Should we be developing games that we'd play and love, or doing what is popular?

ScurvyKnave

Let me give some context for this question... I worked on some larger titles back in the day, and I used to focus on projects that were larger in scope and more technical in nature than some of the projects I work on now. After deciding to rather work on my own stuff individually (the satisfaction of doing what YOU want can't be beat) I somehow came to the conclusion that developing small, more casual games that take less effort and appeal to a wider audience were the way to go. By "somehow" I mean that I bought into the gold rush mentality of developing simple small games on mobile platforms after seeing the success of products that achieved enormous financial success.

My biggest problem I think is that my passion for those kinds of games is pretty low. The kinds of games that I'd play (and that I would genuinely enjoy to develop) are those that appeal to the more "hardcore gamer" audience. Casual games, although still a lot of fun to develop (even if they're not what I'd actually play), require a passion and interest in the genre that I just don't have.

I'm just curious if anybody has had the same thoughts (some people say "developed what YOU would want to play and people will come")?

TheFuntastic

I recently watched a talk by I think Ron Carmel (world of goo) who put it elegantly:

If you make a game you love and it fails you still have an achievement you can be immensely proud of. If you make a game for other people and it fails, well then you've just wasted your time.

Chris_Bischoff

Do it for the love-not even a question about it.
Your time is absolutely precious! To waste it doing something you kinda like because other people may like it is a waste.
But there is a also a psychological aspect to it. Games are art-and people 'know' when art has passion in it, or was done for a paycheck.

Merrik

TheFuntastic said:

I recently watched a talk by I think Ron Carmel (world of goo)

Link? :)

FanieG

I think it would depend on what YOU want out of it. Are you making games, because you want to make games, or are you making games with the intention of making money?

Chris_Bischoff

FanieG said:

I think it would depend on what YOU want out of it. Are you making games, because you want to make games, or are you making games with the intention of making money?

I don't think those have to be mutually exclusive. Make a game that you are passionate about, and sell it. Making games is HARD. It takes YEARS to get something out the door-you had better love what you do!

Tuism

Well, the world is often more a balance of greys than black or white. I personally am getting into making games because I love it, and therefore will make stuff I love.

But at the same time simply making stuff for yourself is a guaranteed way of not being able to make more games - it's not sustainable - and not just because you can't feed yourself with game making (and that's important to me) - because after one, two, ten, however many "made it for myself and noone else can appreciate it" projects, you will simply become demotivated.

In the end, games are made to be played. And people who make games only to play them themselves (everyone else's opinions be damned!) won't get their games played.

There is a lucky space where you make exactly what you like (everyone else's opinions be damned!) and your taste happens to intersect perfectly with a big enough niche to be appreciated and you go and be sustainable :) But that's, again, a lucky space (luck generated by hard work, most likely)

mattbenic

I think if you want to make money as well as enjoy what you do, you have to make compromises on both sides. You don't have to go making a AAA console FPS (which you're highly unlikely to make financially viable as an indie) because that's your favorite kind of game, and you don't have to go and make Clash of the Clans because it's the owning the top grossing charts. You can surely find something that you enjoy AND is more likely to be enjoyable by at least some niche of people. This is where prototyping wins as well, you can get take some of your ideas, hack them out in rough form and see which ones get a good reaction from players.

There is a lucky space where you make exactly what you like (everyone else's opinions be damned!) and your taste happens to intersect perfectly with a big enough niche to be appreciated and you go and be sustainable :) But that's, again, a lucky space (luck generated by hard work, most likely)

Plague inc is a really good example of this. One guy (with contract art) who had an idea for a game he really wanted to play, and made it. It just happened to be a huge hit as well.

TheFuntastic

@merrik:

It's an hour. Mostly stuff we've all heard before - but didn't feel my time was overly wasted. Was interesting hearing how world of goo made $13 million dollars. Nice to be an outlier!

dislekcia

I think my own stance would be: Make games people love. That could mean that you love it personally, it could mean that the people who play it love it, it could mean that the people who experience it love the message it carries or the way it forces them to think.

If there's no love anywhere in the experience of a game, all you're doing is spending your life bargaining for resources in an inefficient way.

Even when QCF was making games for clients, we would always find a way to make something that had love in it somewhere. If nobody loved it, we wouldn't do it.

SniperED007

We've made many games (over 20 completed & released for sale)

If you want to make games for a living then you pretty much have to make games the masses of people want to play on the platform you developing for. Pick small titles so you don't get bored of them as it's not something your heart is probably going to be 100% into.

Once you have enough income from those games you can start tackling the dream games you want to make that are probably a lot more ambitious and will take a bit more time as you want it to be perfect.

Be smart about your game choices, often it's the idea of the game more than the polish of the game that sells the game. We've made games that have literally taking us under a week and brought in just under a million rand.
We used the money to fund a project we wanted to work on, it took around 8 months, and so far brought in R 0.00. Whilst it may sound like a failure you need to try take away all the positives you can from every project and build on it to make your next project better and more successful. We learnt a lot of lessons from the project and also got a lot of exposure from it which has helped our future games to get more press on release which has helped tremendously. The skills we learned making that game helped us make Greed City in a fraction of the time, and that is brining in some very decent cash and growing nicely.