i will only get trophies/achievements on games i love. case in point: up until ratchet: tod, i have 100% every ratchet and clank.

Soriku said: Umm...I doubt it... Btw, what do Achievement/Trophy points get you anyway? Bragging rights?

Your, "umm.. doubt it", answer holds no wait. Trophies and achivements are a very big factor in many peoples reasons for a purchase. Example; Super Stardust HD on the PS3 was the 1st PS3 game to get trophy support. It had over a 200% sales growth just because of this! So many people are playing games that they dislike cause of these things. I too used to say that they are gay and a waste of time, but now have been really getting into them. I finished Uncharted twice already, before the patch. When the patch came I re-played through it twice more. Great for re-play value of your favorite games & a fantastic idea. I am just very happy that SONY has jumped in after all the peoples requests for them & made them different too

trestres said: @noslodecoy: It's sad because some people are addicted to it, just like a MMORPG. I played a MMORPG for a long time, sucks your life in. Good thing I sold everything I had on it and got some cash and never played it again :) @SHMUPGurus: Arcades were a more social kind of entertainment. People would gather around people to watch them play and learn from them. Then when they were good enough they would try and beat the highscore. You would be popular if you possesed a highscore or if you were very skilled. Today home consoles encourage people to play in an isolated environment, and online play killed the social aspect of multiplayer games. People can be alone in their rooms playing against several hunderd people in a MMORPG or dueling or racing some random person anywhere in the world. This gen more than ever made playing a more individual thing than ever before. Wii is somewhat the exception to the rule as it encourages local multiplayer rather than online, maybe that's Nintendo's strategy.

-In online play you verse other real people whom you can communicate with, befriend and so forth... Being able to play with people not living very close to you is a plus...

 -I thought single-player oriented games were being replace by 5 hour games with multiplayer? I agree local multi should not be removed, but online is great and how is it as isolated as you make it out to be? Playing with, meeting new people or reconnecting with those at a distant is great.

I humbly submit to you the following:

Xbox 360 has sold 20.5m units WW. They had sold 10.25m in June '07. Therefore, an average (median) 360 gamer has owned his/her 360 for 15 months. By contrast, a median Wii/PS3 gamer has owned their machine since Dec '07, 9 months. The most recent figures on Vgchartz give tie ratios of;

Xbox 360 7.01
Wii 5.00
PlayStation 3 4.58

This implies that an average gamer buys at the following rate;

Wii .56 games/month
PlayStation 3 .51 games/month
Xbox 360 .47 games/month.

Now I'm sure these figures could be interpreted (or rubbished) in 100 different ways, but all I'm trying to say is that attach rate has a relationship to console age that mustn't be forgotten. After all, I own 5 PS3 games and 44 PS2 games. (I'm still working on my profile). It doesn't mean that I used to be 9 times more of a gamer than I am today ;p

Attach rates typically diminish as the user base increases though.

Users who have owned their consoles longest (the early adopters, typically the core demographic which always buys the most games) will just about always have purchased the highest number of games unless they just stopped using the console.

Past a certain point, the mass consumer point, where consoles are less than $200, many of the new buyers will only end up buying a handful of new games over the life time of the console, lowering the ratio.

They may end up picking up a bunch of used games (budget gamers), but these don't effect attach rates as calculated by hardware companies.

Technically, all those used games sitting in GS, EB and E-bay still count as being "attached" to the console of the original buyer. Meaning, someone could have bought 20 games, sold 15 of them, but still be "counted" as having bought 20 games for that one console giving them an attach rate of 20:1 in the eyes of the console manufacturer.

But the guy who buys those 15 used games, regardless of whether he kept them or traded them back in, they would still have an attach rate of 0:1, assuming he never bought any new games.

They actually bring the overall platform attach rates down as a result, and so typically, the console that sells the most units, paradoxically has the lowest attach rates at the end of the generation. It still translates to significantly more soft units sold overall than the runner ups though.

Maybe a better way of measuring soft attach rates would be on a month to month basis (soft units sold @ month/ hardware units sold @ month), but that overall ratio has always been the first number publishers look at in determining how well games have been selling on a given platform.

For achivements its not bragging rights that are the driver, its some strange feeling that you're accomplishing something when you really aren't. Playing Warhammer in beta for instance (why my trophies are sorely lacking, WAR is to blame....well and being too lazy to add the Uncharted achivements on the site that updates my tag) I found myself doing extra quests, exploring and undertaking activities I normally don't undertake in MMOs just to get unlocks for the games tome of knowledge. Currently noone can really see in your tome (except one achievement you can display in the form of a title like being killed by an enemy Chosen class gives you "The Chosen One" as a title) but that doesn't stop them from being addictive.

Ditto for trophies, there is a really sense of accomplishment when one is unlocked ,especially the harder ones. It isn't as if I play JUST for that, but it gives a reason to play in a more through manner and provides rewards for not giving up at certain junctures. Trophies are also better then achievements in way since they are given more individual meaning through the leveling system (instead of just points). It is hard to explain WHY a leveling system seems to matter (say getting a gold trophy that puts you to a lv 6 gamer level) then getting points (100 points for finishing game X) but never the less it seems to be the case for a lot of people. I think it relates, again, to goal oriented thinking.
What is the goal for a gamerscore? To get it higher right? But to what end? For the trophies the goal for getting the next trophy is to get to the next level. Leveling, in almost any genre, has shown to be the best motivator in all of gaming. Hell even FPS games have levels now (played COD4 lately?) they could just as easily have done call of duty points ;).

I love achievements. All games should have some kind of "scoring" system.

What about last years holiday bundle with 2 free games.....

The 360 has a very high attach rate becuse MS has successfully attracted a segment of the market that values videogames much higher than the standard population, and they spend far more time and money on videogams than most people ever would.

This has side effects that help MS and hurt MS. Obviously, the high attach rate adds royalty revenue to MS' bottom line (which is good as these people are liking these games). A downside is the average customer does not value the word of mouth of this segment, as they are seen as spending far too much time in playing videogames (i.e., they do not represent the positive thing that the average person sees with videogames).

My opinion is that Nintendo, who is mostly at the other end of the spectrum (save for the handful of Internet Nintendo fanboys who decry Wii Music), is not envious of this attach rate, as it does not represent something that is sustainable in most people's lives. Most people have limited cash for videogames, limited time for videogames, and value them in a far different way than the 360 demographic.

I thought the secret behind the 360's attach rate was the extra year it has had on the market. Not to discount your point that achievements have helped to move titles, I do agree with that.