Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Furthermore, the whole reason achievements were created was wholly twofold: a sense of pride and accomplishment for the gamer, which is real and cannot be discounted by the second, which is a metrics and tracking system Xbox offered to game publishers. Since all achievements are dated and timed, Xbox was able to offer valuable insights to publishers as to how their games were played. That’s why most games gave you one for completing the tutorial and/or starting the game. That was the reference point: from there, how long did it take you to do other things?

The best example of this and its effects was Fallout 3 to Fallout 4. In Fallout 4, some players were upset you could only be a good guy. But in Fallout 3, there were none karmic achievements, for having good, neutral, or evil karma at three levels (8, 16, 24?). Since a vast majority of players got those levels at Good karma, they had the receipts to prove players mostly played good. Without achievements, they would not have had those receipts.

The reason GOG isn’t tracking pirates isn’t to spite them, it’s because they don’t want the data from them and can’t or don’t care to separate the data.

When PlayStation and Steam added achievements, I am not sure if they included the metrics for publishers or if they only copied the gamer dopamine feature from Xbox. I did not know GOG had them. I don’t use their launcher; never have.

I like how Animal Crossing did achievements on Switch. Local only and you get tickets for a vending machine for them. Only now I have 189K I’ll never spend. Oh, you also get title keywords you can select from to make your profile title (you can’t just put whatever, e.g. on my old Enya themed island, my title was Wild Child, after the song, because I’d unlocked the title keywords Wild and Child). Silly pointless game. I’m now playing the 3DS version on my MacBook, and it’s way better. Also silly and pointless. Still love it.