Returnal’s “high” ranking among the least played games is not so surprising…

How do we know that Returnal was so disastrous in this area? Well, over the weekend, video game stats and metrics website HowLongtoBeat unveiled its annual year-end rankings for 2021, revealing that Capcom’s Resident Evil Village was one of the highest-performing games this year. However, based on user-submitted data, one list showed Housemarque’s Returnal as one of the least completed/most abandoned games.

The latter caused quite an uproar, as it only considered the total number of people who quit the game before completing it – meaning that popular games understandably have a higher number of quitters before completion. The controversy prompted the HLTB to publish another list of the least played games, which accounted for the proportion of players who quit after starting the game. However, recent PlayStation Network data shows that the vast majority of Returnal players did not actually complete the campaign.

According to PSN trophy data, only 30.3 per cent of Returnal players completed the first act…

…about 23 per cent completed the second act, and about 10 per cent completed the third act. Even if we assume that some of the players did not synchronise their trophy data, it would not make a huge difference.

These statistics should not be too surprising. Although single-player games tend to have high completion rates (see The Last of Us Part II and God of War), the difficulty of Returnal and the lack of save options has thrown many off. Housemarque eventually introduced a suspension point feature, but it was still not a traditional save option, and, understandably, many gamers had moved on to other games by then.

In fact, Housemarque is considering adding more options like Suspend Point to the game in the future, so perhaps we’ll see an increase in completion rates…

Source: GamersRD, HowLongToBeat