Gamerscore

by Psychbomb / October 26, 2026 / 14 min read

I was re-reading a piece from Kayin titled I Irrationally Hate RetroAchievements, and it's the kind of article that's never failed to get me thinking. It's only been a few months since she published it, but I've come away with something new every time I've gone back through; first that it was funny, then that it was infuriating, and I've now landed on my own compulsion to talk about how we got to this point in the first place. Without wanting to bury the lede, I hate achievements. I hate them from first principles, unilaterally. Consider this something of a companion piece to that article, in the hopes that I can flesh out the earliest years of achievement hunting to provide some additional context for you. (Apart from Kayin's own companion piece that does the same, at least.) I'm aware that this'll be redundant, but I have a deep and pathological need to explain why people who breathe the same air as you and me were going to Blockbuster and paying $2.95 to rent Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth solely for the 'cheevos.

Microsoft were the ones who came first to the achievements table, and they nailed it harder than anyone who tried coming after. Sony made an admirable attempt with its trophy system, but where it stumbled was in the fact that basically nobody knew that trophies had points associated with them. Gamerscore cleared in no small part because it all fed into one big, unified number; every achievement you got could never be insignificant, as they all pumped the gamerscore on your profile ever higher. Gamerscore was among the first things you saw when you opened up a stranger's profile, right beneath their name and the amount of games they owned. Microsoft wanted gamerscore on your brain at all times. What ultimately drove the achievement hunters into the welcoming arms of Bill Gates rather than Ken Kutaragi's, I believe, stemmed from there being no distinction between the quality of the achievements on Xbox.

The fatal flaw of most achievements is that they're not accomplishments. My entire "rarest achievement showcase" on Steam consists not of testaments to my skill or some dogged persistence in mastering a game, but rather a bunch of boring bullshit that I got by accident. Most of it is made up of PAYDAY 2 DLC achievements which are not challenging in any way, and whose rarity comes entirely from the fact that you need to pay money in order to have a chance at accessing them; Overkill gave away five million copies of PAYDAY 2 for free, and the game itself is more than a decade old, so it's not surprising that only 1.3% of the playerbase finished 2022's paid Lost in Transit job on Normal. My other rarest achievement is that I played two hundred matches of Tusk in the Killer Instinct reboot, which only 1% of players have done. But, uh, okay? Who cares? What the fuck kind of an achievement is that? I didn't even have to win, just queue up two hundred games. That's data entry.

These are obviously unimpressive if you look at them and understand what a player has to do to unlock them, but gamerscore allows you to tumble these like Bitcoins into being part of a single, impressive value. That's not some insipid "achievement" that didn't require any ability nor effort on your part, oh no. That's ten points. It all adds up, piling atop itself, converting any and all effort expended on a game into an integer. A person who has only experienced life in the form of shadows on a cave wall might be naive enough to believe that this allows the truest of the true gamers to distinguish themselves from the chaff, but this hasn't once been the case in the two decades since gamerscore was introduced.

The entire system is pay-to-win. One Game Timmy could demonstrate full mastery over Deathsmiles — 1CC'ing the game four times across four different characters and racking up a cool 300,000,000 points, among other feats recorded in the achievement logs — but the maximum amount of gamerscore that can be extracted from Deathsmiles is 1,000. Meanwhile, the guy who has access to two hundred games and collects the ten-point "start the game" achievements that infested the seventh gen would ultimately walk away with double the gamerscore, and thus be twice the gamer as One Game Timmy. This is a patently absurd system to try and measure the skill of a player. It is, however, far more useful as a measure of your willingness to part with money.

Gamerscore is one more thing to quantify about a player, one more means of predation upon people's base desires to make numbers go up. Oh, I don't have the DLC, and now my achievements are incomplete! Oh, I have to engage with all of these bullshit systems where they dangle microtransactions over my head with the promise that they'll make this soulless fucking grind easier! How many people do you think paid real money for those upgrade tickets and game-clear rewards in the new Resident Evil games in order to get their achievements faster? Here's a thread of people talking about doing exactly that. Here's another. Here's a third. This is a spreading infestation, like head lice.

Robert J. Hanlon is credited with the saying "never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity". What's surprising about this quote is that Hanlon was alive at the same time as video games, and decided to say this all the same. Indeed, it's the opposite that's true when it comes to the games industry; you should always assume maximum malice at all times, rather than ever attributing anything to stupidity. You should assume malice to a degree so extraordinary that it doesn't even make sense. Assume malice on the level of a Captain Planet villain, who pollutes the Earth for no greater reason than because he is evil and polluting is just something that evil people do. Microsoft did not come up with achievements because they believed it would be cool, or that it would add anything of value for the players. They came up with it because they knew that achievements would be an immensely successful marketing strategy.

