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Comment by qiine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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