The Cost of a Computer Game vs. The Cost of a Serious Game

A computer game that you might get this Christmas could easily have cost between $20 million and $100 million to develop. Meanwhile, the serious games that you might have to play at work probably had a budget of around 10 and 300 thousand dollars (see costs for simulations). Likewise, the computer game may have a development time of three years while the serious game probably had a development time of six months.

And yet, as staggering as that difference is, the actual difference in resources required is probably 100 times that amount. This is because a commercial computer game is inevitably a new example of a genre that has had hundreds of previous iterations before it (with one exception being Spore). And each one of these iterations has experimented with new ideas while refining old techniques, including interface, display, and goals structures.

For example, when you play a first person shooter released last month, you are accessing intellectual property that has been constantly refined since well before Castle Wolfenstein 3-D, in the form of both design and supporting tools. If one had to truly build a similar first person shooter from scratch today, it would probably cost about $1 billion.

If one compares serious games to computer games then, serious games has quite a giant hole out of which it has to climb. Things might, however, be better than they seem.

Serious games can borrow from computer games, if much more carefully. This includes some design patterns, interface displays, and tools, from Adobe Flash to motion capture to use of scores.

There is something much more powerful than that, however. Serious games can use and leverage the real world.

Consider a well-designed serious game that has to teach people how to influence other people: If the serious game can use a real-time, first person perspective and broad approaches to content with accurate contexts and embedded heads-up-displays, and with after-action-reviews, the serious game may not have to fully teach people how to influence in its artificial environment with dozens of levels. Instead, it can "just" force people to start to apply different techniques and analyze their own results. As long as it is successful in doing that, students can then infinitely practice in (and learn from) subsequent real world situations, from instant message conversations with friends to critical meetings with power brokers.

This opens up a content fidelity (the real world!) that computer games can only dream about This is not a given for simulation designers (a lot of serious games that I have seen do not line up to the real world). But as long as serious games connect design and actions to the real world, (and perfect use is not a required output, such as with pilots). they may actually have a budget advantage to which computer games will never catch up.