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Are you even playing the game??
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00:00Trophies and achievements are about so much more than mere pats on the back.
00:03They also ultimately tell a story that says a lot about the modern gaming landscape.
00:08Now, trophy and achievement data is far from an exact science for a multitude of reasons,
00:13but it does nevertheless provide a pretty strong and often shocking indication of modern player
00:18trends, as this list will cement. As tough as it might be to believe some of these absolutely
00:23wild stats, the proof is very much in the dopamine-filled pudding.
00:27I'm Jess from WhatCulture and here are 10 video game trophy stats you won't believe.
00:32Number 10. 58% of players beat The Last of Us Part 2
00:36It's worth pointing out from the outset that achievement data consistently indicates the
00:41vast majority of gamers don't actually complete that many of the games they buy.
00:45Look at the stats for just about any major AAA game and you'll find the number of players who
00:49beat the final boss and roll credits is staggeringly low. Even Insomniac's first Spider-Man game,
00:55which offered up a relatively short and not particularly difficult single-player campaign,
01:00has only seen 49.3% of players reach the end. And so, with that in mind, it's legitimately quite
01:06flabbergasting that The Last of Us Part 2, an extremely polarizing sequel that's roughly 25 hours long
01:12and a brutal, miserable experience for the most part, rocks one of the highest completion rates of any
01:18AAA game this generation. At present, 58% of players have completed the story, placing it far
01:24above not only Spider-Man, but most other major first-party Sony titles, like 2018's God of War,
01:31Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone, and plenty of other comparable AAA offerings.
01:37Even accepting that The Last of Us Part 2 released during a particularly bleak period of the pandemic
01:43where players were encouraged to remain indoors and may have found a strange comfort in its
01:47like-minded narrative, that can't fully explain how such a disproportionate number of gamers did
01:53make it all the way to the end. Impressive isn't even the word.
01:56Number 9. 14% of players never beat God of War's opening fight.
02:02On the total opposite end of the spectrum now, we have 2018's God of War quasi-reboot.
02:08Though a respectable 47% of players have reached the end of the game and popped the Last Wish
02:12trophy, what's more shocking is how many players haven't ever made it past the prologue.
02:17God of War opens with a thrilling onboarding section, where players are introduced to the
02:21game's combat and have an epic punch-up with a stranger, later revealed to be the god known as
02:26Baldur. Even accepting the prologue lasts around 40 minutes, it's simple and riveting enough that
02:31you'd expect most everyone to remain glued to the controller throughout. However, the trophy that
02:36pops for completing this encounter, The Journey Begins, hasn't been unlocked by 13.7% of those who
02:42started playing the game. A head-scratchingly high figure for a game that's both so brilliant right
02:48out the gate, and has such a high overall completion percentage. It's of course important to remember
02:53that God of War has been available to try for free on PlayStation Plus for a long time now,
02:58lowering the barrier of entry enough that many with little to no interest in the game
03:02might have booted it up just to see what it was like, in turn inflating the trophy data.
03:07All the same, given that almost half of the players who started the game did reach the
03:11end credits, it seems unlikely that the PS Plus release is entirely to blame.
03:16Number 8. Almost 20% of Persona 5 Royal players got the Platinum. Even if it shocks you how few
03:22players actually beat games in a bare-bones sense, nobody should be surprised how few dedicate the
03:28time and effort to scooping up Platinum trophies. When even games with relatively fun and easy
03:33Platinums like Until Dawn have only been mopped up by 2.7% of players, it's reasonable to assume
03:39that considerably beefier and more demanding Platts have been popped by a real fraction of this figure,
03:45right? Yet believe it or not, Persona 5 Royal has been Platinumed by 20.2% of European players,
03:51and 17.7% of North Americans. Effectively almost 1 in 5 of people who started playing the game.
03:59It's an impressive figure given that the game takes well over 100 hours for most players to
04:04Platinum, seeming to suggest that the franchise's fans are an extremely die-hard bunch.
