Hacker News Reader

Comment by rickdeckard | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

> 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,...

> 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.

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.

I've purchased some of my favorite games multiple times — both to support the developer, and because I prefer the newer platform and don't want to have to deal with playing the game on the old platform.

But often, after the secondary purchase, I won't actually play the game again. I didn't feel like playing it again in that moment where I purchased it again. I know I will want to replay it one day, which is why I re-bought it. But until I actually do, that second copy will seem to be have been purchased by someone who has never played the game at all.

The vast majority of games aren't bought twice or released. What happens is that people buy bunch of games at the same time and then don't play the third or fourth game.

That's true. But you can look at specific trophies to narrow down the users who actually engage but then still "walk out of your story" (a ratio which of course varies largely from game to game).

Spiderman, one of the high-profile games of PlayStation, has a trophy for each of its 3 Acts of the story.

While 67% of the players finished Act#1, only 49% actually finished Act#3.

So setting completion of Act#1 as a minimum to measure engagement, 27% of those who "sat down" still walked out before the end.

And that is not a sign of failure but a landmark success of that industry. That's quite unique for a product of creativity.

And even more odd: it doesn't even mean that those 27% disliked your product. They might even buy your next creation...

> 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.

What would be "applicable"?

The streaming world of a TV series would be comparable to a streaming world of games. Here the gaming industry is largely selling products of entertainment to customers who pay explicitly FOR THAT product, yet a significant portion of that audience actually never fully consumes it.

That's how it is different. CREATIVELY different. A team of possibly hundreds of people invest years to create a creative product which only a fraction of their paying audience will ever experience in full.

It's like a non-Spotify world where every Artist produces an Album to be sold on CD, knowing that 50% of the paying audience will never hear more than Track 1-4.

With AI, we might one day be able to remake the last (two) season(s).

Everything leading up to the end was magnificent and breathtakingly fresh. No reason it shouldn't be salvaged.

I bet a lot of movies and shows will get "fixed" by fans in this fashion. We've already seen dozens of Star Wars OT and PT edits, several Lord of the Rings edits, and my take is that this trend will grow to encompass everything as it gets easier to do.

> I will probably stop before I get there.

Watch up to and include season 5. Then treat it as if it was unfortunately cancelled.

Why not season 6 or 7? Season 8 is the one that fell off the cliff. Episode S6.E9 is one of the best in all of television history.

Season 6 was alright, with the ending making up for a largely mediocre season. Season 7 was about as bad as 8, but it's harder to tell because the bad moments weren't character/plot altering payoffs, just teleporting around the map and ignoring depth in favor of spectacle.

I just felt like 6 is where the writing became very amateurish. Iirc, 5 was where source material ran out. It has been a long time so I can't pick out details but I recall the change in quality between 5 and 6 was pretty Stark to me. One thing I remember is that instead of "smart" characters really being smart, everyone else got dumb as hell. Then the smart character would 'win' and another would make a comment basically explaining how smart they were.

I know a lot of people think it was good right until the finale and only dislike it because a certain fan favorite has a "change of character". Except it wasn't a change & was obviously telegraphed since season 3 or 4.

I don't think the finale is that bad. My only objection is that the character didn't seem to have been pushed so far based on the previous episodes. It would have been better if the previous seasons showed even more conflicts internally.

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".

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah it is odd to use an example of a difficult to finish game as an example that people don't finish their games.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

I am fairly bad at those sorts of games, but the art is so pretty I pick them up just to mess around.

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.

Imagine all the books that were bought and never opened.

Looking at my shelf, I feel personally attacked.

Don’t need to imagine… looking at the bookshelf right now. One day they will be opened.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

Huh emulators are in HUGE demand especially as PC gaming and mobile became dominant over consoles.

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.

> 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?

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

> 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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com