WCDFTO: Possible Realism vs. Development Costs - RaychelSnr's Blog

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RaychelSnr's Blog

WCDFTO: Possible Realism vs. Development Costs Stuck

Posted on September 23, 2009 at 04:22 PM.

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Yesterday, I discussed a rather straightforward chart which displayed some fairly basic economics. Today's chart is more interesting and might start helping us figure out why sports games simply aren't meeting our expectations this generation.

This chart compares the relationship between development costs and possible realism. As the realism goes farther up the scale, the cost to produce that realism rises exponentially so by the end of the chart, you can see it is inherently costly to produce a game at 100% realism (literally off the charts).

Keep in mind also, on Tuesday I said that the relationship of possible realism and fun was maximized somewhere around 80-85% on the possible realism scale. So when you look at the graph above, you see the cost to develop that realism has already begun to rise exponentially. So at some point where we are close to right now, developing for more realism results in not only a much more costly game, but one which just doesn't appeal to the average gamer.

From a business standpoint, it really makes no sense to go much farther than where we are at from a gameplay perspective. Refining things and making the game play better at the current level of realism makes much more sense. Graphics and animations and presentation still have a long ways to go, but you are getting at the 'too costly to produce range' in regards to gameplay.

So what do you think? How much farther can developers go up the scale on gameplay? Will they ever get to, say 90% realism? Does this chart make you long for the days of 16 bit sporting titles like it does me? Sound off!

Comments

# 1 scolton @ Sep 23

I would just love the next gen NCAA football to play as good as the PS2 version.

# 2 JkA3 @ Sep 23

Hey, I just gotta say that you were providing some very interesting information here. I've followed the other entries and they are very interesting...well put together too!

# 3 PolishHill @ Sep 23

I've really enjoyed a great deal of the articles you've written over the last few months I've been here. But these last articles have not been up to snuff. Numbers are randomly pulled out of thin air, no supporting information is provided, and quite frankly the lack of comments show this. The concept is a decent one but when you don't explain where your numbers come from or how you hypothesize how difficult it is to obtain "realism" (whether that means something gameplay oriented like the difficulty of staying at the correct speed while pitting in a NASCAR game or having the correct boots on a player in FIFA 10 you leave up to the reader). So thanks for the attempt at explaining these concepts and your opinion but I think you could have done a better job to keep at your otherwise consistently high quality level.

# 4 RaychelSnr @ Sep 24

Thanks for the compliments and feedback Polish, definitely a bunch of abstract concepts I'm discussing in this series this week...which is for a reason. There aren't really that many hard numbers out there to draw from, a lot of them are quite subjective (fun factor) and others there is no real standard for them (Total Possible Realism).

Regardless, it's fun to come up with your own theories from time to time. This might be something I have to visit farther on down the road when I can come up with some numbers to crunch for this.