Dev here. We decide the achievements. We have to set them up manually for ps5, xbox and steam. The idea is to give achievement hunter types more gamplay basically. Although certain game devs use achievements as a form of analytics. When you get an achievement like “Level 2 finished” that’s because the devs wanted to know how many players got that far in the game.
It’s a little different for steam/xbox/ps, but generally there’s two kinds of achievements. Trigger achievements and value achievements.
The trigger type ones are the ones that fire once, like when you beat a level or get a certain item or something. These basically have an api call like TriggerAcheivement(achievementID).
The value type ones are the ones like collect 1000 gold or kill 500 enemies. You could choose to handle this manually, and then just fire an achievement trigger, but this usually becomes complicated with multiple saves or crossplay, etc. So instead, there’s an api call like IncreaseStat(statID, 1). And you call that when you kill an enemy or whatever and once it’s been called 500 times, the achievement activates.
You usually set all the achievements/stats up in the steam/xbox/ps backend and then your game is just responsible for calling those api functions when appropriate.
There are tons of games without any ancillary steam features, the only things I don’t think I have seen a game without are the forums section and community tab.
I always figured it was something steam shoves down devs and/or players throat, since it’s a bit of a dark pattern toward buying into their ecosystem.
Otherwise I would consider many many many devs deciding achievements are not their or their game’s thing.
Dev here. We decide the achievements. We have to set them up manually for ps5, xbox and steam. The idea is to give achievement hunter types more gamplay basically. Although certain game devs use achievements as a form of analytics. When you get an achievement like “Level 2 finished” that’s because the devs wanted to know how many players got that far in the game.
Are achievements basically just variables like “beat_final_boss”, and you expose them somehow to steam?
It’s a little different for steam/xbox/ps, but generally there’s two kinds of achievements. Trigger achievements and value achievements.
The trigger type ones are the ones that fire once, like when you beat a level or get a certain item or something. These basically have an api call like TriggerAcheivement(achievementID).
The value type ones are the ones like collect 1000 gold or kill 500 enemies. You could choose to handle this manually, and then just fire an achievement trigger, but this usually becomes complicated with multiple saves or crossplay, etc. So instead, there’s an api call like IncreaseStat(statID, 1). And you call that when you kill an enemy or whatever and once it’s been called 500 times, the achievement activates.
You usually set all the achievements/stats up in the steam/xbox/ps backend and then your game is just responsible for calling those api functions when appropriate.
Pretty much
I’ve always been curious about this myself.
Are you free to ship a game with no achievements?
There are tons of games without any ancillary steam features, the only things I don’t think I have seen a game without are the forums section and community tab.
On steam? Yes. Xbox and Playstation however require achievements to publish a game.
Of course they are.