The Shrine

Saw a title that's clearly a bullet hell genre pop up in Steam's deals, and I looked up the achievement page: http://steamcommunity.com/stats/Gundemo ... hievements

1 out of 8 players who bought the game beat it on the easiest setting? 0.3% of the players beat it on the hardest setting. Yes I know statistics say a lot of people never finish the game they own, but if 7 out of 8 players never finish the game that's probably not going to be very successful, especially if it's a shoot 'em up where people presumably won't be bored with the game before they get to the end unlike your generic modern game that takes tens of hours to complete.

As a point of comparison, 31% of players have beaten Civilization V on Continents setting, so at least that many % have beaten the game (possibly more), and this is a game with a nontrivial learning curve and actually takes a pretty long time to finish, so you can easily get bored halfway.

Nearly (and in some cases over) 10% of the people who play Civ 5 don't even have the achievements you get for basically starting to play a game. I'm not sure how accurate those things are other than making you feel super special for getting an achievement that almost no one else has gotten (yes I have the Master of the Universe achievement)

There's a lot of studies on how people buy games and never actually finish or even play them. There's an achievement for finding a goodies hut in Civ 5 and it's practically impossible to not find one unless you play without them on (which would imply you know something about the game in the first place) and that's not 100% either. But the fact that 31% of players have beaten Civilization 5 implies at least that many % of people play the game to what can be called an ending, and Civ 5 is a pretty long game that you can easily get bored with halfway.

On the other hand a shoot 'em up with 5 stages is probably going to be finished in one sitting unless you simply can't beat it or you play the first stage and decide you bought the wrong game. Yet only 1 out of 8 has done so for this game here. It's fairly consistent with polls I've seen on similar games in the genre, after you factor in people might lie about what difficulty they've beaten to make themselves look better. In the case of Steam achievements, you can be reasonably sure that the % reflects the truth pretty closely.

Another interesting observation I noticed is that Civ 5 says something like 1% or less of players have beaten Deity, but apparently everyone you met online has done it easily. And it's not just saying you could beat Deity if you're inclined to do so. I'm sure I can beat Deity if I'm inclined to do so too, but it'd be a very time consuming process since you'd have to keep on restarting hundreds of times to get the optimal starting position, and then save every 2 turns or so to make sure you never screw up. It'd be doable but may take hundreds of hours which is why I haven't actually done it, and the actual miniuscule % reflects the fact that it's really hard to pull off even with all the tricks in the book. In this sense I think achievements are useful to distinguish between what is in theory possible and whether someone can actually do it.

I probably have not installed or played around 1/8 of the games in my steam library. I, and I am sure I am not alone, am a sucker for the pull of a steam sale. I somehow resisted the $2 Alpha Protocol deal, but still feel a bit of regret for not pulling the trigger on that.

If you didn't install a game, do you even count toward the % for achievements? When I go to a game I don't own, it says you must install the game to compare your achievements.