• finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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          22 days ago

          They have to because the achievements are triggered by ingame events and actions meaning the trigger is coded and therefor any action resulting in achievment creation is by definition part of development.

        • SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
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          23 days ago

          Yes.

          although in some cases with a publisher they could also be involved in determining requirements such as minimum number, etc.

          • dwindling7373
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            23 days ago

            I always figured it was something steam shoves down devs and/or players throat, since it’s a bit of a dark pattern toward buying into their ecosystem.

            Otherwise I would consider many many many devs deciding achievements are not their or their game’s thing.

            • mozingo@lemmy.world
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              23 days ago

              Dev here. We decide the achievements. We have to set them up manually for ps5, xbox and steam. The idea is to give achievement hunter types more gamplay basically. Although certain game devs use achievements as a form of analytics. When you get an achievement like “Level 2 finished” that’s because the devs wanted to know how many players got that far in the game.

                • mozingo@lemmy.world
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                  22 days ago

                  It’s a little different for steam/xbox/ps, but generally there’s two kinds of achievements. Trigger achievements and value achievements.

                  The trigger type ones are the ones that fire once, like when you beat a level or get a certain item or something. These basically have an api call like TriggerAcheivement(achievementID).

                  The value type ones are the ones like collect 1000 gold or kill 500 enemies. You could choose to handle this manually, and then just fire an achievement trigger, but this usually becomes complicated with multiple saves or crossplay, etc. So instead, there’s an api call like IncreaseStat(statID, 1). And you call that when you kill an enemy or whatever and once it’s been called 500 times, the achievement activates.

                  You usually set all the achievements/stats up in the steam/xbox/ps backend and then your game is just responsible for calling those api functions when appropriate.

              • dwindling7373
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                23 days ago

                Are you free to ship a game with no achievements?

                • Voyajer@lemmy.world
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                  22 days ago

                  There are tons of games without any ancillary steam features, the only things I don’t think I have seen a game without are the forums section and community tab.

                • mozingo@lemmy.world
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                  22 days ago

                  On steam? Yes. Xbox and Playstation however require achievements to publish a game.

                • tfw_no_toiletpaper@lemmy.world
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                  22 days ago

                  No, how would that work coding-wise? Not like steam is actively scanning what a game does.

                  Edit: Also you wrote steam was “shoving it down the devs’ throats”, but the same achievements exist on PlayStation, Xbox, I think even Nintendo.

            • Sylvartas@lemmy.world
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              22 days ago

              Nope. IIRCs some other platforms that I can’t name do require you to have achievements. But you are still pretty much free to implement them however you want