Remember grabbing a copy of NBA 2K6 to tack a painless and extra 1,000 Gamer Points to your overall Gamer Score? You aren’t that weird for doing it.

According to Randy Pitchford, significant amounts of people are buying games with painless Achievements. A lot of games. The Gearbox head honcho reckons that the score fiend buys up to 20 videogames a year.

"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,” Pitchford told Official Xbox Magazine in a recent interview. “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 impact of this group is something that can be measured, apparently. Pitchford added that up to 40,000 additional units of a game could be sold if the Achievements per minute ratio does the trick for score-fiends.

"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,” said Pitchford.

"Unfortunately most people in the industry don't think through it that much. You have designers designing achievements, and they're the worst."

Buying a game for Achievements is something I’ve never done, but I have certainly rented a few titles when I was hot for Gamer Score. The fact that people are buying games for the Achievements, and apparently paying full price to boot, is blowing my mind. What games have you purchased for your Score?

[via OXM UK]