Custom vs Off-the-Shelf Simulations: Which Is Right for Your Organisation?

"The question isn't which one costs less. It's which one changes something, at a price you can defend in the room where budgets get argued about."

So you've decided on serious games. Good. The very next question is always the same one: do we buy something that exists, or do we get one built for us?

And the answer you'll get from most people is economic. Off-the-shelf is cheaper and faster. Custom is dearer and slower. True, and almost useless, because it isn't a money question. It's a fit question. Fit is what decides whether anybody behaves differently afterwards.

Here's how I actually think about it.

What Off-the-Shelf Simulations Offer

An off-the-shelf serious game has already been broken and rebuilt a few times. Somebody else absorbed the design risk. The mechanics work. The timing is known. The facilitator has seen the four ways this room usually goes sideways and has a plan for each of them.

That is worth more than it sounds. An untested custom game can fail in ways nobody saw coming, and a game failing in front of thirty senior people is a very long afternoon. With a proven design, the playtesting, the dead ends, the debrief questions that turned out to be rubbish - all of that was paid for already, and spread across everyone who has ever run it.

The documentation tends to be better too. Thorough facilitator guide, developed debrief, the edge cases written down by the person who walked into them first.

Now the catch. A game built to work for everybody has to be a bit vague on purpose. The behaviour it surfaces will be real and useful... just not necessarily the behaviour that is eating your organisation alive this quarter. The debrief will connect to work. It will connect to work in general, though, not to the thing your leaders were arguing about on Tuesday.

What Custom Design Offers

A custom serious game gets built from nothing, for one challenge, in one place. The mechanics are picked because they create exactly the pressure that makes your problem visible. Not because they travel well.

That precision is the whole point. You can bake in the actual constraints - the real trade-offs, the information one department has and another doesn't, the two objectives that quietly contradict each other. When that calibration is right, the debrief stops being an analogy. People recognise the game's world, and then they can't un-recognise it.

Custom also lets you put your own things inside it. Your frameworks, your vocabulary, the scenario that everybody in the building has a private opinion about. People engage harder when the game speaks their language back to them.

The costs are real and I'm not going to be coy about them. Six to twelve weeks of design for something that genuinely works. Several rounds of playtesting. A client relationship that can survive me coming back and saying the second version was worse than the first, because sometimes it is. And you're paying for all of that on your own.

The Decision Framework

Four questions. That's it.

How specific is the behaviour challenge? Influence without authority, decisions under pressure, handling conflict - these look roughly the same in every company on earth, and a proven game will surface them fine. But if the problem lives in your industry's particular weirdness, or in this exact strategic moment, or in the fact that two of your directors don't speak, off-the-shelf can't reach it.

How much does recognition matter? Some rooms, especially senior ones with strong opinions and long memories, need the world to feel like theirs. A generic post-apocalyptic scenario can land beautifully or it can get folded arms and "yes but this isn't really us". If you know your group is the second kind, custom earns its money.

How many people? One cohort of twenty, and custom is hard to justify with a straight face. A thousand leaders over three years, and the maths flips completely - the per-head cost collapses and the fit compounds every single time you run it.

How long have you got? Six weeks is not enough. A game rushed through design and under-playtested will fail worse than a proven game you didn't fall in love with. Six months, and custom is properly on the table.

The Middle Path: Off-the-Shelf with Contextual Customisation

There's a third door, and hardly anybody opens it.

Take a proven game. Leave the mechanics completely alone, because those have been earned. Then customise everything around them - the framing, the brief, the debrief questions, what the facilitator walks in already knowing about your business.

You keep the reliability. You get most of the relevance. For the majority of leadership challenges, it lands very close to where custom would land, at a fraction of the cost and none of the waiting.

That's what I do most of the time. The seven games are proven designs. But no session ever starts cold - there's a conversation first about this team, this challenge, this quarter. The debrief gets built around what I hear in that conversation. The game system is the part I already trust; your context is the part I have to go and get.

When Custom Is the Right Answer

Custom is right when the challenge is genuinely yours alone, when the room is senior enough that a generic world will get politely dismissed, when you're running it enough times for the maths to work, and when you have both the months and the appetite to be involved while I get it wrong a couple of times on the way to getting it right.

When all four of those are true, custom does something off-the-shelf simply cannot. Sharper behaviour data. Tighter debrief. A room that leans in because the world on the table is recognisably theirs. And at the end you own the thing, and can run it again for years.

Or You Could Build It Yourself

Which sounds mad until you notice that the expensive, slow part of a custom build is not the game design. It is me learning your world well enough to design for it. You already know your world.

So there is a five-session mentorship where you do the designing and I sit on the other side of it - five sessions, one to one, spaced deliberately so you go and playtest between them. You finish with a game you can run on Monday, you own it outright, and you can build the next one without me.

It is not for everyone. It needs your time and it needs people you can test on. But if you are the person who was going to end up briefing the custom build anyway, it is worth a look before you commission one.

Not sure which side you're on? Tell me what you're trying to change and why now. Come and have a conversation and I'll tell you honestly - including if the answer is "one of the existing games, next month, and don't spend the extra".

With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.