Windows Phone weekly achievement unlocks increase tenfold after closure announcement

Since it was announced that Xbox support will be removed from the Windows Phone platform in May, we’re seeing a pretty huge spike in the number of achievements being unlocked before the service is gone for good. There has also been an impressive uptick in player counts as we enter the platform’s last few months, at least based on our TA user data, which obviously doesn’t give us the whole picture, but should offer a fair representation given that achievement hunters will be using these final weeks to grab as much Gamerscore as possible from Windows Phone games before they are no longer supported.Naturally, the Windows Phone platform was never the biggest, so don’t expect massive numbers here, but the trend is clear even when dealing with the small mobile player base. In the two weeks prior to Microsoft’s announcement, TA data shows just 376 Windows Phone achievements unlocked in the first, and 559 in the second, across around 55 users per week. Once news dropped that the service only had three months to live, though, people seemingly got to work — player counts pretty much quadrupled, with achievement unlocks coming in around ten times faster, with 3,781 in the first week, followed by a whopping 5,939 in the next. Considering that a lot of these games have already closed, have been removed from the store, or otherwise don’t play nice (Windows Phone achievements not syncing correctly has been an ongoing issue for some time), those are not numbers to be sniffed at.In the three weeks after the closure notice, TA data shows more than 150,000 Gamerscore earned in Windows Phone titles — to put that into perspective, that’s more than the total for the entire six-month period prior to the announcement. Similarly, the first full week after the closure news saw more achievements unlocked than in the previous three months combined. People really want to get some of these games polished off while they still can, it seems, and best of luck to them.Are you working on any Windows Phone completions before that May 16th shutdown deadline? Running into any issues, or have any advice for others who are doing this one last push? Share your words of wisdom below!



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