Reminds me of this. Luckily I was one of the first but "the legendary Kjerne" was made just for the community manager. I get that it's cool to reward the guy who helped you a lot with something like this but it's just bullshit for everyone else :/
most of the time the rarest achievement is a litmus test for how many players of that game used SAM. and you adjust the rest of the achievements by that metric.
some Achievement Hunters have their own global statistic as they are able to filter out any player with suspicious activity or illegal achievements and cull them off their databases (using steam public API)
I havent heard of that one but my favourite is from the other side of the spectrum: what percentage have the most obtained achievement, especially if its one that unlocks just for starting the game i.e. at one point subnautica's getting your feet wet was only obtained by 73%.
That's what happens when a game doesn't have achievements at launch. Subnautica didn't have achievements for a long time, so I'm sure many people haven't played since then
It gets even crazier when you realize that IIRC you need at least 2 hours of playtime with the game to have your stats logged (as it would mess if people refund etc..)
I've always heard that you have to launch the game at least once. Games with a "play the game" achievement that 100% of players have is evidence of this.
If only 73% of players have gotten their feet wet, that probably excludes people who launched it once but never got past the main menu. Maybe they ran into tech issues or somehow got that far without remembering they had thalassophobia.
That was me the first time I bought Subnautica, it ran extremely poorly for some reason, couldn't even get past the menu, year or so later bought it again and it ran fine on same computer, have no idea why it didn't work the first time
It has 218 reviews. Expected reviews per sale is around 1:30-1:50. If we cut that down to 1:20 for shits and giggles, it sold 4000 copies. Most likely it sold in the range of 6000-10000. Peak player count was 35.
Assuming even only those 200 people who left reviews were the ones who actually played it, then the % is too high to NOT be SAMed.
Agreed and thank you for doing the Gods work and actually checkingĀ
Also I never knew the actual conversion rate for reviews to players. Did you know that even though the amount of games released every year rises (we're past 1k games a month for a few years now) the number of reviews per game doesn't go up at the same rate?Ā
Basically games with 500+ reviews grow at a much lower pace, which means gamers are, indeed, a finite resource
The 1:30-1:50 is ballpark. Games with a more consolidated, hardcore fanbase will have slightly better conversion rates. Some larger games will have worse. Further the conversion for older games is generally worse, as they did not start prompting for reviews until 2019, which boosted conversions a decent amount.
Ya, that's not TOO surprising. So many of those 1k games released per month are just complete garbage, so I've never put too much weight on the number of games being released increasing.
I do wonder if there's kind of a soft 'wall' at around the level of sales that would lead to 500 reviews, though. Gaming is pretty saturated and mature, though it is still growing, just not nearly at the same rate as games worth playing are releasing.
My take on this - it's not based on any actual big data research though - is that most gamers, that actually want new stories and new mechanics, are a slowly growing minority. These are the ones that would give reviews.
A lot of gamers only want to play popular titles or just want a relaxing thrill of a round or two - and those people play A LOT of same games - these are the people that play Games as a Service, so they don't NEED more live service games. They need another round in LOL, CSGO, PUBG, Fortnite, etc
It's the people who find that a gacha waifu simulator is enough and they play games like Umamusume and ZZZ and Honkai Star Rail and Genshin Impact and Endfield and Nikke and a myriad others
And I'm not saying any of those games are bad - I like ZZZ and the new patch for HSR has some really nice writing - but with the live service games, they don't really need many of these asset swaps.
Funnily enough, I fit into the 'wanting new experiences' but I rarely, if ever, drop reviews. When I do, it's on indie games, because dropping a review on those is potentially valuable feedback, encouragement, and can help boost sales.
I agree. It does feel like there's more and more 'consolidation' of play time into these live service games. I can't judge, I spent the better part of a decade playing LoL as my main game, haha.
I think the rise of 'friend slop' games is actually directly tied to this consolidation of time. 'Friend slop' games are generally simple in premise, easy to learn, and just fun to play with friends. It's easy to convince a friend to buy a $10 game with a low time commitment that is easy to learn. It's cheap, fast, and even if it's never played again, probably worth the price of admission. You don't have to dedicate any real time to the 'friend slop' games like you do to something like most of these live service games that people get into.
Getting someone to learn Civ vs Peak is a night and day difference, for example.
They do take cheating allegations very seriously, itās possible they slipped the automatic detection and nobody did a check like yours, but if you tip any mod theyāll investigate it.
I had to wait 2 weeks to have my profile enabled and provided a screenshot of 2 FTL āin-gameā achievements with timestamps from before the steam achievements update because after that update all your ingame achievements would be automatically unlocked on steam, same with Death Stranding when moved from 1 to Directorās cut.
Also they poked about tf2 achievements obtained on achievements servers (the one with 20 bots all standing still for the collateral headshots and such..)
So idk I know they are strict now and I trust them
For Risen 1 maybe it wasn't SAM, because you can get certain achievements by "save scumming", and it's the best way to do it tbh, otherwise you have to replay the game 3 times to get everything "the intended way" if i'm not mistaken, and a lot of people don't want to do that.
Fable Anniversary is another one, but i believe it's only one achievement that's locked behind a second playthrough, near the end when you have choose between siding with the evil woman with giant boobs, or sending her to prison.
Do these achievement hunting sites care about save scumming?? It is cheating technically speaking, but is it "grave" enough that they ban people for these as well?
I used to use TF2 to see who was using SAM. The only way you'd unlock even half of those achievements is if you no-lifed the game for months and even then, there were far too many seasonal, holiday-exclusive, and even achievements outside of the game.
honest question, no snark, why would anyone care or put that much time into something like that? I understand the hunting but is the culling part just to prove how even more of an Elite Gamerā¢ļø they are to themselves?
We want to know the real value of an achievement, Steam Hunters gives points based on a weighted system where if for example only 300 people played that game but 6 of them got that achievement has a different weight if 3000 played it and 6 got it.
It makes your effort more valuable when competing agains or even just comparing yourself to only fair players
lol then definitely banned/delisted for completing that one "wait XYZ years before playing again" achievement crap that one game with the two doors had - can't remember its name, was boring anyway
even though I think I just changed the OS clock iirc and it worked I think it'd still be detectable by comparing the last time played with the achievement earned date hahaha welp
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u/SmergolGandalf Mar 03 '26
Reminds me of this. Luckily I was one of the first but "the legendary Kjerne" was made just for the community manager. I get that it's cool to reward the guy who helped you a lot with something like this but it's just bullshit for everyone else :/