So I'm heading to school listening to Major Nelson's podcast when Major mentions one
of the many games he has to play through (Jumper - like the movie) and says that
while playing through the tutorial 50 gamer points gets unlocked. As he leaves the
controller to do something on Twitter, another 50 points is unlocked. He says that in
the span of 3-4 minutes, he unlocked between 150 and 200 points without really doing
much. This got me thinking.

What if you were a company that knew it was putting out a mediocre game? How could
you sell as many units as you could? The answers appears to be, at least on the 360, to
add easily obtained achievement points. This was apparently the case with Avatar: The
Burning Earth which did very poorly in terms of reviews yet sold a very decent amount
of games.

Imagine people buying a game for $50 and unlocking all the achievements within 30
minutes and selling the game back to a Gamecrazy or a Gamestop. You wouldn't have a
game, you'd have a Money for Points product. This would let game developers create
even more horrible games than the already released god-awful licensed products.
Instead of trying to actually make a decent game with that IP, you'll get products that
looks like it was developed by children in sweat shops.

This could also potentially screw up the whole Gamerscore idea. But how would you
regulate something like this? How can you tell if one achievement is real while the
other is just a gimme? For example, I rented The Simpson's game and it probably has
the easiest achievement ever:



I think this is a real achievement with a twist of Simpson's humor added in but
someone could always argue that it was the last achievement they added because they
needed more to hit 1000.

So what do you guys think? Is a trend starting with crappy ass 360 games?