04:09More to the point, given that Royal is an enhanced version of the original Persona 5 release,
04:13the overwhelming majority of the people buying it were already all-in, and may have beaten the
04:18base game already, so they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. Even so,
04:23such a high Platinum rate for a game this huge and challenging is insane.
04:28Number 7. 16% of Minecraft players have never opened the inventory.
04:34There are few actions more basic and bog-standard in any video game than opening your inventory,
04:39right? It doesn't require any skill and can usually be done with the mere press of a single
04:43button at any time. And yet, 15.9% of Minecraft players on the PS4 version have never done it,
04:50and the number goes up even higher to a laughable 17.2% on the PS3 release.
04:56Now, as ludicrous as these stats seem on paper, there is at least something approaching a logical
05:01explanation here. Given that many Minecraft players stick to the creative mode, where a conventional
05:06inventory doesn't exist, and in turn, never play survival mode where the trophy can be popped.
05:12All the same, such a large slice of Minecraft players never having tried survival mode for
05:17a few minutes and taking a quick peek at their inventory is really staggering.
05:22Number 6. Slytherin is the most popular house in Hogwarts Legacy.
05:26And now for some trophy data that provides insight into the mind of the average person playing recent
05:31mega-hit Hogwarts Legacy, and the results are pretty damn surprising. Ask even the most casual Harry
05:37Potter fan which of Hogwarts' four houses is the most popular, and the overwhelming majority will
05:42tell you Gryffindor, given it's the house into which Harry himself was sorted. Yet the trophy and
05:48achievement data for Hogwarts Legacy tells a shockingly different story. The game awards an
05:53achievement early on depending on which house the player selects, and across both PlayStation and Xbox,
06:00Gryffindor is actually edged out by Slytherin. It's a genuinely unexpected statistic given that players
06:06generally opt for the more virtuous and good options in most video games. And so why would so many
06:11players opt to join the house most commonly associated with evil misdeeds? While it's fair to say that
06:17Slytherin gets an incredible amount of focus in the books and films compared to both Hufflepuff and
06:21Ravenclaw, seeing them triumph over Harry Potter's own house is genuinely shocking. Does the game's own
06:27sorting hat perhaps have an accidental bias towards Slytherin, or are players just a little bit more
06:32mischievous than we're giving them credit for? As a millennial who inevitably knows that their own
06:37house is indeed Slytherin, I'm all for people ignoring the sorting hat and picking their own
06:41house. Number 5. 35% of Elden Ring players reached the final boss. Even if you subscribe to the belief
06:49among FromSoftware fans that Elden Ring is the studio's easiest game to date, it still represents a
06:55biblical level of challenge to the average player. And so it's extremely impressive that a monumental
07:0035.3% of players actually defeated the final boss and reached the climax of the game, whereupon each
07:07of its three major endings unlocks a separate trophy. More than one third of players getting
07:12right to the final boss of a FromSoftware game sounds ludicrous on paper compared to the similar
07:18completion stats afforded to decidedly less difficult video games. But much like the Persona 5
07:23Royal Platinum trophy, it's also worth remembering that FromSoftware has a really loyal and dedicated
07:29player base who are very aware of the challenges their games present. As such, there are likely
07:34not too many players who bought the game without any awareness of its high difficulty level, placing
07:39a ceiling on the number of people who would quickly bounce off it. Basically, if you play a FromSoftware
07:44game these days, you're almost certainly all in for the long haul, whether you reach the end or not.
07:49Number 4. Over 50% of players have never got past Sonic's Green Hill Zone.
07:54Now we come to what might actually be the most inexplicable piece of trophy data on this entire
08:00list. Trophies and achievements obviously didn't exist when Sonic the Hedgehog was first released
08:05in 1991. But when it received a digital release for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, that all changed.
08:12While it's not remotely unexpected that just 6.5% of players have nabbed the trophy for beating the
08:17game, given its punishingly old school nature, at least compared to more forgiving modern platformers,
08:23it's absurd just how few players have even pushed past the first zone.
