Why don't PC developers care about achievements?

[tyl0413]

So i've started to notice a trend looking through friends Xbox profiles. Games like Mirror's Edge, Crysis, Wolfenstein (2009), Prey (2006) for example do not have achievements on PC despite them all releasing on Steam at one point. Done further research and found that a big chunk of 7th gen games that released on PC lack achievements despite Steam supporting them since 2007. Meanwhile on console i tried my hardest to find a game without achievement support and i couldn't find any, Quake 4, GUN and all the sports games that launched with the 360 all have them from 2005 so do the weirdest indies. Nowdays it's better, and the majority of AAA games releasing on Steam and Origin and a few others do have achievements but there still Battle.nets and Epic Stores out there with games like the new COD or Control without achievements in 2020 despite them having it on console. Does anyone have any idea why is that on PC devs don't really care to implement achievements into their platforms/games meanwhile literally everything on the 360 has achievements, if they just don't care why do they still bother with it on console? I get it this is really a first world problem that some games don't have some popups but still it's weird to see that they're neglected on PC for basically no reason.

[Lightcrush]

i'd say that we are too few as a community for them to really care, but if there are achievements in the console port, why not the pc? Would really like to know more about that too

[shizawn]

It's not a matter of not caring so much as it is a development cost. If the PC platform were walled off like Playstation and Xbox and controlled by one entity there would likely have been achievement support built in like you see on the consoles. It's a lot easier development-wise to hook into an existing achievement system than building your own.

Now that Steam is such a popular platform for PC gaming, the overwhelming majority of games that come out now have achievements. Developers don't need to build an in-game achievement system (although some still do) and can instead use the tools Steam has given them.

The reason Epic exclusive games don't have achievements is due to the platform itself not having support. You can bet that if Epic had launched the store with achievement support that most if not all of the games there would have them.

[tyl0413]

Originally posted by shizawn:

It's not a matter of not caring so much as it is a development cost. If the PC platform were walled off like Playstation and Xbox and controlled by one entity there would likely have been achievement support built in like you see on the consoles. It's a lot easier development-wise to hook into an existing achievement system than building your own.

Now that Steam is such a popular platform for PC gaming, the overwhelming majority of games that come out now have achievements. Developers don't need to build an in-game achievement system (although some still do) and can instead use the tools Steam has given them.

The reason Epic exclusive games don't have achievements is due to the platform itself not having support. You can bet that if Epic had launched the store with achievement support that most if not all of the games there would have them.

Well Steam has had achievements for a really long time yet developers only started using it in the last few years, there wasn't need to build their own systems from the ground up yet they still didn't do it.

[tyl0413]

Question, does a community created solution like retroachievements exist for PC games without native support?

[Pure_Cipher]

Actually,Steam achievements were introduced around 2008. It wasnt popular back then. So developers didnt care about it much,even after a year or two. Games released before 2008,barely have any achievement on Steam,except some developers who decided to include them. Either they were lazy or didnt care about a game,which is very old and does not have a sufficient player base. Some new games also do not have achievement system,for reasons still unknown to me. But being free of cost,Devs should include Achievements,Trading Cards and Could Save features of Steam

[TreeTrunk]

On consoles it's mandatory for games to have achievements, as it does generally make people spend more time in a game. On PC it's optional.

[tyl0413]

Originally posted by TreeTrunk:

On consoles it's mandatory for games to have achievements, as it does generally make people spend more time in a game. On PC it's optional.

Does it not do the exact same thing on PC? I tend to not touch games without achievements unless the game is amazing after i beat it once.

[Momo James]

Last night I made a dream.
All the old Tomb Raider games have new achievements and I had to redo the whole saga ♥

[tyl0413]

Originally posted by Momo James ✖‿◕:

Last night I made a dream.
All the old Tomb Raider games have new achievements and I had to redo the whole saga ♥

I'm not even asking devs to go back an implement them in their DOS games or something even though thankfully many games get decent remasters with achievements now days but seriously there's no excuse for Tomb Raider Legend for example having achievements on console but not PC.

