Future Games Will Battle Over Physics, not Graphics

The development of game engines that aim to achieve higher and higher graphical fidelity has largely reached a plateau.  People are still gawking at the Crysis and COD4 engines, released back in 2007, because there is still nothing that has been released that looks better.  It's actually kind of hard to figure out how that would be possible, anyway, when it's basically impossible to distinguish between the game and a photograph.  And maybe that's the rub for the developers, that if they spend however many millions of dollars to try and make a better looking engine than Crysis, is that really going to sell more games and give them a tangible ROI when there's already an engine sitting there that looks so good?  Probably not.

But that doesn't mean that the quest for higher realism in games is over -- far from it.  The battleground, however, is shifting toward a focus on physics and AI as developers learn to turn picture perfect virtual environments into something that acts like the real world.  Take, for example, COD:WAW's addition of flamethrowers by Treyarch into the COD4 engine.  Or Far Cry 2, which I recently blogged about being at the absolute cutting edge of this trend: interactive flora and fauna, environmental destructibility, realistic environmental fire behavior, integration of real time and weather.   This is the future of high-end software.

There's a raging war, though, around this technology that will define the future of the market, and it's aggressively fed by the dealings of Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.  These guys all use game developers like pieces on a chess board, and big design-in wins are expensively bought and widely celebrated in the media. They've all got their angle -- NVIDIA has PhysX running on their GPU, Intel has Havok running on their CPU, and AMD is porting whatever they can to their own hardware.

But this segmentation won't last long and the trend is very rapidly driving toward universal compatibility on the hardware side.  The gaming industry as a whole favors as much standardization as possible so that developers can concentrate on making great games, not playing with proprietary hardware or technologies.  Therefore, it's in the best interest of everyone involved to just get their physics engines out to the market and in use as widely as possible. Standards like OpenCL, fueled by the GPGPU revolution, are unifying the market and accomplishing just that.

But why is this so important to these hardware behemoths?  Because their technology is so far ahead of the software that game developers are putting out at this point, that no one needs high-end hardware to play games! Over the past year, NVIDIA and AMD have had to start seriously looking elsewhere for their paycheck, eyeing mobile and embedded markets hungrily for what has become a very lucrative and growing source of revenue.  They've been putting significant resources into growing those markets, but the high-end is where the margins are, and they don't want to lose that.  Physics technology has the potential to create new demand for high-end hardware when consumers start really looking for hardware acceleration for those functions in games.  When that happens, high-end hardware might actually become relevant for the mainstream again -- and everyone in the business would love to see that happen.

But the onus right now is on the game developers.  Barely over a year ago, before NVIDIA bought Ageia and its PhysX engine, no one was really paying attention to physics functionality.  But now, the technology is there, it's maturing fast, and it's being increasingly adopted by the industry, which means that those who are smart and creative enough to leverage it will have an edge.  When you've got massive budgets and many years of development time to produce a product, you've got to do everything you can to differentiate yourself.

So, when a company like Ubisoft integrates these advanced features into Far Cry 2 in a way that really changes the way you play the game, everyone loves it.  When you can get even a casual family game, like Boom Blox, to integrate physics into its core mechanics and also create a great experience, it's going to end up being one of the best third party Wii games out there.  When you tell me that Red Faction: Guerilla is going to allow destructibility of nearly every part of the environment, I'm going to be buying your game at launch (and it better deliver).

Graphics are old news, Crysis and the Wii have shown us.  Physics is the new graphics.