I don't care an iota for achievements, I don't use Galaxy or any other damn client... but for a couple of years now I have ownded a PS4, which I play it once in a blue moon, and there you get achievements whether you like it or not. And finally something cought my eye.

The numbers. The rarity. Some of those achievements are for just playing the game. For finishing the game. You're telling me only 16% of players finished Infinite Warfare? Ok, fine, I'll give you that, maybe most people play CoD only for the multiplayer, ignore the campaing entirely. So how about something single player only?

Less than 8% finished Bard's Tale 4. Are you shitting me?

Ok, ok, ok. That's a pretty old school RPG, it's long, full of puzzles, turn based combat... how about something more console friendly? Something super popular?

Spider-Man! There we go!
49%. Really? Sure, that's way more, but still... one of the most popular PS4 games of all, and still more than half of the players never finished it?

This can't be real. Am I reading this wrong? Or have I just lost my marbles, like Toodles in Hook?

Too many games, too many game devs. Millions must die.

No, it's correct. Gaming is mainstream now. Casual players buy games, play them for 5 hours and never come back. Or it takes them months to finish a 20 hours game. And those now far, faaaaar outweigh what you could call "dedicated gamers", diluting the percentages to the numbers you usually see on achievements. People often mock the term but it is an apt descriptor to differentiate from casuals.

Doom 2016 on Steam for example. A pretty short game you can finish in like 12 hours. % of people who killed the final boss? 33.1%

I have an even better one for you: do people actually live their lives? :P

Nah, gave up years ago. The rogue-like mechanics and perma-death thingy aren't my cup of tea.

Well done, you found out what achievements are actually about ;)

They are telemetry in disguise, used by games studios to know on what they should focus their efforts. Why would you need to polish the second half of the game if 90% of players are never going to experience it anyway?

Nevertheless, you're guaranteed to finish the game, eventually. :>

In modern times, it's very, very, very easy to acquire legions of more games than one would ever have time to play in a lifetime.

The majority of gamers are probably in this boat.

So with that being so, it's only natural that most people will never finish most, if any, of their games.

Probably most gamers don't even ever install or play many/most of their video games for those reasons.

Add to that other types of tasks in games that didn't use to exist back in the 80's and 90's, but which are omnipresent in modern games, like collecting all of the collectibles, completing all of the minigames, etc. etc., and this requires even more time & energy fully to complete any one game, which further adds to the reasons as to why it doesn't happen very much.

i do! i use offline installers tho.

As a percentage, I've definitely been finishing games for quite some time now. Of course, backlogs are backlogs, I start only a small percentage of those I have, but with few exceptions if I start I game I'll finish it... eventually.
That was not the case back in the '90s or early '00s, everything being "pirated", usually get a bunch of games at once, install a pile, poke around in them but hardly ever finish any.
But depends what metric you're looking at. Games finished vs. games started, yeah, doing very well now, while 20-30 years ago that percentage was quite... abysmal, wonder if it wasn't even in the single digits. But games finished vs. games owned (counting all those "pirated" titles that ended up on my computer or on disks around it as "owned"), it's worse now because I end up with more games, the vast majority of which are just left aside for... someday, I hope.

Most people buy a few games a year and never finish any of them... and this is especially true with games getting longer (not particularly better, but longer).

I open the bin files with a text editor, print them out and roll in the code like a pig in shit.

We can actually do other things too?

Not only do people not finish games, but they often don't start them to begin with. The 10% of public Steam profiles have $1.9 billion worth of games they've never even played. The pattern doesn't seem to be all that different here. When browsing people's profiles, I'd see a lot of games that were played for a few minutes, then never touched again.

Between us, we've spent £14bn on Steam games we've never played - Eurogamer

Everyone plays some of their games,
no one plays all their games.
And most probably don't play most of their games.

Often times the overhead is too much. Example the X Series, i love space games, but having a complex keyboard layout printed and referring to it constantly for 30 commands is difficult and feels like a lot of homework before you even start.

Earlier tried Velone, which looks a lot like Opus Magnum. But the tutorial quickly shows it's annoying with no quality of life, won't let me play and experiment to see how things are suppose to work, has weird symbols, and when i copied all the 'commands' exactly as it suggested i do in order to get the current feature/item it refuses to show me where it is wrong or let me proceed forward. Probably 10 minutes, and i'm sick of it because it is actively blocking me and not helping me.

I'm not 14 again when i had near infinite patience to bruteforce figuring out how to play QuestRon without a manual. If the feel is wrong, if the game actively is not fun or anti-helpful then it's going to be a cause to quit, and the bad experience suggests you won't return.

Yeah, this has been true for a while. Most people do not finish games with completion rates probably averaging around 35%.
https://deathisawhale.com/2021/01/20/how-many-players-actually-finish-games/

Marvels Spiderman for PS4 is a game with one of the highest completion rates according to trophies and that still hovers at 50%. Hell, looking at the article above, there are a decent number of people not even finishing the tutorial before dropping for some games.

Its hard to way why exactly but there are likely several reasons.
- early games were very hard (to get people to spend) and didnt have "endings" so not "finishing" a game is not bad
- games are a 30 hour slog now compared to movies (2 hours at most) so people get side-tracked/quit for the next new game
- youtube allows players to see the ending so worst case, they can drop the game when they get stuck and just watch the ending online