If you were conscious and online back in the day, there was a time where everyone was concerning themselves sick over the idea of being "objectively correct". This has fallen out of favor ever since the postmodernists started leading most popular discussion, and everyone splintered off into their own groups to invent their own versions of reality. Back then, though, gamerscore was the ideal marker of determining this objective correctness in gaming arguments. Objectively, your number was bigger, which meant that objectively you were the better gamer. Whatever this entailed was up to you; it was often that having the higher gamerscore meant that others should defer to you, and any statement to the contrary could be swiftly dispelled by pointing to your number and then pointing at theirs. It was a dick-measuring contest. Again, though, this moment has mostly passed.

Yet there are still new games coming out today which exist for you to boot up and then collect an instant platinum, or a hundred Steam achievements, and it's all somehow more meaningless than it was before. Steam Achievement Manager has been around for ages now, allowing you to give yourself every achievement in any game you own without even needing to play them. You'd think nobody would care anymore, but these people remain ravenous. Nobody is buying an Xbox in 2026, but it's too late to stop it now; achievement hunting has already metastasized out to everything else. You can go through anywhere that achievement discussion happens and find that people aren't excited to be getting these things. All of these spaces are full of wall-to-wall complaints about how they hate doing it, how they hate the games they're playing, how engaging with achievements feels like a waste of time. All this, and for what? There aren't even leaderboards.

Well, there aren't any official leaderboards. People have taken to making their own in order to fill the gap left behind by gamerscore across a variety of different sites and trackers. One of them, Steam Hunters, has me floating around the top 16,000 out of a pool of nearly 165,000 profiles. There is no pride in this for me. It does not matter. I have "earned" this placement solely by buying a lot of video games and then playing them. A not-insignificant amount of people never play the games that they buy, and even fewer than that ever play them to the end. Any willingness at all to play beyond the first few minutes of a game will guarantee that you are drowning in achievements, and Steam score, or whatever we're calling it today.

This is because developers don't really give a shit about achievements. Most of them are annoyed at the expectation that achievements will be included in their games, or worse, the mandatory requirement that they be present on all Xbox and post-2009 PlayStation releases. Achievements seem like an afterthought because they often are. The publishers of the games and the executives behind the consoles, though? Oh, they love them. It's telemetry that you can't opt out of. They can collect data on how many people bought and played the game, how far they got into it, how engaged with the systems they were. You used to be able to avoid this by never hooking your console up to the internet, but oops, they're killing discs and pivoting to full digital, so that won't be an option anymore.

The implementation of achievements has always been an absurdly cynical, corporate move, and one that's been a massive success at twisting player perceptions such that they get a brief dopamine pang from consistent engagement. You can go on one of these community pages and post some game you 100%ed and get a wave of "gz" like you leveled up in World of Warcraft, and it feels as hollow here as it does there. It's all so much meaningless "progression". The sound of the achievement popping becomes panacea. It's a reassurance that, no, you aren't wasting your time. This is meaningful. You are winning. You are better than other players.

People keep insisting that there's a compulsion to get all of the achievements in a game, that it hurts them when they don't. Many times, they explicitly don't enjoy doing it. They say over and over again that they hate it, though they feel the need to do it all the same. This is the language of addicts. There are a lot of people who enjoy the process and don't have a problem putting it down, but the same is true of gamblers who go to the casino. Without wanting to incite a moral panic over this, I genuinely believe that achievements get overlooked as a point of focus whenever the discourse around video game addiction kicks back up.

But there can be no right to speak without investigation, and so I decided to join in. I knuckled down and got a proper achievement hunt going for a little over a week, filling out all of the achievements for about one game per day. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I disliked it. I still don't see the point to any of this. Sure, achievements will provide you with a clear list of objectives beyond "beat the game", but a game that's well-designed will make you want to see everything without needing to dangle a meta reward over your head. Final Fantasy didn't need to offer up gamerscore bribes to make me get Excalibur and fight Warmech, and I'm certain that some gamerscore wouldn't have been incentive enough to force my hand if I wasn't already enjoying my time with it.

Still, my suspicion that most achievements were either non-accomplishments or locked behind a pointless grind largely proved true. I got just about everything in Horripilant, Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons, and The 1500 Year Old Forest Elf and My Anti-Material Sniper Rifle without any effort beyond normal