How companies benefit from game achievements

A theory on manipulation
2025/11/07
The Cursory Journal

The first question we should ask is, why do games even have achievements? I mean, just thinking about, games are a recreational activity. Yes, there are games that people make careers out of, esports, where they compete in tournaments, so let's exclude those from the conversation.
Infact, the esports games now, are vastly different to how esports games used to be, they are all very manufactured, built from the ground up for a model of competition. If you look back to how the esports scene began, it was mostly games having a multiplayer component, either in the arcade or in the early internet age like quake, which naturally grew into competitions, just because they were so fun.
Let's also disregard the fact that speedrunning is a career, due to streaming, or that getting platinum or 100% achievements in a game is a career or any other combination of this dysfunctional and sign of the times economy that we now have and just look at the nature of games. Games are a recreational activity, perhaps a luxury, and meant to be played for fun. Now, let's see how achievements started this process of corrupting this meaning; trying to turn the preface of gaming as a recreational activity, that is one approached with your guard down, and using that aspect as a means of controlling users. Yes it may seem utterly pointless to consider that something so inconsequential as achievements would matter, but then, why would this exist, I mean what purpose does it serve and why do platform owners, who are notoriously firing highly valuable employees, closing down products, let these systems continue. First, how do they function? Well, there are 3 main companies with achievement systems in games: Of these, I have only experience Playstation and Steam and both try to do uniquely sinister things.

Playstation has achievements, it has a nice system where everytime you get an achievement, for doing something in a game, it screenshots the moment. Most, but not all games, have this think called a Platinum trophy, a shiny white image, which isn't really 100% a game, but a set of achievements they set. As far as I know, no other platform does this, and I believe this, more achievable nature of the trophy is what nudges people to, rather immorally, waste so much of their time. But, the trophy alone is meaningless, unless of course, alongside the trophy, you get a score, a number, and then a percentage showing how many other people have this. This gets the juices flowing, strokes the ego, builds up this completely unnecessary social component. As if it wasn't enough, you can also individually compare all the games in your library with your friends and see, not only how better or worse your score is, but also how many trophies you have, compared with your friend, for each game.

Steam takes a different angle, though it has the common achievement tags, the percentages so you see how many other people have it and also the comparing with your friends part. What it adds are trading cards. Items you get in steam when you play a game and items which you can sell and maybe make some money off of. Money that you'll use to buy more games on steam perhaps, or do some more trading, but all of that remains inside steam.

These systems aren't very nice. Infact, they're disgustingly exploitative, both from the platform owners and the game companies. People go into games with their guard down, it's a recreational activity, they aim to relax maybe spend some time with their friends. While they to an extent do that, there is this added level of bullshit that tries (rather successfully I might add), to reprogram a very malleable portion of the userbase. Other than a type of personality that doesn't really care about this, it's very easy for other's to fall into this trap. Why?

They want you to stay on, keep using their platform, keep playing the games, keep giving them information about your psyche, what you liked, what you didn't like. Similar to how console game libraries lock you in, you have after all bought so many games on this one hardware so why would you buy another and start again, achievements act as the cherry on top. "Look! you've bought so many games, played so many games, you have all these achievements (that we set because we knew you'd get them) and look at how many you have than this friend, and if you just play some more, you'll be closer to beating this other friend; why would you leave the platform and go somewhere else?" For the game companies, it's an added benefit if people grind to play games, they can show their investors or publishers, "Look at how many people are playing our singleplayer game for more hours than we expected" or even "Look how many people are getting trophies for our games" which is another way of them saying, "Look at how many loyal players we have numerically, so please let us make another game or a sequel". If the game is good then fair play to these companies, making games is one of the hardest software based things and just in general up there in the hardest things you can do, both in terms of talent, time and soul. It's atleast understandable for these companies, but it also hurts them more if more of their users are on these consoles. Consoles devkits aren't cheap and console marketing isn't cheap.

The thing I hate the most though, is how it's essentially a pavlovian experiment, conditioning users into this weird creature who starts expecting validation for the most banal thing they do at 10pm on a Saturday in their boxers. It's also to the point that users who are conditioned into this system, go through what achievements the game has and if there is no platinum, are disappointed; it's almost like a dog not being given it's candy (though that applies more if something happened in the game where a trophy should have been given but it wasn't). The weirdest subculture regarding this is people buying games just because it's easy to get trophies, in fact those games are meant for easily getting trophies, all so you can boost your score... for something meaningless, not even a game, not even a good game, not even a once in 10 years beautiful peace of art game, but a shiny jpeg, with a twinkling sound effect. That's real money they spent. You also can't turn them off, and while that might just be because no one really bothers with it, it's still annoying that it's there.

Is it might be possible, that this happened accidentally? given the amount of work, probably not.
Is this still effective? Yes but probably not for long the way things are going.