Interesting Gamasutra article out today on a study from research group Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) that shows better achievements can drive better sales. Achievements have been a bit of a phenomenon, and it's been pretty obvious that other platforms would be following Xbox LIVE's lead soon enough. (To be clear, I'm not saying that the idea of awards or badges for achieving certain tasks is new; however, LIVE enabled the concept seamlessly for all games on the platform. There was lots of initial skepticism from partners, but I think folks are pretty well bought in now.)

Here's an interesting snippet from the article:

Can you break down the different types of accomplishments you've identified?

GZ: We broke them down into 16 different types, and we've got very specific definitions about what each one is. They go from action accomplishments which reward you for doing an action to something as specific as one related to user generated content, or games that do unlocks, time based or score based accomplishments, initiation, elimination, customization, collection, community, challenges, advancement. They really track to different player types.

We've found that games that incorporate a wider diversity of accomplishments, they hit more people with the things that they really like, and they tend to do better, they tend to get reviewed better, which isn't necessarily terribly surprising. The same goes for quantity.

It's interesting -- we actually have time graphs over the years since the release of the Xbox 360, showing that while it didn't start out that way, it's definitely that way now. As people learned what the accomplishments do, it's actually rather striking. When you look at sales figures for the first five or six months, it really didn't matter as much, but as the consumers have got used to them, they now really seem to be focusing on games that [have more and diverse accomplishments].

I've been on a bit of a "we need to really go enable asynchronous gaming" kick, and you'll see more in that vein going forward. The main thing I wanted to point out here was that achievements are, in many ways, nothing more than another form of async gaming. It's a game where you compete across games to collect Gamerscore, and within games to collect achievements - in many cases, challenging friends to get the same achievements. You don't have to be online at the same time to play, and you can play at any time, and from multiple platforms. Today those platforms include the Xbox 360 and Games for Windows - LIVE... tomorrow, who knows?

Oh - since I know my bringing up G4WL is going to cause some reaction from people who aren't thrilled with our early implementations (in Shadowrun and Halo 2), it's worth saying that I'm still personally excited to where we're going with it. Microsoft is (for better or worse) known for iterating and improving products continually. The old joke is that it takes three versions to deliver what people are happy with - frankly, I think we did pretty darn well with v1 and v2 of LIVE (for Xbox and Xbox 360), and I know folks will be very pleased with what's coming down the pipe for both LIVE and G4WL. Can't talk details for obvious reasons, but let's just say that we fully know things that we need to deliver. Time and space, my friends... time and space.

... also known as "games you can play with your friends without having to be online at the same time." In this case, it's a Wall Street Journal article from this weekend that focuses on Scrabulous, a Facebook application. It's basically Scrabble, except you can play turn-at-a-time with multiple people over whatever timeframe works for you.

I've written about this before, but I think one of the biggest things we as an industry can do is focus on enabling async gaming on gaming platforms. People can't always sit down and play a marathon Halo 3 session together, and it's pretty obvious to me that one of the major reasons Scrabulous is so popular is that it both allows you to play on your own time, as well as play from different locations (thanks to being web-based). This is actually one of the reasons I'm so excited about Microsoft's LIVE Anywhere initiative. Over time, LIVE will be one of the largest online gaming networks that allows you to play with single identity across multiple platforms wherever you wish. Async gaming fits naturally here.

Don't believe the potential? Here's a quote from the article:

Since its Facebook debut in July, Scrabulous has grown to about 950,000 players. According to Facebook's data, 36% of those players (about 342,000 people) are "daily active users," or people who have logged in every day over the last 30 days. That's compared with an average of 7% for the site's top 50 tools and games, according to SocialMedia, a social-advertising company that tracks Facebook activity.

Just last night Halo 3 had just under 600k users online when I was playing. Scrabulous has over half of that playing at least once a day already - and that's just one game. What happens when we start seeing hundreds of these sorts of games? Time will be easier to find (since you're looking for bite-sized slices), but you'll have to filter through and find the worthy games. Guess there will always be challenges to overcome.

Note: if you're interested, make sure to read the Wall Street Journal article soon. It's only free for a limited time.