A recent post by Insomniac Games developer Mike Acton on the company’s development blog asks the simple question: “How much does framerate matter?”

While Acton and Insomniac are proud of what they’ve accomplished in their latest title, Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time (“It’s a great looking game, a ton of fun to play and is 60fps,” writes Acton), it’s come time for the team to question the importance that a high framerate plays in the delivery and presentation of their future games. From the post:

“One of the long-standing sacred cows here at Insomniac is framerate. We’ve long viewed a solid framerate as both a sign of a quality product and professionalism as developers. It’s always been point of pride in our work and considered an extremely serious part of our development process.”

During the development of a game, some difficult choices need to be made with regards to higher quality graphics and framerate, and balancing the two, “[and] we want to make the right choices that reflect our commitment to providing you with the best looking games out there,” continues Acton, so with this in mind, Insomniac’s community team did a little research into the importance of high, solid framerate with regards to its affects on sales of a game and reviews of a game.

“The results perhaps confirmed what I’ve known for a long time,” Acton laments, “but found it difficult to accept without evidence. They found that:

• A higher framerate does not significantly affect sales of a game.
• A higher framerate does not significantly affect the reviews of a game.

“And in particular they found that there was a clear correlation between graphics scores in reviews (where they are provided) and the final scores,” Acton continues. “And they found no such correlation between framerate and the graphics scores nor the final scores.

“As an interesting side-note, our team also found no direct correlation between gameplay scores and final scores, however it does appear that gameplay scores are also influenced by graphics scores. i.e. Better looking games appear to be more “fun” to reviewers, in general.”

With their findings in hand, Insomniac took the question to the public to “see what the players themselves thought of this question.”

Further findings resulting from players uncovered evidence that isn’t really all that surprising; any given framerate needs to be solid enough as to not impact on the game, and that a 60 frame per second framerate doesn’t have that much of an impact on the end product. What does this mean for Insomniac’s future games?

“It means that framerate is still important to us here at Insomniac, but it’s not on the same pedestal it was before. And that Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time will probably be Insomniac’s last 60fps game.”

So in the future, instead of focussing on hitting a consistent 60 frames per second, Insomniac will probably trade that off for higher quality visuals, while trying to deliver at least a locked 30 frame per second framerate experience.

And that’s the end of that!

If you want to see some neat charts showing off their findings, you can head on over to the original post over here.

While you’re ruminating over the data, you can watch a handful of newly released videos for Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time, including the launch trailer, a gameplay video, and a developer diary, all below:

Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time Launch Trailer

Tomboli Gameplay

My Blaster Runs Hot Dev Diary

Source: Insomniac Games Blog