Steam Achievements. Seriously. Why not?

LHammer

Whenever it comes up that Steam players are a very small percentage of the MPQ population and every time I get a player survey, I always ask the same question: "Why aren't there Achievements and Steam Trading Cards?"  For this post, I would like to directly discuss achievements (we'll deal with cards later).

Steam achievements are a minimal effort, multi-pronged marketing tool for your game.  If you care at all about attracting players on the Steam platform, why would you not implement them?

Q: What do you mean multi-pronged marketing tool?
A: First, there are achievement hunters/gatherers who will at least try any FTP game with achievements just to scoop up a few easy ones and feel out how hard it's going to be to go for more.  You want people to try your game right?  Second, every time players get achievements, they show up on the activity feed of all their friends.  Free advertising! Hey, he seems to play MPQ a lot, perhaps I should check it out?

Q: Minimal effort?  Your kidding right? It's going to take lots of work.
A: Single developer achievement spam game companies are swamping steam right now.  Many of them have even figured out how to allow players to submit their own custom achievements.  The coding can't be that difficult.

Q: No, I meant the effort of coming up with the achievements.  Creativity takes time.
A: Not really.  The most straightforward and appropriate solution for MPQ would be to create achievements for:
   
    Add [Character] to your roster
    Max [1/2 star Character]
    Champion [3/4/5 star Character]
    Max Champion [3/4/5 star character]

and voila, you now have several hundred achievements of varying difficulty levels that will always give players something to shoot for and that support the main mechanic of your game (i.e. get players to collect covers).  Creative names and descriptions would only take a small amount of additional work. Example:

    Exile no more - Add Peggy Carter to your roster
    Did what Peggy said - Champion Peggy Carter
    Ultimate Soldier - Max Champion Peggy Carter

You could even use the characters existing tile icons as the graphics for the achievements (if you didn't want to do something cool like the ones for Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3).

Q: Why would we want to put any effort into Steam when it's such a tiny number of players?
A: Why would more people want to play on a platform that gets no effort?

I know expecting an official response to a forum post is wishful thinking but I would really like to know how it is that this game has gone on for so long without someone at least explaining why Steam achievements aren't a good idea for MPQ.

HoundofShadow

Steam has been out for more than 4 years and the playerbase is still very small. I suppose they are not bringing enough money to justify the investment or maybe they have tried in the past, but the results had been disappointing.

The market trend is shifting towards mobile gaming and mobile gaming is taking a majority of market shares. So, it makes business sense to focus on the mobile platform where it is generating lots of revenues.

I believe that the coding for steam is another issue that takes away development time.

sambrookjm

HoundofShadow said:

Steam has been out for more than 4 years and the playerbase is still very small. I suppose they are not bringing enough money to justify the investment or maybe they have tried in the past, but the results had been disappointing.

Steam player here, and I have no idea how many others play on Steam.  Where did you get your data about the playerbase being small?

Achievements would be nice, but I'd rather the devs focus on things that would improve the game for everyone, and not just a subset of the players.  (Unless it's a game-breaking bug for a platform, of course.)

Dragon_Nexus

HoundofShadow said:

Steam has been out for more than 4 years and the playerbase is still very small. I suppose they are not bringing enough money to justify the investment or maybe they have tried in the past, but the results had been disappointing.

The market trend is shifting towards mobile gaming and mobile gaming is taking a majority of market shares. So, it makes business sense to focus on the mobile platform where it is generating lots of revenues.

I believe that the coding for steam is another issue that takes away development time.

I mean, if they can't even find the time and effort to give us our old character screens back, I doubt they'll do anything else.

It was amazing they updated the DLC, tbh.

HoundofShadow

My definition of small is number of Steam players are less than number of mobile players. I remember seeing the number of downloads by steam players and it was not a lot, compared to mobile. 

The devs have already spelt out the conditions:

1) the total number of steam players have increased to more than the total number of mobile players or steam players hold the majority shares in MPQ.

2) they could find a way to code steam ui more efficiently.

It's all down to ROI. The ROI is not there. Besides, after the UI change, lots of players threatened to quit or stop supporting the game. 

It was mentioned that Steam's previous UI ate up some development time, if i did not remember incorrectly. So, it's more efficient to streamline the interface so that more development time can be spent on features/bugs fixing that benefit the majority of the playerbase.

fnedude

You are asking this, and do realize how long Steam players lost out on SCL random rewards?

Steam players are the red-headed step-children of MPQ.

jamesh

For what it is worth, there are achievements on the Android/Google Play version of the game: I think I earned all five of them while still primarily playing with 1* characters:

• Legendary: Get a 4-star (or rarer) character.
• Top Team: Raise three characters to maximum level.
• Uber Allies: Join a Player Alliance.
• Lucky Number: Raise a character to Power Level 13.
• Untouchable: Beat a mission without taking any damage.
  

LHammer

This is all sort of where I was going with this question.  "Because there are so few Steam players" is a perfectly legitimate answer that we have heard many times before (SHIELD Intercepts, new GUI, etc...).  It doesn't quite work though when the question is "Why not do this thing that would attract more Steam players?"

It really doesn't take that much work to add achievements (and cards).  If they've done the math and decided it's still not worth it, the situation is probably pretty grim.  As in "We never should have launched on Steam.  We lose money every day because we have to support a platform that nobody uses.  Even if there were ten times as many players on Steam, it still wouldn't cover having to pay the one guy in the office that speaks PC."  If that's the case, we can all just sit around waiting for the inevitable "We're done with Steam, you must transfer your account to your phone" announcement.

Dragon_Nexus

LHammer said:

If that's the case, we can all just sit around waiting for the inevitable "We're done with Steam, you must transfer your account to your phone" announcement.

Tell you what, on that day I'd give up MPQ completely.