14 ms·

Reminds me of the even more sober fact: Even the content that made it into the game will never be seen by most users, as most buyers of a video game will never

Reminds me of the even more sober fact: Even the content that made it into the game will never be seen by most users, as most buyers of a video game will never complete your game. But if the ending is not satisfying for those who complete it, they will impact the buying decisions of those who never play through it anyway. And on top of that: Before the introduction of Trophies in console games there was no way for game developers to know how far their buyers actually played the game before they stopped and moved on.

qiine 3y ago
On steam you can see % of player that got each achievements for a given game. I looked at Dark soul and only 31.5% got to Anor Londo(on PC), its crazy because that's barely half the game, there is still a lot of high quality content including some of the stuff that made it so famous left to be experienced.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  Does that include people that never even played (or installed the game)? Because I have lots of games I never intended to play but were part of a bundle and I wanted to support the developer.
  - Abekkus 3y ago
    There are some games that encode an achievement basically for starting the story or finishing an early quest, so if those complimentary achievements aren't 100%, you could make that measurement
  - vanchor3 3y ago
    For your total completion stats in Steam it doesn't count games that you have not earned any achievements in, it may be the same for global stats.
- recursive 3y ago
  I'm surprised the other way. I would not expect 31% of players to make it halfway through Dark Souls. I probably got about 1% through it. Regardless of the "quality", I didn't find it fun.
  - seaal 3y ago
    I still have yet to give Dark Souls a try, I was always hesitant to try soul types games. But I wanna shout out Elden Ring for breaking that cycle for me. Truly amazing game.
    - recursive 3y ago
      If I'd never played Dark Souls, I almost certainly would have played Elden Ring. As it is, I'm sticking to my lifetime boycott of the franchise though.
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    Yeah, to specifically choose as an example a franchise whose entire "thing" is its murderous difficulty? I'm incredibly unsurprised that most people who try can't be bothered to grind all the way to the end.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      Yeah it is odd to use an example of a difficult to finish game as an example that people don't finish their games.
    - qiine 3y ago
      Ok maybe this is a special case haha, My reasoning is that its a massively popular game that was played again and again by all sorts of peoples, that became renowned for their collective efforts to explore every nook and cranny(including cut content still in the files!). But despite this unusual efforts the completion rate is low like many other big profiles games.
- t-3 3y ago
  Steam's statistics are very questionable. They routinely "lose" hours of playtime from games in my library and syncing savegames just doesn't work half the time.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  Even if that doesn't include the players who never even installed the game, there's a still a fat tail of players who bought it on a sale, tried it for an hour and weren't interested enough to continue because there are just so many other options. Things used to be very different back in the era of cardboard boxes when most people didn't have an abundance of choice and impulse buying games was much less of a thing.
- rickdeckard 3y ago
  Same on Consoles. The ratio of Players who completed the Story of "The Last of Us" on Playstation (a game praised for its outstanding storytelling), is a mere ~28%. What's even more interesting: Almost the same stat applies for the PS3 (27,2%) and the PS4-remastered (28%) release. --> Something caused 72% of all players to NOT complete this game, on BOTH generations of the console. That's a metric you would file as opinionated if your playtesters would tell you that...
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    The fact that it's a mediocre action game might have something to it. If the story/characters don't pull you in there's not a lot to keep you playing.
- stonemetal12 3y ago
  I am fairly bad at those sorts of games, but the art is so pretty I pick them up just to mess around.
- rednab 3y ago
  The Simpsons Game (2007) on the 360 has an achievement for pressing the start button. It has a 93% completion rate. So 7% of the people that bought this game (and being a console game, it never was part of any bundles) started it up and then did nothing.
  - bluedino 3y ago
    Imagine all the books that were bought and never opened.
    - welfare 3y ago
      Looking at my shelf, I feel personally attacked.
    - me_smith 3y ago
      Don’t need to imagine… looking at the bookshelf right now. One day they will be opened.
