The good folks over at Valve have recently created global gameplay stats pages for all Achievement-supporting games, including Mayhem Intergalactic. It makes for some interesting viewing. There’s quite a range of percentages, which speaks well to the achievement design skills of you guys and myself; a mere 0.9% of players have completed Maestro of Multiplayer Mayhem (not surprising), while First Blood is right up at 78.2%.

What does surprise me a little is that the highest percentage isn’t higher – it’s pretty much impossible to play the game at all without triggering at least one achievement. Maybe lots of people are playing in Steam’s offline mode, e.g. as a result of not having an always-on internet connection, so the achievements never trigger?

Whatever the reason, it’s not exclusive to Mayhem Intergalactic. Audiosurf and Valve’s own Left 4 Dead have maximum percentages which are even smaller (77.8% and 74.5% respectively). Interestingly, Braid has one achievement which is right up at 96.6%, and almost half of the people who bought the game managed to finish it (which is pretty good going). Perhaps the people who wanted to play Braid but didn’t have always-on internet connections decided to buy from one of the other online distributors, rather than Steam. It’s worth noting that Audiosurf and L4D are Steam exclusives, and Mayhem Intergalactic is only available on Steam and directly from me. This might support the “offline mode” hypothesis.

Strikingly, less than half of the people who bought Aquaria are recorded as managing to reach the second area (Open Waters). I know the home area is pretty big, but still, this is a bit saddening. Maybe they got bored because the combat wasn’t difficult enough, or because they got bored by the pure exploration part of the game (before you get weapons)? Push on, people! The game gets better (and harder) the further on you go!

(That reminds me – I still haven’t finished Aquaria. I almost beat the final form of the final boss before I got killed – his stomach beam is nasty – and then wasn’t particularly motivated to start the battle all over again. It’s looooong. Must get to that sometime.)

Well, that’s all for this post. Keeping on making Mayhem, folks!

P.S. Despite the recent radio silence, I certainly haven’t forgotten about my bushfire appeal pledge – I’ll post an update on how much we raised as soon as I get time to do the accounting. Stay tuned.