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jrber763

An exception to completionism?

Yesterday's presentation got me thinking about some of my work this past summer. This summer, I interned with Xbox on its Xbox games business planning team. My work was focused on analyzing trends relating to DLC (in-game purchases) spending. Specifically, with sports video game franchises, I noticed that once a new game in the franchise was released, DLC spending of the older game would immediately drop the following month. Essentially, people would spend a lot less money on the old game once the new one was released.


Thus, there exists a tradeoff between fully mastering an old game and playing the new game. Of course, as the older game had already been out for a year, many people may have felt as though they had already mastered it. But for the others, It would appear as if playing the newer sports game is more desirable than continuing to master the older game. Therefore, perhaps completionism does not hold as strong for video game franchises that are constantly releasing new games.

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squidtm
Oct 12, 2018

I don't know if this is an exception to completionism. It's important to remember that not all players are completionists (and I suspect the vast majority are not). Noncompletionists are also probably overrepresented in the purchase numbers because completionists presumably buy fewer games. There are probably also people who will complete everything they can for the DLC they have, but prioritize buying a new game over buying DLC for the old one, since if they couldn't 100% the old game by the time the new one came out, how can they expect to 100% the new game before another one comes out, especially if they don't start playing until they finish the old game? Additionally, there might be a social…


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davidmatz
davidmatz
Oct 12, 2018

That's a good point, and I think it can go beyond sports games and even beyond specific genres of games to redefine completionism, and I know this sounds weird, as not about 100% completing all the content in a game but about a certain attitude or approach players take towards games. Specifically, an attitude of mastery, achievement, and prestige. As other commenters have pointed out, there are games it's unrealistic to 100% complete. Aside from sports games and open world games that are just released with too much stuff to do all of it, I would point to player vs player games as an example of completionism par excellence, which again I know sounds weird because, as Alex said, "You…


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Matt Zehner
Matt Zehner
Oct 11, 2018

I am intrigued by what you are saying in this post, though the delineation between sports games and “other” games is notable. I would be curious to hear how steep the DLC sales are for other annual franchises, like Assassin’s Creed, as compared to such titles because they are consumed in quite different ways by different folks. Anecdotally, many of the people I know who play sports games are a bit different from your traditional gamer - there is a tendency for this to be the sole genre that they play. If you are the sort of person who plays primarily Madden every day, then you are likely to buy a new title because of the amount of investment and…

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alexfriedman115
Oct 11, 2018

I think this is a very interesting point, but the pitfalls fall, specifically with sports games mentioned, in the type of game and how it is essentially "completed." I think we can agree that acquiring the given Xbox achievements is a fair way to complete the game, but with something that consists of a limitless amount of online play, is there a way to truly complete it 'completely'? You can be the number 1 player on the online leaderboards or rankings but that seems arguably impossible (at least by more than one person). So to disagree, I would say it's very possible to complete a Fifa or Madden in a single player sense but because the game mostly targets multiplayer…

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