Mind-Boggling Achievement Numbers Show Success of Scheme

Kotaku’s gotten a hold of some pretty staggering numbers regarding achievements and gamerscores on the Xbox 360. The impact that achievements have had on gaming is easy to imagine, but wrapping your noggin’ around raw figures brings the bigger picture into perspective. It’s like understanding the total number of visitors at the last World Cup in South Africa. You know that a lot of people went, but the 64 matches were attended by over 3 million fans. That’s a much more concrete indication of scope.

There are over 50 million Xbox 360 consoles worldwide, and, since the introduction of achievements, over 6.3 billion of them have been unlocked. Again, that’s a nice statistic to know, but curiosity demands more information. The total number of gamer points earned from 2005 to March 2011 is 176,802,201,383, and the average gamerscore is 11,286.

It would be interesting if Microsoft could tally the average gamerscore per game, as then we’d have a better look at how effective the system is. With the average gamerscore at just over 11,000, that number could result from 8-9 fully completed games or around 20 half-completed ones. How many of those do you think would have been purchased were it not for achievements? The novelty has slightly worn off from the early days of picking up 2006 FIFA World Cup—the game that hands out gamerscores easier than it would actually hacking the system—but games still come with the assurance of easy achievements.

Only the relentless and determined played through games on the hardest difficulty a few years back; now more people take the challenge to earn a better gamerscore. I don’t think the numbers will ever stop impressing—or rocketing, for that matter.