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Average Game Completion Rate


While my own completion rate is typically in the 25-35% (based on Steam achievements) due to bundled games I’ll never play, somehow @Gnuffi has 62% with over 900 games. :dizzy_face: Insane…anyone got the big Gnuf beat?


My Steam account is still rather small, but that’s okay


i feel like i need a disclaimer here :blush::
steam only counts x% completion rate of games played, with at least 1 achievement unlocked
so you could play 900 games and still have 0% completion rate, as long as no single achievement got unlocked,
-or only play X amount of the 900 games and get 62% completion rate by only getting achievements in a “couple” of those games :wink:

i sorta doubt i’ve even played 62% of my library yet :wink: :blush:


Yup, I idled all my games with cards recently and my percentage never changed.


You’re talking about achievements though. I think you need to make a distinction between “completing” a game as in finishing it, vs achievement hunting. Ninety nine percent of the time if I start a game I’ll finish it, doing the vast majority of the busy work side materials if I enjoy the game. However, I only achievement hunt in the games I feel that I’m enjoying that little bit extra, or where my gaming OCD kicks in, and I’ll never bother with multiplayer achievements (so FEAR 3 or F3AR tanked my stats a bit). I’m actually more interested in the rarity of the harder achievements. Thus far my best/hardest/rarest sits at “0.28% of players have this”.

Screenshot-2018-2-18 Steam Community x-st


Of course I was talking about Steam achievements as it’s the only objective measurement we have to compare all accounts’ game completion rates. I understand how Steam tracks it, thought that was common knowledge? As for rare achievements, that’d be an interesting discussion - for an achievement to be rare, it needs to be a reasonably popular game with a reasonably hard challenge otherwise there wouldn’t be a large enough playerbase to make the achievement rare. So for me, anything less than 1% I consider “rare”, regardless of the game. Completely arbitrary, I know, but it’s common practice to segregate, isolate, and draw attention to the Top 1% so I used that as my baseline. My top 6 rarest are 0.35-0.61% all coming from Civilization V but I also have rare (top 1%) achievements in Mini Metro, Turmoil, Guild Quest, Civ 6, Reus, Mountain, Endless Space, Masters of Orion, Dungeon of the Endless, and Endless Legend because I love those games. I’m sensing a 4X pattern - either people buy them and don’t play them as much as they think they will, or devs create insane achievements that take 100s or hours to complete. Whatever. Honorable mention: FTL. I think I beat the game with every ship every configuration. Nothing public tracks that info, but doubt many have done that…



How does it work out games without Steam achievements (e.g. Mass Effect) ?


Doesn’t count them since you can’t get an achievement


I suppose they wouldn’t count at all, or count as completed. Mine’s at 29% I have far too many small kinda rubbish games that were fun for an afternoon and I would never even dream to go back to for achievement grinding. I try to complete “proper” games that I start though. But as has been mentioned this ratio is about achievements and not having finished games, so it’ll likely stay pretty low.

I wonder which my 2 perfected games are.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Evoland 2 it seems.


I dislike games with achievements hidden behind paywalls like DLC. :rage:



I assumed that if you didn’t have the DLC then those achievements didn’t count towards your total (i.e. that they’re walled off in the dlc content rather than that of the main game?)


DLC achievements still count against you as far as I know. Rather annoying. (At least, it still shows them as part of the total, even though you can’t get them.)


i hate it even more if when it’s multiplayer dlc achievement…
or when some dev think they are being funny and adds new achievements X years after a game has come out :roll_eyes:

heck with it!, achievements should just be outright banned!!, 99% of them aren’t really achievements anyway, way to devalue the word… good job, :angry:
“i took out the trash, yay!” -have a ribbon :trophy:


Many of these achievements are there to track players’ progress through the game so that the developers know how people play their game, where they get stuck, etc. It’s very useful for devs in improving the game or avoiding problems in their next game, and it’s a better alternative than implementing some sort of phoning home. Think of those crappy achievements as just helping out the devs :]


i’ll buy that, but not full sale
some achievements might function like that, game/stage completion cheevos etc
but there are still a shit ton of utterly useless worthless achievements in nearly all games, that don’t offer a dev anything, but an arbitrary “grind” meter for the player
"use your knife 100times" etc etc “pick up a carrot” “drink a potion” or whatever banal bs meaningless achievements can be thought of/made up in your mind
stuff that are either 100% natural during gameplay (like using a heal item achievement), or stuff so arbitrary or meaningless it could offer no value data,
as it either comes too natural, or you have to go out of your way to “fill your quota”- meaning you are “forcing” the player to do something grindy, unnatural, to the gameplay, just to unlock a cheevo -despite “it” not being a worthwhile or “feat” action having to be repeated or performed


This is the sort of information you should be getting from your playtesters though, not your customers.

The kind of achievements I hate the most though are ones they just jam in there in order to force players to “experiment” and change their play style because they were simply not good enough to make the game encourage that naturally.

Or even worse the ones that have you actually play the game worse than you could, having to fail at something in order to unlock a reward is far too common for how stupid an idea it is.


I have 26% average with only 1 perfect game.


oh yea, i really “enjoy” the type of “die from a high place” etc type achievements, “get set on fire” blah blah “let X boss/monster sucker punch you” lol… :roll_eyes:
i still hate the grindy achievements most tho, “do X 1bazillion times”, don’t know where it worse,
the games where it comes 100% natural during a single play anyway… :confounded:
or the ones where you have to rinse and repeat a section to the point where it’s just not even fun killing/doing the X action and you start hating the gameplay for it, having repeated it so much/ad nauseam


I have no issue with story progression achievements, it’s really convenient to analyze data (like a Telltale game, or any game with a main story).

I also don’t mind “trivial” or repetitious achievements, like “kick a chicken” (you cheeky devs, you knew I was gonna do that!), or “kick 10,000 chickens” (haha, nice try…I don’t like your game that much). If they are stupid I don’t put much stock in aiming for them or waving them around, who cares? Same goes for the other end of the spectrum - those bragging about ultra repetitious achievements just convince me they have the patience of 1000 different mes.

I don’t even have an issue with insanely hard achievements. Things like “collect all collectibles” during a story-driven game you can’t go back to previous sections on, that takes either dedication and patience…or a guide. I’m not the type to do that just for an achievement. A good example is Best game of 2017. I beat the entire game, consider it “beaten”, but I don’t have one final all collectibles achievement - I have put it in my list of completed games and uninstalled it though because it doesn’t matter to go back through just for some non-integral voice recordings to play in the background.

The ones I do mind, they are aggravating because they don’t want you to beat the game once, twice, or even 10 times. They want 100+ times beaten, massive amounts of time, and sometimes additional money. Big offenders would be Talisman or Rocket League. I consider them both beat, but I have 16% and 41% of their respective achievements due to expansions/DLCs. Both require not only an insane number of playthroughs beating and re-beating the game to get everything, but they require addition cash $$$ also, plus even more time to play with the DLC content. Those are examples of devs abusing the addictive nature of some completionists that feel compelled to 100% everything.

Optimally, from a programming standpoint, I think it’s an easy fix since it’s mostly just a display issue on Steam -
If the gamer owns the DLCs, show total achievement completion.
If the gamer does NOT own the DLCs, show achievement completion using base.

Example: Civ5 has almost 300 total achievements, including about half from DLCs (150 base, 50 GNK, 50 BNW, 50 other). Lets say you only own the base game and you’ve completed 100 achievements. Instead of showing 100/300 = 33%, it should show 100/150 = 67%. If you own 1 expansion, it should show 100/200 = 50%. etc. Simple math and easy to calculate based on what it owned in the gamer’s account.

If you buy more access to achievements, you obviously can now earn them, congrats. Purely a display error and easily fixable, keep reporting it to Valve and maybe one of these days they’ll fix it in the client.