell should have visited each game completer to give them a lollipop and a pat on the back.
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Technically I’m among those who haven’t. I bought the game direct from 2DBoy and played it to completion, but subsequently registered my pre-order key with Steam for ease of use later on.
I’m also among the 24% who haven’t taken a single region in Empire: Total War because the game hates my PC.
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Trials 2 Second Edition
It also shows how poor and hard are achievements for T2:SE.
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Empire: Total War
Pissed Off Buyers: 100%
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Could it be that a significant number of people play through pirated versions before deciding it’s worth the money and don’t bother repeating them?
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Re: World of Goo
I can’t imagine that I am the only person who bought the game directly from 2D Boy, completed it, and later activated it on Steam without yet playing through again.
Oh. Damn you, Puffin Man.
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1.9% have done Little Rocket Man for HL2:Ep2…I applaud those people.
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Almost half of the red orchestra achievements no one has!
Edit: Thanks Waste_Manager i think that was the hardest achievement in ep2 took me a whole day of swearing and reloading to get it done, now if only I can do it on the 360 version.
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Pleased to see that less than 1% have managed the “Master Strategist” (gold medal in all challenge modes) achievement in Defense Grid. I briefly toyed with it, but it quickly became an exercise in (sublime) futility.
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To Puffins and Skye: If you’ve already bought World of Goo from 2D Boy and completed it, you’ll get the achievement as soon as you plug it into Steam and run it once, so you don’t have to go through it again. I know that’s what I did, anyway…
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I did not know that! I have not actually run the game from Steam yet, and I did not even know that I would keep my save file. There are probably others who have not run it after activation, either.
Shadowmancer, it looks like the Red Orchestra achievements were added just this March. I would guess that their completion isn’t retroactive.
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There was (unsurprisingly) a bug with the Road to Independence campaign that even after finishing it, you weren’t awarded the achievement.
Personally I finished a world domination campaign on hard mode, got the victory video and didn’t earn the achievement, there seems to be a fair number of problems with correctly awarding them.
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I’m pretty embarrassed at my performance on most of those lists, but somewhat bemused that almost as many people carried a gnome through the entirety of Episode 2 than saved all the buildings from the attack on White Forest.
Francis has alot to answer for.
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Braid’s statistics are more in line with what I’d have suspected, what with 96.6% of people obtaining the most basic achievement, and 46.5% completing it. Too many other games barely even get that latter percentage for the most simple achievement.
Owch on the multiwinia stat:
Explorer
Play at least 1 game on every map 0.4%
That said, Multiwinia is one of those games I’ve brought and never played. (Got it free with Darwinia) I fear I would be thrashed instantly.
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http://steamcommunity.com/stats/ZenoClash/achievements/
Seems I wasn’t the only one who didn’t really get the hang of blocking and deflections (Only 1.6% managed 50 deflect kicks). Still a great game though.
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Yeah, my tactic in Zeno Clash was dance and spam right-click. The final levels made that tactic a bit tough, though (and even then, the bloody guards on the gate had ridiculously powerful sniper-crossbows)
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I never really get the latter Portal Achivements because I can never do the final testing room challenge before GLaDoS tries to toss you into the fire without throwing my arms up and just no_clipping my way out of the damn thing.
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“while only 76% of Portal owners have got to the fully-functional Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device stage.”
I actually didn’t get the achievement the first time I got the gun.
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Yeah, worth mentioning that Steam’s achievement/stats tracking is a bit buggy.
My first run through Survival mode on L4D, I got at least four Gold times, but it thinks I have one. It lists best times for maps I’ve never played. People have had tons of problems with it not recognizing the completion of Expert campaigns, or even mysteriously dropping the number completed later on.
There were a few bugged TF2 achievements as well, not sure what the status on those is.
But yay! I’m one of those 1.9% who shot the gnome in to space!
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Actually one issue with the Multiwinia stats is that most only count if played in a multiplayer game with no CPU players (I’m unsure if they changed this in a latter update).
So people who play offline won’t even have a chance to get the achievements.
EDIT: this is particularly true for the explorer achievement. Multiwinia has a lot of maps and several are seldom if ever played online. Also, I think that one was broken for quite some time.
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Interesting, though it wiped some of my achievements for Portal and most of my HL2:E2 achievements a while ago.
I wonder when they’ll add an achievements overview on the main Steamcommunity profile page.
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Achievements have always been buggy, so I think a fair few of these numbers will be off. Braid keeps awarding me the same ones over and over. Also, L4D thinks I’ve only survived one finale ever, which is rubbish.
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The Braid stats are quite good.
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I’ve noticed that the Steam achievements have been getting bad of late. It took me a few tries to get the enviromental death with the Force-a-nature.Though surely I’ve not ground out the TF2 achievements more than most? It makes me feel a little sad…
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Steam achievements only register if you are connected to the steam servers (i.e: you can access your friends list).
My internet connection has a habit of dropping (and hence missed a bunch of ZenoClash and other achievements). Others will only ever play off line.
As such, I reckon a not-insignificant percentage of game oweners will not recieve achievements because of the need for a cpnnection to register it…
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On the Ep2 page you can see what point most people quit the game at. It’s quite interesting actually.
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Re EC and Portals, stats. I know that for EC, when it was first released, achievements didn’t work correctly — much like the entire game. So the purchased achievement is only really an indication of people who didn’t get hit by the achievement bugs or bothered to keep trying when they were fixed.
