Move over Rock Band and Guitar Hero, make way for Alpine Legend
Tag Archive for 'downloadable content'
Ive set up a new twitter called XboxLiveDLC, which grabs the marketplace RSS feed from Major Nelson’s blog. It will tweet the downloadable content, price and any other info that fits in 140 character limit along with a link to the relevant article on Major Nelson, as new content appears.
http://www.twitter.com/XboxLiveDLC
Its automatic, and appears to be working so far, currently its grabbed the info on the Fable 2 Knothole Island DLC which released yesterday.
Stats. I like them. Particularly game related stats. I guess its why gamerscore is such a pull for me, and one of the reasons I put together the weekly gamerscore updates each week right here.
These days with console online connectivity being available right out of the box, systems such as Achievements, Trophies and Steam all provide accessible solutions for developers and publishers to gather some insightful data, stats, on their respective communities and player gaming habits.
Some forward thinking when deciding how achievements and Trophies are awarded, can provide some insightful data once a game is released, and in the hands of the player. What map is most popular? What percentage of people play on difficulty X? What percentage of people have purchased downloadable content? What percentage of people actually finish the game? All of these are pretty straight forward to track, and with a little creativity, more specific data could be tapped into also, which in turn could (and should IMO) influence and feed into the decision making process about what direction possible sequels and updates could take.
Anyway, back on to the stats. Ive been revisiting giantbomb.com over the last couple of days, as I’ve decided to give their podcast a go after several recommendations, particularly now that the 1up series of podcasts are to be no more.
Browsing giantbomb.com I noticed a link to the blog of Robert Bowling – AKA Fourzerotwo – Director of Communications/Community Manager over at Infinity Ward. He recently posted some interesting stats for Call of Duty 4, after hitting a mammoth 10,006,606 unique users who have ever played on CoD4 on Xbox 360 and have connected to Xbox Live at least once:
That number got us curious as to how many of those 10 Million+users finished the F.N.G. mission, or beat Airplane on Veteran (among other things). Well, it turns out:
71.1%, or 7,111,508 people have completed F.N.G. – That’s more than the entire population of Hong Kong (which is 7 Million).
68.8%, or 6,886,509 people have completed Cargo Ship. – This is the same number of adults in the US who were morbidly obese in 2005.
46.5%, or 5,654,643 people have beaten the game on any difficulty. – This is more than the current population of Finland!
2.8%, or 283,632 people have completed Airplane on Veteran difficulty. – The population of Stockton, CA is 280,000.
So if you have one of these on your gamercard:
You can sleep sound in the knowledge your are in the 2.8% of players around the world who have achieved such a feat 
(well at least of those players connected to Live) Additionally if you managed to finish the first level (Cargo Ship) you can also proudly say you are not in the 31.2% who didn’t.
A few of the members of the l337sheet right here actually have their own wiki page on giantbomb by the way, head on over to the site, go to the search box and enter you name to see if you there!
Every Xbox 360 game has up to 1000 achievement points available to gain, with downloadable content offering a possible additional 250 per title. Arcade titles can award a total of 200 points over 12 achievements. How these are awarded and how much each is worth is entirely up to the developer/publisher, and as a result getting 1000 points on one game can be a hell of a lot easier than getting the full set on another (See Avatar: The Burning Earth)
I came across this site a couple of weeks back when it was in beta, and its now its open for public registration.
TrueAchievements.com works on the logical principle that the harder an achievement is to obtain, the more points it should be worth, so based on your current Gamerscore it will work out your True Achievement Gamerscore.
Full details are on their FAQ page, but the basic idea is that the true difficulty of an achievement is calculated by the frequency of people who have it, compared with the amount of people who own the game. So using the example on the site, if 100 people own a game, but only 1 person has a certain achievement, then that achievement must be very difficult to get, and should then be marked up considerably.
Upon signing up, your Gamertag data is scanned, and your True Achievement score is calculated. My latest Gamerscore, and True Achievement Gamerscore is calculated below, with a more detailed break down here.
So, what’s your True Achievement worth?
“IM BATMAN“, Alan Partridge once said.
Its also what I’m saying now I have a new shiny Batman Gamerpic for myself, displayed up there on the top right. But you wont find this Gamerpic in the UK Xbox LIVE Marketplace, oh no, so how did I get it? From the US Marketplace that’s where…
Depending on your location, you will have access to a different version of the Xbox Marketplace, all of which carry slightly different content. I have 3 accounts set up, Shepperton, which is my normal Gamertag that I use to play online and collect precious achievement points, then also a US and a Japanese account I use to access the different Marketplaces.
Once content is downloaded from another Marketplace, its free to use on any Gamertag you may have. For example some demos appear only on the US or Japanese Marketplace, if this is the case its possible to sign to your US/Japanese Gamertag, download it, then sign back into your normal Gamertag and play it.
When a new Gamertag is created it will be Gold Tier for the first month, then revert to Silver automatically after that, you wont have to input any payment details. You will also only be able to grab content that is free.
There’s a full walk through on creating US and Japanese 360 accounts for Marketplace over at GamerReports I recommend Aegis Wing from the US marketplace, which is a Free side scrolling free shooter with 4 player co-op, released last year in May.