The Importance of Game Design

It seems that game design is underplayed in its importance in the video game development process and many newbies don't even understand what it is and why a game designer is necessary. Let's take a quick look at the consequences of bad and good game design.


The main role of the game designer is to ensure that the gameplay in a game is fun, balanced, unique, and fitting for the game being made.

There are many failed video games that had great graphics and bug-less code, but failed because the gameplay was not well designed. They were simply not fun to play either because of certain gameplay design oversights that made parts of the game annoying to play, or the core gameplay not being fun or unique enough. Many Ubisoft games come to mind. One of the last few Assassin’s Creed games has changed the gameplay to the point where it doesn’t play like an AC game and keep to the strengths of the franchise (AC Unity). The Division looked great in trailers, but in practice many of its gameplay concepts were not well thought out, as reflected by the negative feedback for many months since launch. However, the reviews became positive after a major gameplay update that changed how many gameplay features work. There was also No Man's Sky that lacked compelling gameplay as described in my other post. And that’s AAA titles with massive budgets and skilled development teams.

There are many failed indie games too. Just filter by indie tag and see the mixed and negative overall review scores in the generated list. I'm sure that not all of them have failed due to poor game design, but it's well known that if the gameplay is great, the graphics and bugs can be overlooked. For example, take a look at Ravenfield. This "Battlefield"-like game with simple graphics has sold around 52,000 game copies on Steam in two months at around $15 per copy. That is around $780,000 that the one-man development team has amassed (before Steam took 30% from that and the government applied their taxes). The gameplay is simple, addictive, and familiar, making players overlook the simple graphics and its potentially buggy "Early Access" label.

Therefore, without solid gameplay design, the rest of game development areas will be doing work in vain, dooming the game to fail after many months of work. However, having good gameplay design and less good graphics and code/completeness of the game can still do wonders for the playerbase and the developer.

PS: I may update this post with more notable game design fails and successes in the industry.

Have any question or suggestions? Let me know in the comments.