First Week of October

This week I worked on a competitive analysis, comparing my idea to games that are already on the market.

There are a large number of racing games available on the market, several with a series of sequels. One of the more successful racing simulators is Gran Turismo.

Described as “the real driving simulator”, it focuses on creating an extremely realistic racing experience. The game has licenses to use real car manufacture brands and models and allows for massive modifications to the smallest details of the car. Each car has options for tyres, exhausts, engine upgrades and other familiar racing modifications. Gear ratio can be fine tuned, suspension raised and lowered and braking balance adjusted to meet the demands of the player. The physics engine is designed to produce realistic racing conditions even taking road condition into account.

However Gran Turismo has never expanded beyond vehicles of the 4 wheel variety. While introducing a Rally mode in some of its later games it has never made space for waterborne or airborne vehicles. There is also very little visual or external customisation, with the exception of adding new tyre trims and a spoiler, only the colour of cars can be altered.

Another successful racing series is “Need for Speed” which has more recently focused less on track racing and much more on street racing. While the graphics are still working on becoming increasingly realistic, much the same as Gran Turismo, the racing itself is significantly less realistic and more simple. The cars do not handle like they would in reality and are much more forgiving of minor errors by the player.

While playing Gran Turismo, which claims to be a racing simulator, you must slow for each corner and can only safely make it through a corner if you are going below a certain speed. However on Need for Speed the accuracy needed for this has been significantly reduced so that most corners can be taken at almost full speed. This makes game play much faster paced and less intensive.

Players can instead focus on the numerous other challenges that come with street racing, as opposed to track racing, such as pedestrian vehicles and in some versions, the police. In the more recent Need for Speed games the new Japanese trend for drifting has become a prominent factor in the racing styles. Need for Speed: Carbon is based almost entirely on the Japanese downhill drift-race style.

Again however there has been no attempt by the Need for Speed series to diversify into either the airborne or waterborne areas of racing. However the player is able to make huge cosmetic changes to the exterior of the vehicle adding many decals and custom kits to personalise their ride. The more recent games also move away from the limited race courses with single option routes to free roaming races with only a predefined start and finish, so the player can select his own route which seems the fastest. While this is an ideal concept, in a race which allows the use of airborne vehicles it is too likely to be abused to complete races easier.