Gearbox Software co-founder Randy Pitchford was interviewed recently and in that interview, he stated easy Achievements are something developers should consider. According to Pitchford, easy Achievements can help sell extra games, by up to 40,000.

He also states that right now, most developers aren't taking this into consideration. Guess he's ahead of the game.

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has said that including easy Achievements can increase a big game's sales by up to 40,000, in an interview in the new issue of OXM.

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."

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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."

RabidChinaGirl via oxm.co.uk »