[Lightcrush]

Originally posted by tyl0413:

Originally posted by Momo James ✖‿◕:

Last night I made a dream.
All the old Tomb Raider games have new achievements and I had to redo the whole saga ♥

I'm not even asking devs to go back an implement them in their DOS games or something even though thankfully many games get decent remasters with achievements now days but seriously there's no excuse for Tomb Raider Legend for example having achievements on console but not PC.

definitely agree on that, i understand that coming up with new achievement ideas and implementing them is bothersome and time consuming, but if they already exist in the console version, it surely shouldn't be hard to port them

[CLicKz]

Hey all,
Regarding the above discussion,I've just started a new Steam group that aims at uniting like minded people. My aim is to start petitions to get developers to implement steam achievements to their games.

A petition example is
https://steamcommunity.com/app/625820/discussions/0/2381701715729597756/

If your interested please check out my new group.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/AchievementPetitions

[tyl0413]

Originally posted by CLicKz:

Hey all,
Regarding the above discussion,I've just started a new Steam group that aims at uniting like minded people. My aim is to start petitions to get developers to implement steam achievements to their games.

A petition example is
https://steamcommunity.com/app/625820/discussions/0/2381701715729597756/

If your interested please check out my new group.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/AchievementPetitions

That's nice and all but petitions rarely do anything. Not saying we shouldn't try but what are the chances of Activision copy pasting the 360 achievement list into Steamworks for COD 2 in 2020? or hell even caring enough to build an achievement system for Battle.net for the 2020 COD or finding someone with dev access to Prey 2006 when the rights are all f-ed up. This mostly be for indies who would do them either way most likely sooner or later. Anyways i joined, hope i'm wrong and we can actually get some achievements in some old games.

[Mercury]

Over my years as an achievement hunter on Steam you come to realize that us as a community are much more fringe on this platform than say trophy hunters on PS or achievement hunters on Xbox. Their systems are much more fleshed out with native support for stuff like gamer score and whatnot, while Steam simply will never achieve that level due to the system already having been in place so long. There's not a way to retroactively implement a gamer score like system on Steam. On the PC platform, everything is much more open source and cheating is much easier to do (i.e. a SAM equivalent doesn't exist for PS players to my knowledge) and not nearly as preventable. Valve doesn't control the entire OS of your system like Sony or Microsoft on their respective consoles.

Achievements are a strong selling point for consumers like myself, avid achievement hunters. However, we as a community on Steam are looked down upon by those who naturally lack the completionist urge and don't have nearly as much respect. Our platform has much more open floodgates that lead for achievement spam games (which since have been mostly eradicated, but there is still hundreds of absolute garbage games which are easy perfects) and these can deflate the value of profiles significantly. There's nothing inherently wrong with playing spam games, I've played tons of it to boost my stats, but if they didn't exist (and there weren't so many easy minutes-long 100%s too) I would be spending a lot more time playing more bigger games and therefore naturally be forced to have a more respectable list of perfects.

Overall, a variety of factors lead to developers not adding achievements to Steam. Usually, I would guess that they simply don't see the point if they're not required to add them and they're not a huge selling point. A prime example is Kerbal Space Program, which has trophies on PS4 but no achievements on Steam. The developers have specifically stated that due to the game's sandbox genre, they don't want to add a set of achievements as, in their eyes, it limits the creativity of some of their playerbase. I don't agree with this, but in the end, it's their game and they can do what they want. I'd love to see tons of games get achievement sets that don't currently have any.

Some related things I'd like to address are that throughout my years as a member of this community I have suggested adding achievements in plenty of games' Steam discussion hubs and can't think of a time it's led to any success. Not to say it doesn't ever happen, but it's rare. It's simply not a priority whatsoever for developers. What also sucks is how plenty of developers might release a game with an untested achievement set in which some or all achievements are completely broken in functionality due to what's almost always a stupidly basic coding error, yet there's not priority here for some. Cave Story+ for example took over 5 years of developers ignoring all discussions and emails regarding their bugged "Curse Broken" achievement. There's not enough pressure for developers to address such issues in far too many cases.

I've just kind of rambled a bunch of thoughts of mine here, bored out of my mind right now. Hope something meaningful came out of it, lol