"The Achievement hunter, who's going to make purchase decisions around the Achievements per minute to ratio - he's probably buying ten to twenty titles a year, or at least playing that many," Pitchford told us. "He's playing a lot. So he's a very frequent customer, and you want to be in that pile. That's just business."

"The time it takes is minimal," we were told, "because you're designing Achievements anyway, and you can probably affect your sales by something like 10 and 40 thousand units. If you're talking about a triple-A game selling between 1 and 2.5 million units. You're talking tens of thousands of units of impact there."

"Unfortunately most people in the industry don't think through it that much. You have designers designing achievements, and they're the worst."