The Rarest Trophies and What It Takes to Earn Them
Pedro Faiole·
When a platinum notification pops, most people screenshot it and move on. But some platinums — a very specific, deeply uncomfortable category — have earned rates below 0.1%. That means out of every thousand people who own a game, fewer than one has done everything it asks. Sometimes it's zero. Sometimes the number stays at zero for years and nobody can figure out if it's even possible.
Those are the trophies worth talking about: not the ones you finish in a weekend, but the ones that have beaten most people who tried.
What "Rare" Actually Means
There's no official rarity tier stamped on PlayStation trophies beyond bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. Sony shows a percentage of earners, and that number tells you everything. A platinum earned by 25% of a game's owners is a casual experience. One earned by 5% is starting to mean something. Below 1%, you're in legitimately difficult territory, and the community tends to treat sub-0.1% as the elite bracket.
Steam does have formal rarity labels: Common (above 50%), Uncommon (10-50%), Rare (5-10%), Very Rare (1-5%), and Ultra Rare (below 1%). As a benchmark, anything under 5% is verging into ultra-rare territory, and sub-1% represents what most hunters consider a genuine feat.
The percentages can mislead, though. A trophy at 0.1% in a game with 50 million owners represents a lot more human effort than 0.1% in a game with 500 owners. Context matters, and so does how a trophy actually becomes rare.
The Rarest Trophies and What It Takes to Earn Them | Blog | The End Wiki
Why Trophies End Up in That Range
There are a few distinct paths to ultra-rarity, and they are not the same thing:
Rarity Driver
What it demands
Examples
Raw skill
Mechanical precision under pressure
Fall Guys "Infallible," System Shock
Time grind
Hundreds of hours of consistent effort
GTA V, Red Dead Redemption II
Multiplayer or luck
Other players, RNG, or specific conditions
Overwatch 2 trophies, Infinity Nikki
Server dependency
Online requirements that can expire
WWE 2K23, LittleBigPlanet 3
The distinction matters if you're deciding whether to chase something. A skill-based trophy is always theoretically earnable with practice. A server-dependent trophy has an expiration date. A grind-based trophy just takes time. And RNG-based trophies can genuinely make experienced hunters walk away.
The Platinum Hall of Fame
GTA V and Red Dead Redemption II
The two rarest platinums on PlayStation are Rockstar games, and both sit around 0.1% of owners. GTA V's "Los Santos Legend" needs 70 Gold Medals on missions, over 100 hours of gameplay, and a meaningful chunk of that in GTA Online. It's not the hardest game in the world; it's that most of the game's audience bought GTA V to mess around in Los Santos, not to min-run missions with precise completion criteria.
Red Dead Redemption II's "Legend of the West" is worse. It requires 200+ hours and 70 Gold Medals, which means playing many missions in strict, specific ways while the game actively wants you to take your time and wander. The platinum fights the game's design at every turn. Hunters frequently describe abandoning it not because they couldn't do it but because doing it felt wrong.
Fall Guys: Infallible
For a genuinely skill-based rarity, nothing in recent PlayStation history comes close to "Infallible" in Fall Guys. To earn it, you need to win five complete episodes in a row. Each episode has multiple rounds. You can be knocked out at round one of episode four by a physics interaction that has nothing to do with your skill level. The difficulty ratings from the community typically land at 9-10 out of 10, and the gap between players who attempted it during peak popularity and the number who succeeded is enormous.
The 2024 Tier
Among the hardest platinums from 2024, Infinity Nikki's "Heart Full of Wonders" sits at 0% earned globally. It requires collecting 100 Iridescent Eurekas through random drops, with community reports averaging 30 hours per single collectible. NBA 2K25 has trophies also sitting at 0% with no verified completions. System Shock was earned by just 0.3% of players, requiring four full playthroughs at the highest difficulty setting in different modes.
The F1 24 "99 Club" trophy, which requires maxing your driver rating to 99, sits at 0.1% of earners. Balatro expects somewhere between 200 and 400 hours to platinum on the highest difficulty across every deck and joker combination.