I think too, that when Portal came out the achievements for that were buggy as well. You certainly didn’t get awarded achievements if you weren’t signed into Friends back then. So that too, could just inidicate the number of people who would rather play their games without interruption.
In fact, most games when first released seem to have bugs with the achievements being rewarded, looking at posts on the forums.
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“Maharajah of the Indies
Have mastery over all the provinces and regions in India at the same time.
5.9%”
only 5.9% what the hell, playing the Maratha Confederacy is like easy mode.
Am not pissed off with empire total war would you be because your comp cant handle it on maxed out settings which seem to be the reason for a lot of game hate.
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Smurfy, HL2 E2 achievements got wiped (achieved and later removed) for many people.
You’re better off looking at the “total hours played” stats for Hl2 E2.
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Am I the only one that finds the grey icons for “compare with own statistics” almost impossible to differentiate from the regular, black ones?.
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psyk: Yeah, but that relies on people actually playing as India. It’s not the most immediately obvious way to play, given the Western focus on European and American politics.
But yeah, I conquered all of India with the exception of Sri Lanka (since pissing off the Dutch was not on my agenda and I didn’t need it enough to trade for it). Especially in the last version when sea invasions were impossible for the AI, playing as India was pretty linear, fighting your way up the subcontinent and into the Middle East.
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What is interesting is that 40%+ of people conquered all of America, yet few people were recorded (bugs aside) as having completed Road to Independence.
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Thanks Waste_Manager, it was fun to do.
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Has anyone else experienced having elements of a game story revealed (spoiled) prematurely due to reading an achievements list? Fuck this meta-gaming shit.
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yep, thats why you don’t look at them till after you finish the game.
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Plants vs Zombies just got achievements on Steam today as well. So it’s half price from a different distributor than the developer AND it has more features (if you can call achievements that – I guess they are good for the skinnerian/pavlovian types) on that different distributor as well? Curiouser and curiouser…
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That reminds me, I still haven’t finished World of Warcraft…
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Have you not? It’s my understanding that these days you could sit on your keyboard and wiggle your arse, and you’d still manage to clear all the end game content currently in WoW.
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Personally, I’m against achievements, or at least heavily in favour of making them optional and easily removable.
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According to the Steam forums, the achievement is bugged and requires some region-capture-and-game-reload rigmarole to actually make it pop up.
Edit: Err, I just reread your comment and it seems you understood that.
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I strongly doubt that many of the people who bought WoG from 2D Boy, and subsequently activated it on Steam, have ever actually run it via Steam.
I activated it there because I could, as it meant I had another form of backup of the game, but why would you ever play it in Steam if you have a DRM-free version?
Additionally, I have bought several games in Steam sales that I have yet to start playing, so I’m sure there are people who have done this with World of Goo.
Just saying that these stats may not be terribly useful.
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How do you even register World of Goo on Steam if you bought it from 2d Boy? I don’t have a key or anything, just the “secret download link.”
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Speaking of Defense Grid achievements, I find it a little strange that 3.4% of the purchasers don’t even have the “kill an alien” achievement, and almost 9% didn’t get past the first three levels.
How did they think they’d find out about the raspberries?
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Oak: Yeah, I was mainly interested that while only 76% of people have even conquered a single region (again, this could be bugged), over half of those went on to conquer all of the Americas.
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That’s because you can get it in the tutorial campaign, when technically the Americas consists of only three provinces.
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@Vinraith: I’m not entirely sure, but I think that was a pre-order bonus if you bought from the official site
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@ Xocrates: Nope, not a pre-order bonus. The pre-order bonus was the profanity pack which they never ended up making.
I preordered from the 2DBoy site (Thanks to RPS for telling me about the game) and the Steam code was just something extra they threw in unexpectedly. I had never installed it on Steam after I beat the game. But I just did and got the “All levels complete” achievement once I ran it for the first time. Sounds like a bug to me.
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Pre order bonus, on the world of goo activation. I was one of that percent who had no defence grid achievements. It wasn’t even installed until a few hours ago. $5 games may demand to be bought, but they can wait to be played. :)
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Oh lawd. Has my mind finally pitched over the edge into the black cavern of twisted depravity, or does the ‘New Rome’ achievement for E:TW have an unnerving familiarity about it?
Direct link to the image:
http://media.steamcommunity.com/steamcommunity/public/images/apps/10500/d64fcd77e8029ed2cc33bc119cff49d75cbf45bc.jpg
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Try and stop us.
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This is genuinely fascinating… I’m not as bad at left4dead than I orginaly thought.
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It says 0% have achieved “Demolition Man” in AYIM, but I have the achievement. Perhaps it gets rounded down to zero though.
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I’ve been thinking a bit about achievements and trophies (for console and PC games) and thinking that there need to be more negative awards set up. Basically achievements which denote things you don’t necessarily want public credit for. Like cheating, “evil” or OCD activities.
I suppose the rocketman, and squish every glow bug achievements in HL2:EP2 are good examples. But how about things like “bunnyhopper” for some deathmatch multiplayer games?
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@Lactose: I see it too.. oh god.
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Anyone else find it amazing that 46.9% completed Braid, getting all the puzzle pieces? That seems really high to me since Braid is not an easy game. I would have guessed something lower, like 10% completion rate…
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@Gap Gen
I’ve owned Empire for a couple of months and never conquered a province. I’ve only dabbled with skirmish, I’m waiting for the game to be patched up a bit more before I invest time in a campaign.
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