The 80/20 Rule of Development
Human perception is logarithmic. This goes for sound, light, force, and so on. Even the stock market charts are displayed on a logarithmic scale. There is plenty of academic research in this area already, but I guess grasping change and making something meaningful of it has more sense in relative terms than absolute, and hence our logarithmic scale of perception.
Regardless of why it works this way, our perception of quality is also logarithmic. And this has a very counter-intuitive impact on the amount of work we put into projects in development.
It is typical for development budgets of modern AAA games to go over $50mln. Investments like these are applied primarily towards the quality of the content, as they seldom have that much more content than lower quality projects.
By default, one would assume that the more effort you put into something, the higher the quality of it becomes. While generally true (and we assume that that effort is appropriate), it implies a linear correlation – i.e. if I put in 10% more effort, the product or service will become 10% better. The truth is – it doesn’t work this way, and it is because of our logarithmic perception.
Generally speaking, for us to perceive something as being the next step on the quality ladder, it has to be twice as good as the preceding one. Or, put it differently – the effort doubles for every step of perceived quality.
Here is a graph representing this, in terms of effort required to achieve it:
Quality vs. Effort
By “effort” I mean time, money, work, whatever contributes to the development of the final product and to its quality level. And “quality” is a customer’s subjective value assessment of your product.
As you can see, the initial effort yields quality results pretty quickly. Similar to the Pareto Principle, I call this the 80/20 Rule of Development, as the first 20% of the effort will yield about 80% of the quality. The actual numbers may vary, say 30/70 or maybe 10/90 – it depends on the actual specifics of your project. But no matter how you look at it, it’s pretty darn good – getting more with less!
While anybody with experience in game development can attest that the first impressive results come online quite early in the project timeline, the final 20% of quality is the hard part, and it takes the rest of the 80% of effort and resources to get done. This is what differentiates successful titles from mediocre ones, and is really difficult to achieve, if not just plain expensive.
There is, however, a way to exploit this mechanism and get top results with a mostly 20% effort. It is not unheard of games that are blockbusters and got developed with a fraction of a typical budget. Successful websites do this as well. So, how do you develop a product with a 20% budget that achieves close to 100% perceived quality?
The essence of this approach is that what matters most for a customer in a game (or pretty much in any consumer product) is its core feature. Maybe it’s a set of specs instead of a single number, but the vast majority of the secondary components (physical or not) just have to be at a generally accepted level.
With just about 20% effort you can put your product or service at the 80% mark across all the specs and features. In fact, you should not invest more than 20% effort in any non-core and non-defining features of your project, because going for more quality gets expensive really fast and offers diminishing returns. It does not make sense to waste all that effort (time, money) on non-essential parts.
Now the primary feature, or what often is referred to as the “focus” of your project has to get that 100% effort. And since you save on the rest of the non-essential areas, you can invest even more in what counts!
Looked at it this way, the 80/20 Rule of Development states that you should invest 80% of your budget into your core competitive advantage area, and spread the rest of 20% across everything else that just has to meet the market standard.
