3 ms·
I reviewed the algorithm, and as long as you have SOME users at all registering some amount of achievements, the method is quite accurate. Even if most players
by larsiusprime 8y ago
I reviewed the algorithm, and as long as you have SOME users at all registering some amount of achievements, the method is quite accurate. Even if most players register no achievements, they still count towards the overall pool of "achievers" and provide a solid base for doing the calculation.
You can verify this yourself with the supplied source code.
The only cases where it can fail are:
1) When there is no achievement data
2) When there are not enough independent achievement %'s.
2 Can happen for games with very few achievements -- but in practice, if a game has even 3 achievements the chances of this happening become very small.
TL;DR -- for very nearly every game on Steam, this was an extremely accurate method for estimating the number of "achievers" for that game. The tricky bit is correlating "achievers" with a metric you actually care about, like e.g. actual sales.
- ant6n 8y agoIsn't that the point of anonnyj? I.e. you don't know which % of sales are made without even registering a single achievement.
- larsiusprime 8y agoYes you do. Because even if they don't register an achievement, they still show up as part of the total population of possible "achievers". I've verified this from my own stats as a developer and that of other developers. As long as any portion of the userbase registers some achievement data, you can (well, could) get scarily accurate stats. The only "inaccurate" part is that the stat you're measuring -- "achievers" -- doesn't exactly correlate to any stat we directly care about, like sales. In all the measuring I did against known private sales data, it was always higher than the # of people who had downloaded the game, and the # of people who had played it for at least 1 minute. My best guess is family sharing inflates the "achievers" stat.