Sunday, 24 July 2011

Achievements - the things you didn't know

While putting some of the player recording keeping together I was debating adding achievement records. While you might think they are throw-away pop-ups, even to the point of being annoying, what you might not know is that in the console world these systems are rather sneaky ways of gathering information about player habits.

They tell a publisher how long people play games, what mode of play they prefer, how far they progress, what sort of game mechanics they adopt and much more. This data is automatically uploaded and can be mined for all kinds of information that go some way to shaping the sort of games that get made.

It's all good clean data that's of more value to the likes of SONY and Microsoft than it is for bragging rights.

Oh, I just unlocked an achievement, "Time Waster - For blogging instead of  getting on with some real work". Hope my boss doesn't see that one.

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