[Graeme Dice]

Raapys said:
You really don't seem to get it. If you have a hundred thousand to spend on a game, then how you decide to use those again decides if the gameplay will suffer because of too much of the total resources was spent on graphics.

Why don't you explain to us all how gameplay suffers if you can't pay the salaries of multiple designers? You only need one for anything but the largest projects. Programmers don't tend to make gameplay design decisions, and neither do artists.

It's simple logic. I don't need written documentation.

Of course you need written documentation, or else you're just making the argument because it's popular to complain about graphics on internet gaming forums.

If you use 90k on graphics and 10k on gameplay, then the gameplay will be worse than if you spend 80k on gameplay and 20k on graphics. What's so hard to get?

The problem, of course, is that gameplay reaches the point of diminishing returns on your monetary investment long before graphics reaches the same level. You won't get better gameplay by throwing money at a developer, as gameplay is essentially the result of one or two people's work. Once you've paid their salaries, giving them extra money wouldn't make any difference other than to make the design more muddled by adding other opinions. What that extra money can be used for is to pay the salaries of the dozens of artists and media producing people that can actually stack their efforts to produce something useful.

How, exactly, does this make the analogy flawed? That it's more expensive just means you need to spend more coins to actually reach an acceptable graphic quality level.

It's fatally flawed because the relative costs are completely different orders of magnitude, and you've not included anywhere near the proper level of granularity. The only way to make your analogy work would be to point out that gameplay costs about one hundredth to one thousandth of a "coin", so it doesn't really matter how much you spend on graphics. If your game has a development budget of $50,000, then you spend $45,000 of that on the gameplay, and only $5,000 on graphics. If your game has a budget of $10 million, then you spend $100,000 of that on gameplay, and the rest on the graphics. There's no point in spending greater and greater amounts of money on gameplay because of diminishing returns on your investment.

Hardly. Fanboy's are the ones that always go up and support the developers whatever decisions they make, and appear to nearly be worshipping them and never complain about anything.

You're not a Malfador fanboy, you're a gameplay over graphics fanboy. I suppose I could use the forum rat term, but that's less well understood.