Every Game Has a Wall: Where Players Quit

What "the Wall" Is and How We Measure It

If you sort a game’s trophies from most common to rarest, the list should slope down gently: each trophy held by slightly fewer people than the one before. When two consecutive trophies are separated by a big step, that step is a point where a lot of players stopped at once.

We call that biggest step the wall of the game. It is not an opinion about which part is hardest: it is the largest gap in percentage points between two consecutive trophies, calculated on the snapshot.

One detail changes the result: we only count trophies required for the platinum. DLC and New Game+ trophies are held by far fewer players, and including them produces huge steps that are not drop-off at all, just content nobody had to buy or play.

From a 36-Point Drop to 6: Not Every Game Has a Wall

The difference between games is enormous.

Crimson Desert is the extreme case. Its wall is 36.04 points in a single step: from 76.64% down to 40.60%. More than a third of its entire player base stops right there, and it is a story trophy. With that figure in hand, it stops being surprising that its platinum is the rarest on the site, at 4.49%.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II follows with 22.94 points, also on a main-story quest: from 91.22% to 68.28%.

At the other end there are games that have no wall. The biggest step in Resident Evil Requiem is 6.56 points, and in Octopath Traveler 0, 7.53. Their curves descend gradually, with no point where players fall away en masse.

And Ghost of Yōtei, despite having 62 trophies, has a wall of only 10.09 points: its curve is among the flattest of all, which is exactly what explains its platinum being earned by 42.40%, the highest we have measured.

Does the Wall Predict How Rare the Platinum Will Be?

In the platinum study we saw that the number of trophies explains nothing about how rare a platinum is: its correlation is −0.016. The obvious question is whether the wall explains it any better.

The answer is yes, but only in part. The correlation between wall size and platinum percentage is −0.552 across the 12 games with a platinum. That is a moderate negative relationship: the bigger the wall, the rarer the platinum tends to be. Far from the −0.016 of the trophy count, but also far from being a reliable rule.

One game clearly breaks the pattern, and that is Battlefield 6: its wall is mid-sized (10.19 points) and yet it has the second rarest platinum on the site (6.45%). It is not a contradiction: its list is not abandoned at one specific point, rather a huge share of its players never touches the campaign and stays in multiplayer. Its low percentage does not come from a wall, it comes from a lot of people playing something else inside the same game.

If you exclude that case —and with the warning that dropping the data point that does not fit is exactly what you should not do without saying so— the correlation rises to −0.624 over 11 games. We put it in writing so the effect is visible, not to present it as the good result.

The Big Walls Are in the Story; the Small Ones Are Anywhere

There is a pattern more solid than the correlation above, and it is where the wall falls.

It is worth stating precisely, because the easy version of this idea does not hold up: counting all 13 games, the wall falls on a progression trophy in 5 of them. That is the most repeated group, but it is not a majority: the rest is split between combat, collectibles, secrets, techniques and ranks.

What stands out appears when you sort by size. The four biggest walls on the site are, without a single exception, on an ordinary progression trophy: Crimson Desert (story, 36.04 points), Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (quests, 22.94), Dying Light: The Beast (progression, 14.09) and Borderlands 4 (progression, 13.22). You have to go down to fifth place to find anything else.

Put another way: when a game loses players en masse, it loses them advancing along the main path, not stuck on the hard challenge everyone talks about. Walls on skill trophies do exist, but they are small: whoever gets as far as attempting them has already decided they are going for the platinum.

How It Is Calculated

For each game we take the snapshot of unlock rates, discard the trophies that do not count towards the platinum, sort them from most common to rarest and calculate the difference between each trophy and the next. The largest of those jumps is the wall.

The correlations are Pearson correlations between wall size and platinum percentage, over the 12 games that have a platinum. Forza Horizon 6 is left out of that calculation because it is an Xbox and PC achievement game, where the platinum does not exist.

The table at the end is generated from whatever data is current, so it can be used to redo any calculation on this page.

What You CANNOT Conclude From This

The wall does not say why players left. A big step could be an impossible boss, a boring stretch, a launch bug or the point where a more interesting game came out. The data marks where, not why.

A small wall does not mean an easy game. Battlefield 6 proves it: you can have a smooth curve and an extremely rare platinum if the people playing are not going for trophies.

The games are recent. A wall softens over the months as players pick their runs back up. These figures are from August 2026.

Twelve games are not a representative sample of the medium. They are the ones we have measured, not a random selection of releases.