A glowing digital trophy case filled with platinum and gold badges, some faded and grayed out, magenta and violet neon light illuminating the display in a dark room
Trophies You Can't Earn Anymore
This is the part that genuinely frustrates the hunting community. Some trophies didn't end up rare because they're difficult. They ended up impossible because servers closed.
LittleBigPlanet 3 is one of the clearest examples. The platinum required community-based online trophies and was considered achievable if not trivial. The servers went offline after an alleged hacking incident, and those trophies are now permanently locked. Nobody can earn them. The platinum no longer exists as an obtainable goal.
Most recently: WWE 2K23. As of January 2025, publisher 2K disabled the game's servers, taking the platinum with them. Players who owned WWE 2K24 were warned to complete their online trophies before similar shutdowns hit that game too.
The PlayStation community has been petitioning Sony to stop requiring multiplayer trophies for platinum eligibility in games that are primarily single-player. It's a reasonable ask. When the servers close, the history closes with them.
Steam Has Its Own Ultra-Rare Club
On PC, there's no platinum equivalent. You just have individual achievements with global percentages. The rarest achievements on Steam include:
PUBG's "Shoot The Knee," earned by 0.9% of players, requires eliminating 10 opponents using only a crossbow.
Warframe's K-Drive achievement for traveling 1,000,000 meters without touching the ground sits at well under 1%.
Alien: Isolation's "One Shot" (complete the game without dying) is earned by 0.37% of players.
The Steam community uses third-party trackers like Steam Hunters to surface these numbers since Valve doesn't give them prominent placement in the interface. Ultra-rare Steam achievements don't carry the same cultural weight as a platinum, but the specific percentages can be more meaningful since you're always comparing against the game's full installed base rather than just the trophy-curious slice.
Why People Keep Chasing Them
It's worth asking the honest question: why would anyone grind 200 hours for a 0.1% trophy?
Trophy hunting communities describe the core pull clearly: the dopamine response from the notification sound is real, the social element of comparing lists creates genuine connection, and for some hunters, the trophies provide structure and purpose that makes game purchases feel more justified. You spent $60 on a game. You're going to get everything out of it.
But the same community is honest about the costs. You will play games you've stopped enjoying. You will spend time on mechanics that frustrate rather than engage. The profile pressure (not wanting to start something you can't finish) can make you protective in ways that reduce how freely you explore new games.
The healthiest approach, based on how experienced hunters talk about it, is to decide upfront whether you're chasing the plat before you start rather than getting halfway through and feeling locked in. Check server status before committing to anything with online requirements. Research the specific trophies that tend to brick people, especially in games where one missable locks you out.
And be honest about RNG. Some trophies involve randomness that will make you feel nothing you do matters. That's not an interesting challenge for most people. Skipping those specific trophies doesn't disqualify you from the hobby.
Keeping Track of What You've Actually Done
If you're deep in the rarest-trophies world, you've almost certainly got completions scattered across multiple platforms. Your PlayStation platinums live in one ecosystem. Your Steam ultra-rares live in another. Your Xbox completions exist somewhere else.
The EndWiki was built specifically for this: a single place where your gaming history across all platforms lives under your control. You can sync your library from PlayStation, Steam, Xbox, and more via the import tool, see your full completion picture in one view, and log every game you've tracked down regardless of what platform issued the trophy. Browse every game in the database and mark off what you've done, what you're working toward, and what's sitting in the backlog.
The part that matters most for completionists: your data stays yours. Platform servers shut down. Games get delisted. Libraries go dark. But the record you've built on The EndWiki doesn't depend on any individual platform deciding to keep their servers alive.
What It Actually Takes
The rarest trophies don't share a single formula. Some take raw mechanical skill you build over time. Some take more hours than most people have to give. Some take coordination with other players you can't fully control. And some, honestly, just take luck.
The common thread is commitment to a goal that most people who played the same game walked away from. That's the point. Not the notification itself, but the decision to stay when leaving was easier.
If you want to get into the broader world of completion culture, start by tracking what you've already done. You've probably earned more than you realize.
