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Gearbox's Randy Pitchford Says Easy Achievements Improve Sales
Achievement junkies, take note: You're probably going to want to be picking up Borderlands. If Gearbox president Randy Pitchford's recent comments are any indication, this game should be a pretty smooth 1000 points to your Gamerscore (or Platinum Trophy, if you prefer).
According to an interview in the Official Xbox 360 Magazine (via Joystiq), Pitchford believes the relative ease of unlocking Achievements in a title "can probably affect your sales by something like 10 and 40 thousand units." He backs up these numbers by pointing toward the "Achievement hunter" as a new breed of hardcore gamer that hunts down and buys or plays at least 10 to 20 new titles per year and "make[s] purchase decisions around the Achievements per minute to ratio." Pitchford says this extra boost in sales is easily enough to justify spending development time tweaking Achievements, and he stresses that developers throughout the industry should be thinking about Achievements more closely and designing them better.
Then again, it's also possible that Pitchford has a personal stake in making video game Achievements as easy as possible. The developer recently found himself caught up in a Gamerscore war with Game Informer's own Andrew Reiner. Needless to say, Reiner won. By a lot.
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