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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 above not
01:25only Spider-Man, but most other major first-party Sony titles, like 2018's God of War, Ghost of Tsushima,
01:32Horizon 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.
01:57Number 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.
02:07Though a respectable 47% of players have reached the end of the game and popped the Last Wish trophy,
02:13what'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 end credits,
03:12it seems unlikely that the PS Plus release is entirely to blame.
03:168. Almost 20% of Persona 5 Royal players got the Platinum
03:21Even if it shocks you how few players actually beat games in a bare-bones sense, nobody should be
03:26surprised how few dedicate the time and effort to scooping up Platinum trophies.
03:31When even games with relatively fun and easy Platinums like Until Dawn have only been mopped up
03:35by 2.7% of players, it's reasonable to assume that considerably beefier and more demanding Platts
03:42have been popped by a real fraction of this figure, right? Yet believe it or not, Persona 5 Royal has
03:48been Platinum'd by 20.2% of European players and 17.7% of North Americans, effectively almost one in
03:56five of people who started playing the game. It's an impressive figure given that the game takes well
04:01over 100 hours for most players to Platinum, seeming to suggest that the franchise's fans are an extremely
04:07die-hard bunch. More 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 base
04:19game already, so they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. Even so, such a high Platinum
04:24rate for a game this huge and challenging is insane. Number 7. 16% of Minecraft players have never opened
04:32the inventory. There are few actions more basic and bog-standard in any video game than opening your
04:38inventory, right? It doesn't require any skill and can usually be done with the mere press of a
04:43single button at any time. And yet, 15.9% of Minecraft players on the PS4 version have never
04:50done it, and 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 Potter
05:37fan which of Hogwarts' four houses is the most popular, and the overwhelming majority will tell
05:43you 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
05:59Xbox, Gryffindor is actually edged out by Slytherin. It's a genuinely unexpected statistic given that
06:05players generally opt for the more virtuous and good options in most video games. And so why would
06:11so many players opt to join the house most commonly associated with evil misdeeds? While it's fair to say
06:16that Slytherin 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've given them credit for? As a millennial who inevitably knows that their own
06:36house is indeed Slytherin, I'm all for people ignoring the sorting hat and picking their own house.
06:42Number 5. 35% of Elden Ring players reached the final boss. Even if you subscribe to the belief
06:49among From Software fans that Elden Ring is the studio's easiest game to date, it still represents
06:54a biblical level of challenge to the average player. And so it's extremely impressive that a
07:00monumental 35.3% of players actually defeated the final boss and reached the climax of the game,
07:06whereupon each of its three major endings unlocks a separate trophy.
07:10More than one third of players getting right to the final boss of a From Software game sounds
07:15ludicrous on paper compared to the similar completion stats afforded to decidedly less
07:21difficult video games. But much like the Persona 5 Royal Platinum trophy, it's also worth remembering
07:26that From Software has a really loyal and dedicated player base, who are very aware of the challenges
07:31their games present. As such, there are likely not too many players who bought the game without any
07:36awareness of its high difficulty level, placing a ceiling on the number of people who would quickly
07:41bounce off it. Basically, if you play a From Software game these days, you're almost certainly
07:46all 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.
08:11While 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 5 minutes, yet hasn't been finished by half of the
08:55people who started playing it. Could it be the players en masse bought the game for the nostalgia-fueled
09:00fun of it, but never got back to it after quickly testing out Green Hill Zone's first level?
09:05Truly, 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.
09:14The FIFA franchise finally introduced the ability to play as female football teams back in FIFA 16,
09:19and ever since has included a trophy for playing even a single women's football match.
09:24Sadly, the resulting data is pretty damn depressing, with just 20% of players playing
09:29even one women's match in FIFA 16, and that number has basically fallen further off a cliff with each
09:35new release. By FIFA 22, just 6% of players had popped the passion achievement for playing
09:41a women's international football match, and the recent EA Sports FC 24 saw this figure drop to a
09:47catastrophic 0.8%. It doesn't help at all that EA's implementation of female football in the
09:53franchise remains relatively piecemeal compared to the male side, but at the same time, the fact that
09:58their inclusion has moved the needle so little with the player base is still pretty disappointing.
10:03Number 2. 12% of Fallout 4 players have never left the vault.
10:08If 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
10:25expanse. And 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
10:38tracked PS4 players, almost 90,000 people for those keeping score, haven't yet wandered out of
10:44the vault and dug into the meat of what Fallout 4 has to offer. And given that the game shipped
10:4912
10:50million units to retailers within its first 24 hours alone, the real-world number of vault-camping
10:55players across all platforms is going to be many orders of magnitude higher. On one hand,
11:01it's great that players found so much value in the game's glorified tutorial area, but that's also a
11:06huge swath of the 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
11:52a
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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