By The Numbers: Playing The Percentages

When Sony introduced the PlayStation 4, all eyes were on the graphics, the new controllers, the share button and other exciting new features. In amongst all that, though, Sony introduced lots of tiny features and changes too. One of these small changes was to introduce a percentage figure to each of their Trophies, showing you just how many people have actually collected that trophy. This works for PS3 and PS4 games, so I can now go back and see this data for older games as well as new.

It certainly shows up some interesting numbers. I looked at downloadable title flOw and saw that it has a trophy called “Adventure”. How do you get “Adventure”?  Well, you load the game for the first time, and press Start. So, not a particularly difficult challenge, I think we can all agree. And yet, somehow, only 97.5% of all flOw players have managed this momentous achievement. I just can’t get my head around that figure. 25 in every 1,000 people who went out of their way to buy, download AND load the game to the starting screen then somehow failed to even press Start. It’s a pretty mellow game, but unless they lapsed instantly into a coma for several years, how did they not do this?

25 in every 1,000 people who went out of their way to buy, download AND load the game to the starting screen then somehow failed to even press Start.

The critically acclaimed Journey, a game that I loved to bits, actually does quite well by the numbers. You’d generally expect shorter games to have more chance of people completing them, but still only 71% of players have completed the story, a feat that takes about two hours and doesn’t require mad gaming skills.

Still, flOw and Journey are cheap downloadable games, maybe people just bought them for a few quid and never got around to playing them. Surely people don’t do that with full priced AAA titles?

Full priced AAA titles like BioShock Infinite, you mean? BioShock Infinite has a trophy “Written In The Clouds” for completing the lighthouse. If you’ve played the game, you obviously know that this section takes less than five minutes and is little more than a prologue to the game proper. Unless, of course, you are one of the 5.5% of people who “played” BioShock Infinite and never got past that point.

The Last Of Us, a game so good that it even has diehard Xbox fanboys wishing they had a PS3, has actually only been completed (on normal) by 33.9% of all the people who played it.

The chart above shows the percentage of people who completed each level of the PS4 version of Dead Nation. I picked this game because it was on Playstation Plus, and also because there aren’t that many games on PS4 at the moment, so you’d think it would be well played. It also, conveniently, has a trophy for completing each level. Just 58% of people got through the first level of this game, dropping to 18% by level 4. And this isn’t a bad game, far from it. Just 7.1 percent of players have ever finished it.

Sure, there are some people out there now who are probably happily playing it, who intend to get to the end, but there is clearly a large number of people who just don’t ever bother to play the games they’ve got. And to those people I say, don’t waste your money on games – just send it to me, and I’ll waste it for you.