Valve Turns in Half-Life 2 Report Card
High technology means there's no more hiding for folks who wuss out before they see the credits.
At the risk of turning as all into statisticians in our spare time, Valve has released data it collected through its Steam service of the habits of Half-Life 2: Episode One players. From the percentages and graphs emerges a picture of gamers who seem eager to get their money's worth from the first of the three new episodes.
Nearly half of all those who played for more than an hour got to the final map of the game. Oddly, only around half of these people saw the credits, which Valve says is down to people either quitting before the credits or a bug in how it collected the data.
And if you're wondering how much life there is in episodic gaming, here's your first tangible number: for people that played through the game and saw the closing credits, the average completion time was a touch over five hours, which is right what Valve was hoping for.
Game makers have shown concern that not all that many of the people that buy their games are finishing them. Some have estimated that as few as a quarter of the people who buy a game actually make it through. And then there's the issue of waiting for games to come out, which is exactly what episodic gaming was designed to combat.
If you've got some time and you feel like wading through the numbers yourself, you can find them here.
Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games
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