Just a bit of ephemera.

Sony has recently released (or will have released on Friday) a new Playstation. The Playstation 4 while having many different things about it has one feature that has been grandfathered in for the previous Playstation 3. Trophies now tell you percentages acquired, to give a little context. Trophies are achieved in video games from doing certain actions, these could be as simple as getting them for story beats or involve hidden secrets.

This grandfathering in means we can have a closer look at how people play games and how people stick with games. One bored half hour I did some back of the envelope maths and I figured I’d share it. If we look at the first two games of the God of War franchise, we see something quite interesting. In order to remove people who physically started the game but didn’t start the story part I’ve calculated based on the first available trophy in the games and thus the one with the highest percentage of people who have earned it. In God of War 1 we find 13.6% didn’t get to that first available trophy and that figure rose to 19.8% in God of War 2.

Now overall through the game of those who got to the first trophy (not simply the percentage who got the last trophy) and then completed the game we have a 54.6% retention in God of War 1 and 65.5% in God of War 2. That means that throughout God of War 45.4% of players didn’t end up coming back by the end but more people stayed (34.5% left) in God of War 2.

We could reasonably hypothesis that people who bought God of War 2 and got to the first trophy were more invested in the story than perhaps those who started playing God of War and then decided it wasn’t for them.

Note, these are HD remasters for the PS3 so another reasonable assumption could be that those who originally bought the games for the PS2 didn’t end up re-buying for the PS3 reducing the significance of the difference between the two.