Study reveals the easiest and hardest games to beat

According to new data released in 2023, there are approximately 3.09 billion active video gamers worldwide.

And while starting a video game is the easiest step, finishing it requires determination, time and sometimes, a good gaming chair. With that in mind, BestCasinoSites.net sought to find out which video games are the hardest and easiest to beat by analysing Steam data.

Key findings:

Only 1.5% of players have beaten Baldur's Gate 3 so far.
Mafia II: Definitive Edition, DOOM 3, and Path of Exile are amongst the hardest games to beat.
Resident Evil and The Walking Dead are the most ‘beatable’ game franchises!

The most ‘beatable’ video games

Rank	Name	Average time to complete (hours)	Genre	% of people who beat the game's story
1	Resident Evil 3 - Remake	5.3	Action, Horror	69
2	The Walking Dead: A New Frontier	8.4	Adventure	68.2
3	The Walking Dead: Season Two	9.9	Adventure	64.3
4	Resident Evil 4 - Remake	16	Action, Adventure	64.2
5	The Walking Dead: The Final Season	12.6	Adventure	64.1
6	The Walking Dead: Michonne - A Telltale Miniseries	4.5	Adventure	64
7	Resident Evil Village	10.3	Action	62.4
8	Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series	10.8	Adventure	60.6
9	Yakuza 4 Remastered	27	Action, Adventure	60
10	The Wolf Among Us	9.6	Action, Adventure, Casual	59.5

Resident Evil and The Walking Dead are the most ‘beatable’ game franchises!

Resident Evil 3 - Remake is the easiest video game to beat – with 69% of people completing the game story. The Remake of the 1999 original came out in 2020 and it follows the protagonist Jill Valentine in her quest against Nemesis T-Type. The average time to beat the story is 5.3 hours and 25.9% of people have started the game (got the first achievement) but not beaten it.

But Resident Evil 3 is not the only game in this series that makes the top 10! In fact, Resident Evil 4 – Remake is the fourth most completed game (64.2% completion rate), and Resident Evil Village is the seventh most completed game (62.4% completion rate).

The apocalyptic setting seems to be a win amongst players, as the second most completed game is The Walking Dead: A New Frontier, with a main game completion rate of 68.2%. While the first and second games in The Walking Dead franchise follow protagonist Clementine in her fight for survival during the Zombie apocalypse, the spotlight in The Walking Dead: A New Frontier is around an original character named Javier "Javi" Garcia. The average time to beat the story is 8.34 hours and only 23.10% of people got the first achievement in the game but didn’t stick around to beat it.

The fight against the undead continues, with The Walking Dead: Season Two in third place for the most completed video games (64.3%), The Walking Dead: The Final Season in fifth place (64.1%), and The Walking Dead: Michonne - A Telltale Miniseries in sixth place (64%).

The least ‘beatable’ video games

Rank	Name	Average time to complete (hours)	Genre	% of people who beat the game's story
1	Baldur's Gate 3	39	RPG, Adventure, Strategy	1.5
2	Mafia II: Definitive Edition	24.6	Action, Adventure	2.9
3	DOOM 3	18	Action	3.7
4	Path of Exile	63.7	Action, Adventure, Free to Play, Indie, RPG	4
5	Shadow Warrior Classic Redux	18.5	Action	6
6	Painkiller Hell & Damnation	7	Action	6
7	Gas Guzzlers Extreme	10.8	Action, Racing, Sports	6
8	Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut	27.8	Action, Adventure	6.1
9	Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice VR Edition	9	Action, Adventure, Indie	6.2
10	Dead Rising 2: Off the Record	18	Action, Adventure	6.7

Released on August 3^rd of this year (2023), Baldur’s Gate 3 took the gaming world by storm, delivering an immersive Dungeon & Dragon-like gameplay, which earned them a 10/10 rating on Steam, out of a whopping 213,233 current reviews.

That being said, currently only 1.5% of gamers have beat the main game story. This can be due to several factors, from the freshness of the game release to the extensive world that allows the players to get lost in it for hours. Currently, it takes players around 39 hours to complete, and 81.80% of gamers have started the game (got the first achievement) and haven’t yet completed it!

In second place is Mafia II: Definitive Edition, released in 2020, with a main game completion of only 2.9%. This is followed by DOOM 3, with only 3.7% of players beating the game and Path of Exile, with only 4% of people beating the game.

Methodology:

BestCasinoSites.net performed a study to discover which games have the highest/lowest rate of completion among players.
Games on Steam were the focus of this study, as Steam has a large library of games with achievements, whose data is widely accessible. Data on all games currently on steam was obtained from Kaggle.com.
Games to be analysed were filtered to have a linear single player story. Through the use of the game IDs, Steam’s API was used to obtain data on achievements, such as the % of players who have obtained each one.
In addition, only games with a pegi 18+ tag were included, as identified either on the game store page, or from https://pegi.info/
Next, astats, an achievement recording tool, was scraped. Astats features tags for achievements, denoting if they are a story achievement or not. By combining the data from astats and Steam, we were able to obtain the % of people who have completed the story of each game. In addition, data on the length the game takes to beat was gathered.