08:27Sonic kicks off with Green Hill Zone, the franchise's most iconic setting by far,
08:32and one which even the most casual and unskilled of Sonic players should basically be able to cruise
08:37through. And yet, among the 100,000 plus players tracked for the game on PlayStation platforms,
08:43only 44.4% of them have cleared Green Hill Zone. This is a zone which, to be clear,
08:49can be comfortably beaten by most players in around five minutes, yet hasn't been finished
08:54by half of the people who started playing it. Could it be the players en masse bought the game
08:59for the nostalgia-fueled fun of it, but never got back to it after quickly testing out Green Hill
09:04Zone's first level? Truly, truly baffling.
09:06Number 3. Most FIFA players haven't played a single women's match.
09:11There's no two ways about it. This one kind of stinks. The FIFA franchise finally introduced the
09:16ability to play as female football teams back in FIFA 16, and ever since has included a trophy for
09:22playing even a single women's football match. Sadly, the resulting data is pretty damn depressing,
09:27with just 20% of players playing even one women's match in FIFA 16, and that number has basically
09:33fallen further off a cliff with each new release. By FIFA 22, just 6% of players had popped the
09:39passion achievement for playing a women's international football match, and the recent
09:44EA Sports FC 24 saw this figure drop to a catastrophic 0.8%. It doesn't help at all that EA's implementation
09:51of female football in the franchise remains relatively piecemeal compared to the male side,
09:57but at the same time, the fact that their inclusion has moved the needle so little with the player base
10:02is still pretty disappointing. Number 2. 12% of Fallout 4 players have never left the vault.
10:09If you're sticking to the critical path, it'll take you about half an hour to get through Fallout 4's
10:13prologue, leave Vault 111, and head above ground into the wasteland. It's here where Fallout 4 really
10:19begins, as the game opens up and players are free to explore the irradiated post-apocalyptic expanse.
10:26And yet, a decent sliver of players are still holed up in that original vault,
10:30and seemingly not terribly eager to come out. At present, 11.9% of the game's 750,000-plus tracked
10:38PS4 players, almost 90,000 people for those keeping score, haven't yet wandered out of the vault and
10:45dug into the meat of what Fallout 4 has to offer. And given that the game shipped 12 million units
10:51to retailers within its first 24 hours alone, the real-world number of vault-camping players
10:56across all platforms is going to be many orders of magnitude higher. On one hand, it's great that
11:01players found so much value in the game's glorified tutorial area, but that's also a huge swath of
11:06the player base that's barely dipped their toe into the wider experience.
11:11Number 1. Almost 40% of players never killed somebody else in Hunt Showdown.
11:16Trophies and achievements can give developers extremely useful, fascinating, and perhaps perplexing
11:21data about how players are experiencing their games. And that's certainly true in the case of Hunt
11:27Showdown. The game is a PvP VE first-person shooter, where players are tasked with taking down other
11:33players. And as such, one of the game's most basic trophies, Debut, is awarded for killing your first
11:39enemy hunter, that is, another human player. But almost four years since the game's PS4 release,
11:44and only 62.7% of players have popped the debut trophy. That leaves 37.3% who've not killed a
11:52single human player during a game where that's the operating objective. This was even recently
11:57commented upon by the game's general manager, David Fifield, who noted the difficulty of creating
12:03a competitive experience that's also inclusive for newcomers. Reading between the lines, it seems
12:08clear that many new players quickly took their leave of Hunt Showdown after getting mowed down by
12:13fellow players a few rounds in a row. Fifield insists they're continuing to work on the issue,
12:18and hopefully the percentage of players without a single kill to their name will drop in the near
12:22future. Well, here's hoping. That's the end of our list, but let me know down in that comment
12:27section if you don't know about any other interesting trophy stats. As always, I've been
12:31Jess from WhatCulture. Thanks so much for hanging out with me. As always, you can find me on my Twitter
12:36account, at JessMcDonnell, or on my Twitch where I'm Tempertress. And make sure you stay tuned to us here
12:42for plenty more great gaming lists.
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