InfiniteCombo
Banned
For the longest time, I've been curious about this; didn't see a recent thread so here you go.
Doing a quick scan of Achievements in Steam, by taking a look at the completion percentages of some games, I see:
Tomb Raider (2013): 42.4%
BioShock Infinite: 38.2%
Resident Evil 2: 29.8% (for the "true" ending; Leon A-only completion rate is 50.5%)
Yakuza 0: 24.9%
Witcher 3: 24.6%
Red Dead Redemption 2: 23.9%
This was a quick and dirty cross-selection of popular, well-regarded games that I have in my Steam library. It actually gets worse from there, with some games having a very low completion percentage (like Resident Evil HD with a 22.5% completion rate with Jill, who's actually the easier of the 2 characters to use). I would say that, for games I own on Steam, the average completion is 25% -- so that means that 3 out of every 4 people that buy a popular game on Steam don't complete the single player campaign. That (to me) is pretty wild.
Question: Why does it seem like a small percentage of plays beat games?
Some points, for discussion:
Discuss!
Doing a quick scan of Achievements in Steam, by taking a look at the completion percentages of some games, I see:
Tomb Raider (2013): 42.4%
BioShock Infinite: 38.2%
Resident Evil 2: 29.8% (for the "true" ending; Leon A-only completion rate is 50.5%)
Yakuza 0: 24.9%
Witcher 3: 24.6%
Red Dead Redemption 2: 23.9%
This was a quick and dirty cross-selection of popular, well-regarded games that I have in my Steam library. It actually gets worse from there, with some games having a very low completion percentage (like Resident Evil HD with a 22.5% completion rate with Jill, who's actually the easier of the 2 characters to use). I would say that, for games I own on Steam, the average completion is 25% -- so that means that 3 out of every 4 people that buy a popular game on Steam don't complete the single player campaign. That (to me) is pretty wild.
Question: Why does it seem like a small percentage of plays beat games?
Some points, for discussion:
- It may be that Steam may not be representative of the broader gamer completion percentage. It may very well be that completion percentages on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo are much higher. (My speculation: I doubt it)
- It may be that my selection of games have too many open world games; people may get open world fatigue and not care to finish the game. I don't own many First Person shooters, but it may be the case that for example those have higher completion percentages?
- Any talk of games like Resident Evil should be banned in this thread because survival horror in general potentially has low completion rates; this can extend to other genres.
- Do some gamers just chase the latest, shiniest games, so that even when they're in the middle of playing one, they drop it and get the latest shiniest game?
- Do a big percentage of players potentially buy games just for the multiplayer portion? (From my selection above, that doesn't apply to over half the games. Also, if you look at Achievement statistics, it seems that Achievements for actions earlier in the game are very high -- usually in the 70s/80s percentage -- so that would seem to indicate that players at least start the single player campaign).
Discuss!
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