- stuckinhell 3y ago
  My theory is people are buying games on sales. $15 dollars is loosely equivalent to a two hour movie. So as long as they put in a couple hours, they feel like they've got their moneys worth. A game is just distraction for most people, especially as the economy is cratering and other priorities come up.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't know that the rate of people who "finished" a game is actually very significant. There are just so many other factors that determine this, unrelated to the game's actual merit. Cave Story is one of my favorite games ever and I never quite beat that final level. I remember trying it about 10-15 times and then just getting busy with something else in life and I never went back to it. And I'm okay with that! It was still a wonderful experience! The fact that I only made it 99% of the way through really says nothing about the game itself.
- cameronh90 3y ago
  I'm one of the 68.5%. I bought it on a sale, played it for like 30 mins, decided I really just hated that type of gameplay, and never touched it again. The bigger concern for me is getting to the end of games I actually enjoy. What normally happens is something comes up in life that stops me from playing for a few weeks, and then when I try to pick it up again, I've forgotten how to play!
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  nah. sen's fortress is peak in level design. After O&S, the game takes a dive in quality. they got out at the perfect time lol
  - mattgreenrocks 3y ago
    Agree. The back part of the game is not as well regarded these days by the fanbase. For my playthrough, I thought certain sections were more annoying than before, but not to a noticeable extent. Besides, an okay set of levels in a FromSoft game is still way ahead of most games.
dotnet00 3y ago
How much is this just a result of the modern games market being so heavy on sales and things like Humble Bundle? When I was a kid I put in my best effort to play through games (well, at least before piracy) because they were relatively expensive that had to be "bought" through begging and good grades. Being physical copies there was also a cost to keeping them. Nowadays I am more likely to just buy a few year old game that I was interested in for like $5 and leave it in my digital library for if I ever have the time to play through it. Only to usually just go back to Factorio.
- rickdeckard 3y ago
  That's a good question, but I'd say even in the 90s the games-market was heavily focused on sales and bundles. Question is whether the ratio of completing a game was ever any different. I invested alot of time in some games also as a kid, but I also remember lots of games I actually enjoyed but never finished...
sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
> most buyers of a video game will never complete your game Even content that made it into a movie won't be seen by people who didn't watch the movie to the end. And it won't be seen by people who didn't watch the movie at all. So what? Who cares?
izacus 3y ago
> Even the content that made it into the game will never be seen by most users, as most buyers of a video game will never complete your game. But if the ending is not satisfying for those who complete it, they will impact the buying decisions of those who never play through it anyway. That's because a lot of gamers will get it in a bundle, discount or as part of different passes. Those aren't the core audience that would even be expected to finish the game. Similarly, I'd bet that "most people" these days don't finish Lord of the Rings books. Luckly we didn't have product managers telling Tolkien to not finish writing the books while looking at statistics saying that "most people don't finish books".
- wongarsu 3y ago
  There are plenty of games I have paid good money for that I didn't finish for one reason or another. Sometimes the game just falls flat of my expectations (free demos went out of fashion about a decade ago), sometimes it offers me a compelling experience for a while, but not through the whole experience. And sometimes life gets in the way. I'm not rich by any measure, but I have enough disposable income that I don't have to force my way through an experience I stopped enjoying. Similarly there are lots of books I started reading and never finished, and plenty of TV shows I started and dropped at some point. Even some few movies I started and never finished. And that's ok. But unless they are highly recommended I don't start TV shows that were canceled, and similarly a bad ending is a score against me ever purchasing a game or book. There is a good chance the show or game will lose me before I ever get there, but why would I set myself up for a bad experience in case I do like the product enough to get that far?
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Quite often there will be games I love, but life gets in the way. Then when you try to go back, especially at higher levels, it's very difficult to get in the pacing/difficulty level so you just don't pick it back up. Even though it's a great game and you enjoy it.
AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
> Even the content that made it into the game will never be seen by most users, as most buyers of a video game will never complete your game. But if the ending is not satisfying for those who complete it, they will impact the buying decisions of those who never play through it anyway. How is this different from any book, movie, or other form of entertainment? Case in point: I have not yet watched Game of Thrones, but much of my momentum to watch it was stymied by fan outcry of just how atrocious the final season was. If I do watch it, I will probably stop before I get there.
- rickdeckard 3y ago
  > How is this different from any book, movie, or other form of entertainment? I'd say if you spend millions to make a movie to be shown in the cinema you don't expect that by default 50% will walk out before the finale. But even more crucial: If that would happen, your ticket-sales would plummet week-by-week. > Case in point: I have not yet watched Game of Thrones, but much of my momentum to watch it was stymied by fan outcry of just how atrocious the final season was. If I do watch it, I will probably stop before I get there. The final season of Game of Thrones was based on the success of the seasons before it, it was produced AFTER Season 1,2,3,4,...
  - AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
    > I'd say if you spend millions to make a movie to be shown in the cinema you don't expect that by default 50% will walk out before the finale. But even more crucial: If that would happen, your ticket-sales would plummet week-by-week. Maybe walking out in the middle of the movie is a bad analogy, but, it would certainly be applicable to the streaming world, where half your audience might watch Episode 1 of New Netflix series but stop watching well before Episode 10.
    - themoonisachees 3y ago
      Valid in some way, however there is an additional half of users who never launch the game at all. Several high-profile games on steam have global achievement stats where the achievement you get for launching the game / completing the tutorial /creating a character is only earned by at most 60% of people who own the game.
wingerlang 3y ago
> Before the introduction of Trophies in console games there was no way for game developers to know how far their buyers actually played the game before they stopped and moved on. Do console games not have analytics?
- qiine 3y ago
  During the xbox 360 era it was unusual, this was and still is a simple and effective solution.
stuckinhell 3y ago
It's worse today than it's ever been. We've reached peak content, people are still playing games from the playstation 1. On hackernews, there was a post about someone translating old japanese playstation 1 or 2 games. You are starting to see diminishing returns on even the big AAA games. Sony, Epic, etc are starting layoffs. You are also seeing new trends with Zoomers, where they don't 'play' games but have some sort of weird "meta"/"metaverse" around a game like Five Nights at Freddys.
- thfuran 3y ago
  >people are still playing games from the playstation 1 And people are seven feet tall. But nearly all people are outside both of those groups.
  - stuckinhell 3y ago
    Not as much as you'd think. New fantasy writers often say they have to compete against Lord of Rings. Classics are still are demand and have social proof.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      Lord of the Rings isn't a PS1 game. A lot more people are reading old books than are playing PS1 games. I'd assume most people still playing PS1 games now are using emulators, but for a sense of scale: Something like fifty million more copies of Lord of the Rings have been printed than PlayStations made.
      - norwalkbear 3y ago
        Huh emulators are in HUGE demand especially as PC gaming and mobile became dominant over consoles.
      - stuckinhell 3y ago
        Emulators have hundreds of millions of views on youtube as a rough benchmark. There is a huge huge amount of interest in the "classics" across a wide amount of multimedia.
manaskarekar 3y ago
Perhaps, this is why watching someone else stream game playthroughs is a popular thing. You can enjoy the content/story/art/player’s skill etc without having to pour in the time to get to that point in the game yourself.
madrox 3y ago
This has had the follow-on effect of watering down of video game difficulty over time. It's more important to see the user steadily progressing throughout a game's content than see them getting stuck too long (even if there's an intellectual payoff when they finally figure it out). Many developers have cited this as a reason for changing their game mechanics in favor of ease. It's arguable if this is a good or bad thing for gaming, but it's unquestionable there's a connection.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

