Is Anyone Playing Forza? (Patreon)

Thinking through the math on this a little bit, but...

...this bit from Xbox's Wrapped-style year-in-review thing claims that I played Forza for 11 hours and that puts me in the top 25% of players in terms of time spent.

So... does that mean that no one stuck with Forza? Because even though I put in 11 hours, I feel like I barely scratched the surface on that game. Heck, I'd bet at least an hour of that time was spent waiting for an online event to begin.

I suppose there's some wiggle room on this 25% number, considering the phrasing is that I'm in the Top 25% of the "most active players," as opposed to outright stating "all players" or something like that. That said, if it is some kind of subset, that actually makes this whole thing seem a bit worse, right? 75% of all players played that game for 11-ish hours or less? Does that sound like a healthy number to you? Granted, as I was saying on the podcast today, I've been a bit surprised by the seemingly middling-to-negative reception that Forza seems to have received this time out, but at the same time, that very much lines up with the time I spent playing it. All 11-ish hours of it. I played on PC, where the frame rate felt all over the place and the entire game just felt... off. Then, once you get into the meat and potatoes of it, it just seems like it's chasing a smaller, more dedicated audience than the previous games.

Mission accomplished, I guess? Or do you think Game Pass factors in to this, too? I mean, it's very low-stakes to download Forza, try it out for an hour, realize you don't much care for it, and move on, right? That probably skews these numbers in ways that don't always look great.

Either way, I'm always fascinated by a lot of the data that gets spit right at us these days about time spent and how many players got a specific achievement. Take this one, from my most played game in the Xbox ecosystem for 2023, Starfield:

9.58% of Starfield players have finished the main story. That's what that "One Giant Leap" achievement signifies, anyway. Even when we look at a subset of dedicated players, the numbers are only marginally better. 16.26% of the Starfield players on True Achievements have this one. I take this one as a mix of causes. First, no one finishes games anymore. That's plainly clear when you go and dig through achievements like this on Xbox, PlayStation, or Steam. The falloff is immense. While I don't finish every game I start, either, something about this news has always bummed me out a bit. Imagine being at a studio and cranking on a game for 2-5 years only to see that the vast majority of your players never saw most of the stuff you made. Actually, I think some of you are in that very position. Does it feel bad? I always felt a little bad back in the day when we were writing multi-page reviews. I think we'd usually see some massive drop-off from traffic to page one vs. traffic to page two. At some point, why write a page two in the first place?

Personally, I'm a big fan of the "rarest achievement showcase" that you can put on your Steam profile. It barely ever changes, and because some of these games are no longer available, achievement percentages for games like Marvel Heroes Omega (where my rarest achievement, for fully unlocking 50 characters, comes from) or Firefall are just set in stone now. This also lets us know that very, very few people who own Call of Duty Warzone/MW2/MW3 are playing much of that MW3 campaign--two fairly easy achievements from that part of this year's game showed up on my rarest list. I guess that's what you get when you slam together two years of games and your free-to-play battle royale thing onto one game page with one set of achievements, huh?

See ya soon, everybody.-Jeff