Patterns in Steam achievement completion rates

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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I was looking over achievement completion stats on Steam, and noticed that they seemed to contradict a lot of popular viewpoints in this community. Wanted to highlight a few things that stood out to me. Warning: Long post, TL;DR at the bottom.

Note this is not a rigorous scientific analysis; just my take on a few things. Also I want to say upfront I don’t think we should read anything into how low some of these numbers are. Completion rates naturally go down for new content the longer a game lives, as people burn out and such. I will also note I am not trying to defend Three Kingdoms; while I don’t feel as strongly as some do, I largely agree it was a bad direction for the game.

Now, what got me on this was noticing I’m among only 0.2% of players who have completed the Alexander the Great Chronicle campaign. Even for the newest DLC, that seemed very low to me, so I started comparing it to other recent DLCs.

Battle for Greece is at 0.6%. The Mountain Royals campaigns are all at 1.6%, vastly higher than Chronicles. The Three Kingdoms campaigns are at 0.7-0.9%, significantly lower than Mountain Royals but still up to 50% more popular than Chronicles. The new Return of Rome campaigns are at 1-1.3%, while the original AoE1 campaigns are below 1% but still ahead of Chronicles. Victors and Vanquished missions seem to be at around 1% or slightly less, around equivalent to Three Kingdoms or slightly better and again well ahead of Chronicles.

This is surprising because among the community Chronicles is massively praised, while Three Kingdoms, Victors and Vanquished, and Return of Rome are highly criticized, but the latter three seem to have been significantly more popular overall than Chronicles. Three Kingdoms being higher in completion than BfG is especially telling considering it’s newer. That said, Three Kingdoms is still pretty low overall, so it was not necessarily a huge success in general terms.

This may explain why several key Chronicles devs were recently laid off. My guess is that Chronicles DLCs are very beloved among the hardcore players who tend to post on forums and reddit but not actually very popular among the wider playerbase. Possibly the mechanics are too complex for casual players. This is further supported by the fact an Achaemenid victory is at around 1.9%; seems like a lot of people started Chronicles but didn’t finish it. I would be concerned about the future of the Chronicles line based on these numbers.

I also find it interesting that new Return of Rome campaigns are as popular as they are, given it’s widely viewed as a flop. The ported AoE1 campaigns being significantly lower may explain why more weren’t ported, but based on these numbers I feel like there might be an argument for more new Return of Rome content (though selling DLC for a DLC is a dodgy proposition).

Overall, it seems like vanilla is the most popular flavour here. Mountain Royals being so far ahead of Three Kingdoms and Victors and Vanquished may be just due to it being older, but it also beats Return of Rome, which is even older.

There is also a popular narrative that European civilizations are more popular than civilizations from other regions and thus Europe should continue to be a regular destination for more DLCs, but in my opinion the numbers don’t really support that.

Looking at achievements for getting at least one win for a civ, there are a handful of Age of Kings/The Conquerors European civs that are hugely ahead of everyone else, but after that there doesn’t seem to be any strong bias towards one region or another. When looking at paid DLC civs, the popularity seems to more or less go down relative to their release date.

My interpretation of this is that there is less a bias towards Europe and more likely a bias towards the civilizations people first played when they picked up the game as kids, and I would guess most competitive players just want new civs and don’t particularly care where they come from.

You also see this in campaign achievements. Despite its wide praise among the community, Jadwiga is at 3.1% completion rate, nothing special in the grand scheme of other campaigns from a similar time frame. Jan Zizka from the same DLC is actually higher at 3.2%. African campaigns Yodit and Sundjata are at at around 5% for comparison.

They definitely benefit from not being a paid DLC in DE, but comparing to other earlier DLC, Edward Longshanks from Lords of the West is at 4.9%, whereas the Dynasties of India campaigns hover around 2.5%, so there seems to be a bigger drop off between Lords of the West and Dawn of the Dukes than between Dawn and Dynasties. This again indicates release date is the major factor in declining popularity rather than the DLC’s region.

TL;DR: Despite being highly praised, the Chronicles DLCs don’t seem to be very popular. Three Kingdoms and Victors and Vanquished both did better despite their criticisms. There is not compelling reason to believe European DLCs are more popular than other regions. The biggest factor in declining completion rates for DLCs seems to simply be time, with only Chronicles being significantly below the overall trend.

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that is a wrong conclusion. Keep in mind that cheats disable achievments and for casual aoe lovers, using cheats is a valid way to play campains. for example marco polo, because they like to see more, adding some resourses or simply destroying the enemy with the cobra car. All achivemnets are very low. Even the “super basic” ones are very low, and one big reason is cheats

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Yeah, but I’m not talking about the numbers being low overall, I’m talking about comparing the numbers of recent DLCs relative to each other. BfG having a 0.6% completion rate isn’t significant on its own, but the fact it’s completion rate is 50% lower than Three Kingdoms’ is. Unless your argument is people cheat way more in Chronicles than anywhere else, which also wouldn’t really be a great sign for them.

