Official Xbox 360 Magazine - Play new games every month with the UK's number one Xbox 360 magazine

	Black Ops: Killstreak Ideas FEATURE: What's confirmed, expected, suggested!
	Mafia 2 ³⁶⁰ REVIEW: An offer you can't refuse?
	10 Things To Try In Crackdown 2 FEATURE: Have you done them all yet, agent?
	OXM Speaks To... Phil Spencer FEATURE: MGS boss on Kinect, Crytek and Milo!

On the site today - News: Black Ops Mulitplayer trailer hits http://bit.ly/cMRurs

BROWSE OXM

OXM CONTENT

Contact us
Feeds

Login

Not a member yet? Click here to register!

Video

Launch Player

Forza Motorsport 3 gets free add-on car and track packs

Captain Price is back in Modern Warfare 2

News

Gearbox: easy Achievements mean 40,000 extra sales

Wednesday 7-Oct-2009 1:54 PM Crafty inclusion boosts your game sales, says Randy Pitchford

17 Comments

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has said that including easy Achievements can increase a big game's sales by up to 40,000, in an interview in the new issue of OXM.

Apparently blatant scorewhores, like our own OXM Jipped, are an important enough demographic to be worth catering for.

"The Achievement hunter, who's going to make purchase decisions around the Achievements per minute to ratio - he's probably buying ten to twenty titles a year, or at least playing that many," Pitchford told us. "He's playing a lot. So he's a very frequent customer, and you want to be in that pile. That's just business."

Enough business to justify fiddling with the Achievements? Yes, apparently, because it's barely any more work than you'd do already.

"The time it takes is minimal," we were told, "because you're designing Achievements anyway, and you can probably affect your sales by something like 10 and 40 thousand units. If you're talking about a triple-A game selling between 1 and 2.5 million units. You're talking tens of thousands of units of impact there."

"Unfortunately most people in the industry don't think through it that much. You have designers designing achievements, and they're the worst."

Check back later this week when we'll go into more detail with Randy about bad Achievement design - or you can read the whole thing in the latest issue of OXM. You can buy a single copy here..

Jon Hicks