qiine 3y ago

On steam you can see % of player that got each achievements for a given game. I looked at Dark soul and only 31.5% got to Anor Londo(on PC), its crazy because that's barely half the game, there is still a lot of high quality content including some of the stuff that made it so famous left to be experienced.

Pet_Ant 3y ago
Does that include people that never even played (or installed the game)? Because I have lots of games I never intended to play but were part of a bundle and I wanted to support the developer.
- Abekkus 3y ago
  There are some games that encode an achievement basically for starting the story or finishing an early quest, so if those complimentary achievements aren't 100%, you could make that measurement
- vanchor3 3y ago
  For your total completion stats in Steam it doesn't count games that you have not earned any achievements in, it may be the same for global stats.
recursive 3y ago
I'm surprised the other way. I would not expect 31% of players to make it halfway through Dark Souls. I probably got about 1% through it. Regardless of the "quality", I didn't find it fun.
- seaal 3y ago
  I still have yet to give Dark Souls a try, I was always hesitant to try soul types games. But I wanna shout out Elden Ring for breaking that cycle for me. Truly amazing game.
  - recursive 3y ago
    If I'd never played Dark Souls, I almost certainly would have played Elden Ring. As it is, I'm sticking to my lifetime boycott of the franchise though.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  Yeah, to specifically choose as an example a franchise whose entire "thing" is its murderous difficulty? I'm incredibly unsurprised that most people who try can't be bothered to grind all the way to the end.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    Yeah it is odd to use an example of a difficult to finish game as an example that people don't finish their games.
  - qiine 3y ago
    Ok maybe this is a special case haha, My reasoning is that its a massively popular game that was played again and again by all sorts of peoples, that became renowned for their collective efforts to explore every nook and cranny(including cut content still in the files!). But despite this unusual efforts the completion rate is low like many other big profiles games.
t-3 3y ago
Steam's statistics are very questionable. They routinely "lose" hours of playtime from games in my library and syncing savegames just doesn't work half the time.
Sharlin 3y ago
Even if that doesn't include the players who never even installed the game, there's a still a fat tail of players who bought it on a sale, tried it for an hour and weren't interested enough to continue because there are just so many other options. Things used to be very different back in the era of cardboard boxes when most people didn't have an abundance of choice and impulse buying games was much less of a thing.
rickdeckard 3y ago
Same on Consoles. The ratio of Players who completed the Story of "The Last of Us" on Playstation (a game praised for its outstanding storytelling), is a mere ~28%. What's even more interesting: Almost the same stat applies for the PS3 (27,2%) and the PS4-remastered (28%) release. --> Something caused 72% of all players to NOT complete this game, on BOTH generations of the console. That's a metric you would file as opinionated if your playtesters would tell you that...
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  The fact that it's a mediocre action game might have something to it. If the story/characters don't pull you in there's not a lot to keep you playing.
stonemetal12 3y ago
I am fairly bad at those sorts of games, but the art is so pretty I pick them up just to mess around.
rednab 3y ago
The Simpsons Game (2007) on the 360 has an achievement for pressing the start button. It has a 93% completion rate. So 7% of the people that bought this game (and being a console game, it never was part of any bundles) started it up and then did nothing.
- bluedino 3y ago
  Imagine all the books that were bought and never opened.
  - welfare 3y ago
    Looking at my shelf, I feel personally attacked.
  - me_smith 3y ago
    Don’t need to imagine… looking at the bookshelf right now. One day they will be opened.
stuckinhell 3y ago
My theory is people are buying games on sales. $15 dollars is loosely equivalent to a two hour movie. So as long as they put in a couple hours, they feel like they've got their moneys worth. A game is just distraction for most people, especially as the economy is cratering and other priorities come up.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't know that the rate of people who "finished" a game is actually very significant. There are just so many other factors that determine this, unrelated to the game's actual merit. Cave Story is one of my favorite games ever and I never quite beat that final level. I remember trying it about 10-15 times and then just getting busy with something else in life and I never went back to it. And I'm okay with that! It was still a wonderful experience! The fact that I only made it 99% of the way through really says nothing about the game itself.
cameronh90 3y ago
I'm one of the 68.5%. I bought it on a sale, played it for like 30 mins, decided I really just hated that type of gameplay, and never touched it again. The bigger concern for me is getting to the end of games I actually enjoy. What normally happens is something comes up in life that stops me from playing for a few weeks, and then when I try to pick it up again, I've forgotten how to play!
dvngnt_ 3y ago
nah. sen's fortress is peak in level design. After O&S, the game takes a dive in quality. they got out at the perfect time lol
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  Agree. The back part of the game is not as well regarded these days by the fanbase. For my playthrough, I thought certain sections were more annoying than before, but not to a noticeable extent. Besides, an okay set of levels in a FromSoft game is still way ahead of most games.

dotnet00 3y ago

How much is this just a result of the modern games market being so heavy on sales and things like Humble Bundle? When I was a kid I put in my best effort to play through games (well, at least before piracy) because they were relatively expensive that had to be "bought" through begging and good grades. Being physical copies there was also a cost to keeping them. Nowadays I am more likely to just buy a few year old game that I was interested in for like $5 and leave it in my digital library for if I ever have the time to play through it. Only to usually just go back to Factorio.

rickdeckard 3y ago
That's a good question, but I'd say even in the 90s the games-market was heavily focused on sales and bundles. Question is whether the ratio of completing a game was ever any different. I invested alot of time in some games also as a kid, but I also remember lots of games I actually enjoyed but never finished...

sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago

> most buyers of a video game will never complete your game Even content that made it into a movie won't be seen by people who didn't watch the movie to the end. And it won't be seen by people who didn't watch the movie at all. So what? Who cares?

izacus 3y ago

> Even the content that made it into the game will never be seen by most users, as most buyers of a video game will never complete your game. But if the ending is not satisfying for those who complete it, they will impact the buying decisions of those who never play through it anyway. That's because a lot of gamers will get it in a bundle, discount or as part of different passes. Those aren't the core audience that would even be expected to finish the game. Similarly, I'd bet that "most people" these days don't finish Lord of the Rings books. Luckly we didn't have product managers telling Tolkien to not finish writing the books while looking at statistics saying that "most people don't finish books".

