I really like completing games. Finding every collectible, exploring every nook and cranny... I've been trying to achieve 100% in save files since the days of the PS2, and achievements are a very natural extension of that.

Steam achievements, in particular, were remarkable in this regard: the variety was immense, the community was friendly, and the price of games was remarkably cheap, which is something of great value to young teenagers. And a lot of that is still valid today.

Unfortunately, from around 2017 and after, the whole achievement ecosystem got flooded with those cheap trash titles that give you thousands of achievements and an 100% for basically nothing - the proverbial shovelware. And, like many of us completionists, I fell in for the scam and got myself some bucketloads of the stuff. They were extremely alluring at the time, and I didn't know any better.

Concurrently, there were also a lot of free games coming out with trivially easy achievements as well, such as visual novels. I would sometimes just set them to max speed and get all the achievements without even knowing what the novel was about, because the number needed to go up. Up, up and up. Another similar issue happened with demos, where you are able to just go through a couple of minutes of content for a free 100%. They are all equal in the eyes of Steam.

Finally, I got really pissed off at DLC achievements, particularly those from delisted titles that you are no longer able to buy. PlayStation, for one, has solved this by creating separate lists for DLC achievements/trophies, so I can get a platinum for the base game and see the number go up by +1 without having to worry about expensive or even unobtainable DLC. But Steam has no such system in place. It's all or nothing.

Finally, there's the matter of cheaters: while I have nothing to prove to anyone, it is undeniably heart-wrenching how any semblance of rankings and competition, both in regards to rarity, number of perfected games, and completion percentage, are rendered void by the existence of people who mass-unlock achievements through illegitimate methods.

All of these things left a sour taste in my mouth, and I no longer saw the point in hunting for more achievements when my list was so irredeemably contaminated by trash titles and games impossible to 100%, on an ecosystem that was less-than-friendly to this type of experience. I had a big falling out around 2019, and the worst part was knowing that most of it was self-inflicted.

I should have been getting 100% in games that I enjoyed. That should be the only criterion to whether I perfect a game or not. But, instead, I was buying and playing through a whole lot of trash just to see two numbers increase.

But not all is lost.

Things did improve, though: as of 2023, Valve got really good at removing trash games from our achievement statistics, and I can just pretend that most of those I played don't exist anymore. Many demos, too, also stopped counting.

Furthermore, the recent 100% achievement page comes sorted, by default, by playtime, and looking at the first 2/3rds of this list actually makes me happy. There's still some trash if you scroll down to the bottom third (as most trash titles only take a few minutes, or maybe a few hours at most), but this new aesthetic update to the achievement list fills me with a renewed sense of proverbial pride and accomplishment.

There is still a lot I think Valve should improve: removing every single 100% from demos would be a start, and a legitimate way of deleting achievements would be downright impressive. Will I start doing some serious achievement hunting anytime soon, now that things are looking better? I don't know. I did a few last year, in 2022, but I'm still pretty much at my lowest of lows when it comes with engaging with PC gaming. I've found a lot of success in PlayStation [psnprofiles.com], and I think I'll stay there for a while. I've even fallen into a silly pattern of getting a platinum for games I've 100%'d on Steam, and sometimes doing the opposite. Hunting for trophies on PlayStation - and bridging them with Steam - is one of the most fulfilling gaming experiences I've had in ages.

I don't know if I'll ever be into serious achievement hunting on Steam again. Besides the issues with Steam itself, I have also grown more and more bitter about PC as a platform in general: a miserable GPU market, endless launchers, inexplicable stutters, aggressive DRM, and constantly being reminded of work all contribute to this growing discontentment.

If one thing that this last year made very clear, is that I don't expect to return back to Steam anytime soon, except for occasionally fiddling with a game here and there out of curiosity. Maybe someday...

Original 19-Mar-2023, revised 2-May-2024