In a recent interview, Gearbox Software co-founder Randy Pitchford claimed the including easy Achievements in a game can boost sales by up to 40,000.  After all, Gamerscore-whores also spend money.  Guess a bigger score is worth having games like Avatar: The Last Airbender in your play-history.

And that extra profit is enough for developers to consider, Pitchford explained.  In fact, adding these no-brainer Achievements is fairly easy and shouldn't cost much in terms of time and effort (and money).  It seems most of the gaming industry hasn't caught on though:

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.  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 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.

Show of hands: how many of you out there actually buy games just to boost that Gamerscore?  Don't be shy now.  Raise 'em high so we can point and laugh / shake our heads in disdain.