this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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TIL people still don’t know that achievements are a front for analytics. They’re not for you. They’re for publishers.
Fallout 4 didn’t initially let you play a bad guy because the analytics from Fallout 3 achievements showed them that a vast majority of players hit each level achievement at good karma. They were checking for that. They just didn’t expect the bad karma gamers to be so vocal.
Analytics don't need to be public. It's often better for the analyst if they're not. There are much better, much more detailed ways to gather analytics from your own game than achievements.
Achievements are very obviously not analytics. Not for the developers or publishers, at least, or for anyone whose livelihood depends on analysing how players play games. They're incentives to drive player engagement. A way to further, uh, gamify the game.
You might be bored of killing goblins, but you've almost reached the achievement, just 132 goblins more. And then you're almost up to some other achievement, so you keep playing a bit more.
And up goes the playtime.
Which is something analytics are very interested on (since it often contributes to discoverability), even if no achievement measures it.
There are plenty of gamers (myself included) who do actually like well-designed achievements, and they can actually really help you vary how you engage with a game. I'm sure that publishers also love the analytics, but pretending that they aren't for regular people at all is silly too.
I mean, sure, but let's not put the cart before the horse. Achievements exist for analytics. That's why Microsoft built the system. And some developers cared and used them that way (for example, Bethesda). Some developers did not care (look at the Avatar game everyone rented just to get a quick and easy 1000GS). And yes, some achievements were well designed and funny.
Then there's Nintendo saying they will never support achievements for analytics, yet some of their games have them solely for the player's enjoyment, such as Animal Crossing. Rather than Gamerscore (or Trophies), you get Nook Miles which can be used to buy some things. The system is completely optional to engage with, but provides that same/similar "dopamine rush". And that's fine.
So yeah, not pretending anything, just amazed that most people don't understand why they exist in the first place.
That said, I think I recall reading that Xbox provided/provides publishers with a means to hide "Achievement Hunters" from the analytics entirely. That is to say, if as a player, your goal is to simply collect all the achievements, and/or maximise your Gamerscore (or Trophy collection), your metrics are less valuable to the publisher than someone who is just playing the game normally and the achievements show the choice they made. For example, not only did Fallout 3 have the karma choices (3 separate achievements for each level that had one), Oblivion had two mutually exclusive achievements for picking a faction in the DLC. And BioWare games make use of this a lot. So yes, while they can see which one you went for first, it's not useful information because the one you went for last is the one you stuck with. So they just throw out that data. Or they can.
So two things you can do to mitigate your data being used to vote for how the next game will turn out: One, play the game after the next game has come out. They should no longer care about the analytics. Two, get all the achievements. Your data is less valuable. On the flip side, if you want your data to matter, play the game when it's relatively new, and make choices based on your morality rather than what you think it should be.
I'd also like to point out that there are a handful of games that collect this information without using the achievement system and show you the data. All of the first three Life is Strange games do it. (I haven't played the two newest ones.) As Dusk Falls, which was published by Microsoft, does it as well. I think the Telltale games (e.g. The Walking Dead) do it, too. What's really cool about this system is, at the end of each chapter, you can not only see how your choices stacked up against gamers around the world, but you can also filter it down to those on your friends list (local to Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, or Steam). As Dusk Falls takes it a step further, giving you a preview of how other choices branch the story in other ways. Personally, I think this system is the best system. They're still collecting data on how you play, but they're presenting that data back to you in a meaningful way.