wongarsu 3y ago
There are plenty of games I have paid good money for that I didn't finish for one reason or another. Sometimes the game just falls flat of my expectations (free demos went out of fashion about a decade ago), sometimes it offers me a compelling experience for a while, but not through the whole experience. And sometimes life gets in the way. I'm not rich by any measure, but I have enough disposable income that I don't have to force my way through an experience I stopped enjoying. Similarly there are lots of books I started reading and never finished, and plenty of TV shows I started and dropped at some point. Even some few movies I started and never finished. And that's ok. But unless they are highly recommended I don't start TV shows that were canceled, and similarly a bad ending is a score against me ever purchasing a game or book. There is a good chance the show or game will lose me before I ever get there, but why would I set myself up for a bad experience in case I do like the product enough to get that far?
- pixl97 3y ago
  Quite often there will be games I love, but life gets in the way. Then when you try to go back, especially at higher levels, it's very difficult to get in the pacing/difficulty level so you just don't pick it back up. Even though it's a great game and you enjoy it.

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

> Even the content that made it into the game will never be seen by most users, as most buyers of a video game will never complete your game. But if the ending is not satisfying for those who complete it, they will impact the buying decisions of those who never play through it anyway. How is this different from any book, movie, or other form of entertainment? Case in point: I have not yet watched Game of Thrones, but much of my momentum to watch it was stymied by fan outcry of just how atrocious the final season was. If I do watch it, I will probably stop before I get there.

rickdeckard 3y ago
> How is this different from any book, movie, or other form of entertainment? I'd say if you spend millions to make a movie to be shown in the cinema you don't expect that by default 50% will walk out before the finale. But even more crucial: If that would happen, your ticket-sales would plummet week-by-week. > Case in point: I have not yet watched Game of Thrones, but much of my momentum to watch it was stymied by fan outcry of just how atrocious the final season was. If I do watch it, I will probably stop before I get there. The final season of Game of Thrones was based on the success of the seasons before it, it was produced AFTER Season 1,2,3,4,...
- AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
  > I'd say if you spend millions to make a movie to be shown in the cinema you don't expect that by default 50% will walk out before the finale. But even more crucial: If that would happen, your ticket-sales would plummet week-by-week. Maybe walking out in the middle of the movie is a bad analogy, but, it would certainly be applicable to the streaming world, where half your audience might watch Episode 1 of New Netflix series but stop watching well before Episode 10.
  - themoonisachees 3y ago
    Valid in some way, however there is an additional half of users who never launch the game at all. Several high-profile games on steam have global achievement stats where the achievement you get for launching the game / completing the tutorial /creating a character is only earned by at most 60% of people who own the game.

wingerlang 3y ago

> Before the introduction of Trophies in console games there was no way for game developers to know how far their buyers actually played the game before they stopped and moved on. Do console games not have analytics?

qiine 3y ago
During the xbox 360 era it was unusual, this was and still is a simple and effective solution.

stuckinhell 3y ago

It's worse today than it's ever been. We've reached peak content, people are still playing games from the playstation 1. On hackernews, there was a post about someone translating old japanese playstation 1 or 2 games. You are starting to see diminishing returns on even the big AAA games. Sony, Epic, etc are starting layoffs. You are also seeing new trends with Zoomers, where they don't 'play' games but have some sort of weird "meta"/"metaverse" around a game like Five Nights at Freddys.

thfuran 3y ago
>people are still playing games from the playstation 1 And people are seven feet tall. But nearly all people are outside both of those groups.
- stuckinhell 3y ago
  Not as much as you'd think. New fantasy writers often say they have to compete against Lord of Rings. Classics are still are demand and have social proof.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    Lord of the Rings isn't a PS1 game. A lot more people are reading old books than are playing PS1 games. I'd assume most people still playing PS1 games now are using emulators, but for a sense of scale: Something like fifty million more copies of Lord of the Rings have been printed than PlayStations made.
    - norwalkbear 3y ago
      Huh emulators are in HUGE demand especially as PC gaming and mobile became dominant over consoles.
    - stuckinhell 3y ago
      Emulators have hundreds of millions of views on youtube as a rough benchmark. There is a huge huge amount of interest in the "classics" across a wide amount of multimedia.

manaskarekar 3y ago

Perhaps, this is why watching someone else stream game playthroughs is a popular thing. You can enjoy the content/story/art/player’s skill etc without having to pour in the time to get to that point in the game yourself.

madrox 3y ago

This has had the follow-on effect of watering down of video game difficulty over time. It's more important to see the user steadily progressing throughout a game's content than see them getting stuck too long (even if there's an intellectual payoff when they finally figure it out). Many developers have cited this as a reason for changing their game mechanics in favor of ease. It's arguable if this is a good or bad thing for gaming, but it's unquestionable there's a connection.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]