http://www.oxm.co.uk/article.php?id=14388

Apparently blatant scorewhores, like our own OXM Jipped, are an important enough demographic to be worth catering for.

"The Achievement hunter, who's going to make purchase decisions around the Achievements per minute to ratio - he's probably buying ten to twenty titles a year, or at least playing that many," Pitchford told us. "He's playing a lot. So he's a very frequent customer, and you want to be in that pile. That's just business."
Enough business to justify fiddling with the Achievements? Yes, apparently, because it's barely any more work than you'd do already.

"The time it takes is minimal," we were told, "because you're designing Achievements anyway, and you can probably affect your sales by something like 10 and 40 thousand units. If you're talking about a triple-A game selling between 1 and 2.5 million units. You're talking tens of thousands of units of impact there."

"Unfortunately most people in the industry don't think through it that much. You have designers designing achievements, and they're the worst."

Check back later this week when we'll go into more detail with Randy about bad Achievement design - or you can read the whole thing in the latest issue of OXM.

worst gen ever confirmed? this is pretty sad :(

I love acheivements, they do affect which console i buy games for, and why i only buy exclusives for PS3, and everything else for Xbox 360, despite me just prefering X360 (online friends also), and it's controller.

I can believe that since I've bought and rented games based on easy achievements.

I have done it once or twice...

*prepare for rant*
Sorry but this is one of my rant topics ;)

When I was young and the Xbox first came out with the idea of 'achievements',
I remember hearing about it and thinking "wow thats a cool idea, you can see that your friend beat a certain level on super hard and then ask for help."

Then when it came time for 'achievements' to be implemented, it turned into a pathetic, ego stroking useless system. Ohhh I just killed 10 guys with a SHOTGUN! Even worse, is the fact that people now try to get as many achievements as possible just to raise some arbitrary score to make them feel like they are a better gamer or something. I actually see people rent/buy games that are easy to get all the achievements for instead of playing a game because its ya know... fun!?

Being a strong PC gamer, I always realized that console games were lacking in gameplay stats that PC games like BF had. So when I first heard about 'achievements', I thought it would be a good step towards more gameplay stats. However, achievements turned into these static, useless milestones for a certain weapon. In my mind I could tell that the game was 'tracking' how many kills I got with a certain weapon. However for some reason the devs would only tell me when I got 20 kills with the sniper rifle. So they track your gameplay but then don't display any of it except for the stupid kill x with y achievements. Some achievements are getting better but most are useless.

I know I am crazy but watching gamers struggle to get a high gamerscore because they think it proves their gaming prowess is humorous. Especially when the achievements are as useless as the self derived pride you get from 'achieveing' one.
I just play games and have fun.... thats it :)

/rant
sorry, long day at work ;)

someone should make a game where you get a full 1000 points just for starting the game. it would sell like hotcakes for sure. xD

Not all console games lack stats.  Bungie.net has provided an incredible amount of statistics for Halo 2/3/ODST.

Well, I know that, all other things being equal, I tend to choose the 360 version because I prefer Achievements to Trophies. Like with Arkham Asylum, if the PS3 didn't have the extra content, I'd have got it on the 360.

I like achieving things, but I don't like game designers telling me how much my achievements are worth. I have a glow in the dark plaque that says I'm really good at Donkey Kong Country, and nothing on XBox can ever give me a glow in the dark plaque. So... screw 'em.

I like this kind of stuff in-game, but not built into a console's entire library where they all go into the same score. That just seems dumb. I like it in individual games where you're trying to get 100% or something, or the achievements in Portal, challenges in Mega Man 9, or even the stamps in Wii Sports Resort. They're fun little things to dick around with, but I don't like the idea of putting a numerical score on them.