All Xbox 360 games contain a certain amount of Achievements that players can earn while playing. Achievements have been around for years, as players are encouraged to earn as many if not, all of them. Completing Achievements seem to be a popular trend in gaming; many display their Gamercards on forums, and there are even websites that help gamers keep track of all available Achievements in a particular game.

However, a recent GDC panel suggests that Achievements may not be that important to players after all. Industry analyst firm Electronic Entertainment and Design Research (EEDAR) gave a talk that detailed their findings on a study they conducted on Achievement trends. Using data from My GamerCard and with the permission of Microsoft, EEDAR looked at 32 million data points and a random sample of 100 games.

The study yielded some intriguing results, the most telling of which was that only 4% of gamers complete all the Achievements in a game. About 27% gamers complete half of a game’s Achievements, and less than 10% complete 80% of them. These findings led EEDAR analyst Jesse Divinch to ask, “Does this mean Achievements are too hard?”

While these numbers are interesting, when you think about it — are they really that surprising? I don’t think that Achievements are necessarily too hard to complete; it’s that people simply don’t care about them. Achievements do nothing to improve your character or your gameplay. All you get is a title and bragging rights on your Gamercard. Achievements just give you something extra to do while you’re playing, and something for the OCD crowd to fixate upon. Let’s face it — many Achievements are dull. They require you to do something repeatedly, such as collecting X number of items, killing a certain number of guards, or completing a certain skill X number of times. After a while this can get quite grindy and worse, boring. So you stop worrying about them and continue playing the game.

When I play, I don’t even think about Achievements. Sure I get a little thrill when I hear that little chime indicating that I’d just completed an Achievement, and yes if it’s pretty easy to finish I’ll go ahead and do it. However, I don’t go out of my way in working on them. For example when I started playing the first Assassin’s Creed I learned about collecting various flags to earn some Achievements. I started to do it but quickly lost interest. Why? Because I simply couldn’t be bothered to go the extra mile. My health bar doesn’t go up if I get all the flags, and I won’t get any cool new skills either. I just get a title. Yay. I know this is anecdotal evidence and I’m just one person, but when you look at the EEDAR results it does seem to make sense.

Another little nugget of information gleaned from the EEDAR study was that there was a positive correlation between highly rated hardcore titles and the percentage of gamers who have earned at least 50% Achievements. What does this mean — that players are more encouraged to complete Achievements when playing highly rated hardcore titles? Or does it mean that hardcore gamers are more likely to be the type who like completing Achievements? Or even that the Achievements in such titles are easier to come by? It would be cool to see the results from further analyzing this data.

If game designers are concerned about their hard work on creating Achievements going to waste, then I suggest that they consider either making certain Achievements a little faster/easier to obtain, the grind-inducing ones in particular. I wouldn’t mind collecting say, 20 rings in a game but I sure as hell wouldn’t collect 50. Another suggestion would be to eliminate the grindier Achievements altogether but leave the more interesting ones behind such as defeating bosses or unlocking special characters.

Since I provided some anecdotal evidence, let’s hear some from you guys as well. What do you think of Achievements? Do you spend time completing them? Are there certain games in which you complete more Achievements than others?