Jamie over at GameDevBlog is sad because 55% of the people surveyed about Spiderman 2 didn’t finish the game.

So, well, that’s depressing to me. That’s a little like hearing that half of my readers put down my novel halfway through. Or that half of my audience walked out of my movie halfway through. (Not that I’ve ever made a movie. I’m just trying to make a point.)

Of course, my reaction is, ‘wow, 55% of your users finished the game? That sounds high’. Personally, the games that I finish are the exceptions. I got 2/3rds of the way through Doom 3, my WoW character is stuck at level 51 and the new Vampire sits on my desk unopened. Heck, I think the only games I actually finished recently were God of War and…. Culdcept.

In the thread, someone brings up an excellent point:

[A] good follow-up question to ask in a future survey would be “Why didn’t you finish the game?” with choices like “It got too hard”, “I got bored”, “I started playing another game”, etc. If many people don’t finish games, I’d like to know why…

We actually do these sorts of exit polls in the MMO industry. Of course, for MMOs, people deciding they are done is a much larger problem than for those making offline games, and this information is crucial for us to know. Any bit of information is useful– a particularly useful one is what class and level a player’s character was when he quit. Those metrics can be telling – if there’s a spike in the graph of clerics quitting at level 26, maybe you need to have your balance guys figure out what part of the cleric experience sucks at that point.