Only 29% of People can Beat a Zombie Apocalypse, Gaming Data Reveals!

With the video game adapted TV series The Last of Us achieving a big success, the search volume for “post apocalyptic games” jumped 54% last week. From zombie outbreaks to alien invasion, there are various types of memorable narratives told in the video game world, but how likely would it be that we survive in each apocalyptic events in real life?

With this in mind, Slot Tracker collected a list of 85 popular post-apocalypse video games and analysed data on the percentage of gamers completing the story through Steam and Astats. They then ranked the games to uncover which types of post-apocalyptic games players have the most success in, thus revealing the apocalyptic future we are most confident in surviving! 

Key Findings 

• Plague Inc: Evolved tops the list of post-apocalyptic games that we would most likely to survive in, with 81.1% of gamers completing the game’s story. 
• The Walking Dead: A New Frontier ranked second highest as the post-apocalyptic game we would most likely to survive in, with 68.1% players beating the story.
• An apocalyptic future with diseases would be the event we most likely to survive in, with 50.3% players on average beating this type of games. 
• Lovecraftian, unnatural and terrifying monsters, is the second scenario that we are most confident in surviving within. This is followed by a world with curse and aliens. 

We really hope you find this release useful. If you do end up using it, we would very much appreciate a link to https://slottracker.com/ who commissioned the data. A linked credit allows us to keep supplying you with future content that you may find useful.

Top 10 post-apocalyptic games with the highest completion rate

Slot Tracker found out that Plague Inc: Evolved is the post-apocalyptic game with the highest completion rate, with 81.1% of gamers completing the story. It took players an average of 19.3 hours to complete the main story line and get all three story achievements on Steam. Initially released in 2014, this real-time strategy game simulates the spread of severity of a global plague. Since the game unexpectedly became a reality in 2020, the game developer introduced a new DLC expansion and collaborated with WHO experts to promote outbreak control measures and raise public awareness on epidemiology. 

The Walking Dead: A New Frontier has the second highest percentage of gamers who beat the game’s story (68.1%). Developed by Telltale Games, the game is set four years after the zombie apocalypse and requires the player to protect all survivors from the zombies while discovering the whole story about this world that is gradually eaten up by zombies. It took gamers around 8.4 hours on average to acquire all 30 story achievements in this game. 

In third place is The Walking Dead: Season Two, the second season of this video game series. 64.1% of the players have completed all 40 story achievements and reached the end of the story, spending almost 10 hours on average. Released between 2013 and 2014, this game has 5 episodes and is a sequel to the first The Walking Dead. 

Two other games of this episodic graphic adventure game series followed closely behind. The Walking Dead: Michonne ranked fourth with 64.1% of players completed the story and The Walking Dead: The Final Season fifth with 64.0%. 

Last on the top 10 list is Half-Life 2: Episode One, with a story completion rate of 46.8%. This first-person shooting game is set in a world where the Earth has been conquered by the alien empire Combine, after a research accident. 

Please see the full dataset including all 85 games here.

Top 10 apocalyptic futures we would most likely to survive in

Slot Tracker can reveal that we would most likely survive in an apocalyptic future with disease, with 50.3% players on average beating this type of game – the highest percentage among all apocalyptic game types reviewed. It took players slightly more than 19 hours to survive the game. 

An apocalyptic future with lovecraftian, unnatural and terrifying monsters is the second scenario that we are most confident in surviving within, with a 39.0% percentage of players completing this type of post-apocalyptic games. 

An apocalyptic future led by Curse ranked third, with 34.9% players beating the story. Following closely behind is a future with aliens – 34.7% people completed the challenge. 

Although four zombie post-apocalyptic games were ranked in the top 10 with the highest percentage of completion rate, the average completion percentage for all zombie games reviewed is only 29.9% – leaving us not much confidence to survive when the world is full of zombies. 

Please see the full dataset including all 85 games here.

We really hope you find this release useful. If you do end up using it, we would very much appreciate a link to https://slottracker.com/ who commissioned the data. A linked credit allows us to keep supplying you with future content that you may find useful.

Methodology : 

1. Slot Tracker performed a study to discover which post-apocalyptic games have the highest/lowest rate of completion among players.
2. To collect the seed list, they focused on games on Steam, as Steam has a large library of games with achievements, whose data is widely accessible. They obtained data on all games currently on steam here. 
3. Only single-player games with the “post-apocalypse” tag or theme were included in this study. Games who post apocalyptic event in only one area (i.e. Resident Evil 2, where only one city is infected with the Virus) have been excluded, as the whole world hasn’t ended.
4. To obtain data on achievements of each game, they used the game ID’s and Steam’s API. 
5. They then used Astats, an achievement recording tool to scrape tags for achievements of each game, denoting if they are a story achievement or not. By combining the data from astats and Steam, they obtained the % of people who have completed the story of each game. In addition, data on the length the game takes to beat was gathered.
6. The % of people who have beaten a game was calculated as the story achievement with the lowest % of completion (the lowest completed story achievement is typically the final one, i.e the least completed or rarest one).
7. Next, the % of people who started the story (who got the first story achievement) was subtracted from the % of people who beat the game, to show the % of people who started the game but did not finish it.
8. To ensure the data consistency and accuracy, the following games were excluded from this study: Non-single player games, games without story achievements (as marked by astats), games without achievements (i.e Fallout 3), games with two or less story achievements, games with fewer than 50,000 owners on Steam, games with an average story length of less than 2 hours. 
9. Data was collected in March 2023 and is correct as of then.