What would gamers do if achievements suddenly disappeared?
That is a question that, I’m sure, runs through everyone’s head at some point in time. To most 360 gamers now, achievements are an everyday thing. Some people are even addicted to collecting these digital points as if their life depended on it. Others just look at them as a meaningless add-on and play the game they bought, instead of focusing on the size of their number. But what if, one day, the achievements suddenly disappeared? What if Microsoft made an executive decision to permanently delete all achievement points and make it like the old days?
I decided to go out and ask some gamers what they would do, and their thoughts, on if achievements suddenly were done away with in an upcoming patch. One female gamer said, "I would be bummed, but I would still play... Probably not as much, though." The LeBaron, an avid gamer, says otherwise: "I wouldn't care. I don't play games for achievements; I play for fun. I admit, I would be a little sad to see all my achievements go, but I would get over it in a couple of hours." After questioning for a couple of hours, and getting two different types of answers like this, I decided to go to a higher source to see what they thought. It was then I posed my scenario to Dan Amrich, senior editor of Official Xbox Magazine.
He had this to say: "I think it would be insanity, pure and simple. The Achievement and Gamerscore system gives Microsoft added value for literally nothing. How simple was it to implement an arbitrary reward system? There's no payout. You can't use the Gamerscore points to buy anything. They are utterly worthless...and yet everybody places a high value on them. I mean, PS3 introducing Trophies is one thing, but when World of Warcraft arbitrarily adds its own Achievement system, you know you've got a winning idea. So if Microsoft suddenly decided to take it away...the competition would be thrilled, the gamers would be furious, and whoever was responsible would be sacked."
Satisfied with my answers, I finally ended it there. In my opinion, I believe that the spark of 360 gaming would wane. Yes, there are games out there such as Call of Duty: World at War or Gears of War 2 that have stellar multiplayer features that would keep them still running, but what about the other games? Through word-of-mouth alone, I would think that most arcade games (at least, the poorly-made ones) wouldn’t sell very well. Most retail games would probably hang on by a string, but would wane quickly after boredom set in; at least for the Xbox 360 fanboys out there.