I’m not trying to hate on Chronicles, so don’t shoot the messenger, but the numbers are what they are.

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TL;DR:
the more recent a campaign the fewer people will have completed it
chronicles is less popular than other content
3K did relatively well (probably because lots of chinese people bought it?)

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The math for if Chronicles is successful is different then for other DLC because it is made by a different team.

The Forgotten Empires team is working on AoE2DE, AoMR, AoE4 and maybe even AoE5 at the same time so they are in high demand. The Capture Age team on the other hand just does Chronicles so it’s a very simple calculation. Does Chronicles make more money then it cost to make it, if it does then it’s worth to make another one.

The percentage of cheat code users should be equal for all campaigns I assume, right? You think Asian customers are less likely to use cheat codes and therefor 3 Kingdoms has more completed achievements?

So less completions will likely mean less purchases.

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Maybe, but I’d expect it to be correlated with both campaign difficulty and length. The Battle for Greece campaign is (in my opinion) much harder than the Three Kingdoms and Return of Rome ones, and it’s obviously much longer as well, so I’d expect cheat usage to be more common.

(In case you’re wondering why length is relevant, I’m assuming cheating on a single scenario would disqualify someone from the campaign completion achievement.)

That said, I also think it’s very plausible that Chronicles is a niche interest with a small but vocal group of fans, and that actually none of these DLCs did all that well.

Plus achievements in AoE2 are really buggy! If I recall correctly some of the Return of Rome ones in particular were bugged on release so that they were awarded without you actually completing them.

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Campaign length shouldn’t impact the cheating rate on the first missions, right? So achievements for the early missions should indicate the play rates.

Completion rates are a bad metric for sales since long campaigns take longer to complete anyway. Bad campaigns or hard campaigns are also more likely to be dropped.

I had a bunch of cases where I don’t have the “Victory with X” civ despite getting the campaigns achievements. Also testing in the editor used to give you that achievement too, now it doesn’t anymore I think.

The team size of Capture Age seems relatively small so they are probably “cheap”. The interesting question is how much does it cost to make all the sprites for units an buildings since Chronicles has like 2 architecture sets per DLC plus lots of units while the base game is pretty conservative with those so far. Maybe that isn’t actually that expensive and there are other reasons for them not making new architecture sets. It can’t be file size because everyone downloads the Chronicles assets even if they don’t have the DLC.

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That’s true. Do all campaigns have an achievement for completing the first mission? I thought only BfG does, but I could be misremembering.

I’m not sure sales are a good metric either – at least from the developer’s point of view, since what they really care about is how well the next DLC will sell, not the previous one. If players bought a DLC but didn’t enjoy it (regardless of whether they completed it or not), they’re unlikely to buy a follow-up.

I don’t know, I think if creating architecture sets was cheap we would have got more of them for the base game – it would be such an easy win, and I think could have justified a higher price per DLC.

I don’t think it would have to be sold as a DLC for a DLC – here’s an alternative: keep Lac Viet, AoE2 Romans, and the RoR campaigns (including the ported AoE1 campaigns) exclusive to Return of Rome. Release a new DLC that unlocks the same game mode as RoR (which could be renamed to something more generic) and the original AoE1 civs, along with some new civs, new campaigns, and ported versions of the remaining AoE1 campaign.

Does that make sense? Ideally I think Return of Rome shouldn’t require AoE2 either…

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I don’t think all do but the BfG opening one is a pretty good indicator for how many people bought it.

Ironically enough I bought and completed the Alexander Campaign DLC before Battle for Greece.

That is what confuses me too.

They put so much effort into both Chronicles and then hinted a 3rd one at the end of the 2nd one, so it seems like they want to continue making more. But they have done very little visually for the base game until the one big patch before 3 Kingdoms.

Maybe it’s because they just recently shifted the focus and are planing to do a lot more visual stuff in the coming years like regional military unit and villager skins.

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For me sales is the ultimate metric as its money in the pocket.Anything else is reoccurring revenue which is great to have.

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Another possibility could be that CA is almost completely dedicated to make chronicles while FE have to make new civs, campaigns, balances, patches, maps, etc, they invest time and resources to singleplayer and multiplayer in many different ways so maybe chronicles, with all its new content, is in comparison cheaper to make. Maybe

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It would be really cool to know what parts of a DLC are the most expensive and which parts are pretty cheap.

I assume visual stuff will be cheaper then most people expect.

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Don’t forget they have to do multiplayer balance changes, solve technical issues with the game and make a new maps for the major game updates etc. None of these things make them any money, but still require time and effort.

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I post here because I would like to post about achievements.

I just got the last achievement! I’m not the first but wanted to share with you.

The hardest was “Rome was destroyed in one day” but my last was “Plebeian preserver".