Video Game Economics-Spintires
I wrote this to compare the simulated process of Spintires to real life metrics, to see if it's economically feasible or not to haul logs in the simulated conditions. I’ve played a ton of Spintires lately, and my gut feeling was that the whole premise was ridiculous – you could spend 400 L of diesel to deliver a load of logs and the logging company could still be profitable. If you like analyzing processes, are curious about how the world works, or just are a logging/transport enthusiast, read on . This isn’t for everyone, and I’ll be the first to admit that. I did most of this work as a “back of the envelope” type of a calculation – the article writing took the majority of the effort.
The entire objective of the game Spintires is using a large truck to deliver logs from a logging camp to a sawmill. Of course, the game part of this is these trucks are typically in large swamps, with virtually non- existent roads and the ground being only slightly more solid than liquid water. Travel speeds are slow, you get the truck stuck extremely often, and sometimes can waste real journeys of over an hour by your truck rolling over unexpectedly. It's very dwarven in that aspect.
For the rest of this document, I’m going to base everything on the C-255 truck in game. I chose this truck for two reasons - It is based off a real life truck -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KrAZ-255 , and it has dimensions readily available. I am using dimensions from
http://www.mortarinvestments.eu/products/jeeps,-trucks-a-motos-3/kraz-255b-23The first thing I noticed about this game is that trucks are extremely slow, even when considered against their real life counterparts. They have an indicated top speed of about 30-40 km/hr ( as run in proving ground mode). In tests, a C255 in game does about 30km/h max on a paved surface with highway tires, in top gear. This is well below the 71 mph listed top speed (114 km/hr). I don’t know if this is a physics engine limitation, or just to make it a better “game”, or a bad oversight. You will spend most of the game in low gear going approximately 10km/hr.
All this leads to the first element of cost. Labor time. I spend most of my time in multiplayer. It takes two good players a little over an hour to pick up and deliver a full load of logs (8 pts of logs) , provided they start with a truck like the C255 and don’t have to unlock anything. So for sake of this analysis
1 load of logs = 1.25 hours x 2 people = 2.5 man hours
This is with manual loading of logs into the truck using truck mounted crane. I am going to make an adjustment for unloading in real life and add 15 minutes time for each driver to make the final adjustment 3.0 man hours total.
I am assuming the player character is a logger, and is not a full time driver. The closest match in the Bureau of Labor and Statistics database is a “Logging Equipment Operator”
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes454022.htm#st . The hourly mean wage is $17.52 an hour, so the labor cost to deliver a full load of logs is:
3.0 man-hours x $17.52 / hr = $52.56
This of course doesn’t include any other administrative costs.
The second element of cost will be fuel. In most maps, you have to drive so many indirect ways to get to your load, then drive another bunch of indirect paths to the final goal. A look at a river map shows a player must drive roughly 4 KM with a load of logs to deliver it.
I did a test of fuel mileage on relatively flat, fast surfaces. The 255 with a full load of medium logs burned 60L/1 km.
So:
2 trucks x 60 L/1 km x 4 km = 480 L of fuel total
These trucks run diesel, and it assumed that they run regular onroad diesel. The US Retail Diesel price is $2.21/gallon or $0.58/L.
For 480 L the cost is
480 L x $0.58 = $278.4
So each full delivery would cost at least $278.40 + $52.56 = $330 USD
Adding a profit of 30% for the logger, this comes out to $429.
Now,the big question is- can this be a sustainable business if the load costs $429 to deliver? How can this question be answered? First I’m going to estimate the retail value of the load of wood.
Let’s look at a picture of the side of the truck.
The truck is known to have a bed length of about 4.5 M, and a width of 2.5 M. I estimated from the picture the bed length was 350 pixels. The overall log length is estimated to be uniform at 9 M.
Lets look at a picture of the loaded logs. I’ve identified 3 “sizes” of log. I’m just doing a quick analysis here – so I’ve classified logs into small, medium or large. The logs are turned into boards, so the unit there is the “board foot”, or a finished standardized board.
So we have the following log diameters 650mm, 500mm, and 310mm. The only log volume calculator I can find is in feet, so I convert those to inch diameters of 25.6”, 19.7”, and 12.2”. Using the log volume to board foot calculator at
http://ww.woodweb.com/cgi-bin/calculators/calc.pl Number Log Diameter Length (ft) BF/log Total BF
3 25.6 29.5 940 2820
7 19.7 29.5 555 3885
15 12.2 29.5 215 3225
Total: 9930
The final amount on the truck is roughly 9900 board ft. These logs all appear to be hardwood.
A google search provides a hardwood board-ft price of about $4.00. This is a retail price to consumer, so you can expect retail markups to be near 100% on almost anything compared to wholesale from logger to retailer. So the wholesale price the Spintires logger is selling this load for is going to be half of that.
That’s $2 a board foot out of the sawmill.
I will assume that the log is worth about 50% before the sawmill, so that’s a little over a $1 a board foot in log form. The sawmill obviously has processing time in each log, which I’m not going to bother estimating unless people really want to see it. The waste from cutting is already factored into the international type of board ft calculation.
So
2 trucks x 9930 board ft/truck x $1.00/board ft = $19860
So, the $429 delivery cost per two trucks full is a small % of the total of approximate value in each truck. It is reasonable to think that the Spintires simulation business would be “feasible” to exist in the real world.
This has been an interesting exercise for me. I have designed a few small games myself, and have worked on small economic simulations for games. I always kind of started at the end point with a player perspective - for example, "How many monsters should a player have to kill before earning a sword?" rather than trying to model the game with the real world in mind. I don't believe the designers of this game really spent much time thinking about whether it would be economically feasible to log in this manner, but if it was a realistic simulation of a real process
shouldn't it be feasible?
If you enjoyed reading this, please let me know. I had fun making it, I've done similar exercises on other games but have never really typed them out.
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Topic: Video Game Economics - Spintires (Read 1442 times)