It happens quite often that people misunderstand what I’m saying. Maybe that’s why I have just 300+ posts after 6+ years. I avoid writing with sense to avoid confusion. I have no idea what made me write something in the first place, sorry.
So anyway, to explain in detail what I mean:
There is no definition on what a good game is. Some will say that a good game is a game that sold well. Others will say that the number of active players shows the quality of a game. Some might say it’s both those things combined. Opinions are opinions.
From my point of view, as a gamer, I care mainly about the game itself only then about the sales (if a game has a low number of players I won’t have enough options to play it with others). Does a developer studio see it the same way? I seriously doubt that. A game developer studio wants to build a franchise that is popular and sells well, so when the next entry in the franchise gets released people will buy it. I am not saying that is a bad thing. This is how it works and it is how it should be.
I have never owned a developer studio so I can’t base this on experience, I can just assume. My assumption is that when a new franchise is about to be build the decision making people in a company have to discuss what will sell. If it’s a completely new market you guess, you speculate what will sell. If it’s an existing market you obviously look at the competition. You look what makes a certain product or service sell and you try to incorporate this into your own product or service. You can call it copying, you can call it inspiration or influence.
Let’s say you want to get into the mobile phone market. There is a market in place already, there is demand, there is competition. You know that by building a basic plastic mobile phone with calling and text messaging capacity you won’t flood the market and you won’t build a successful franchise. So you look at the competition. But you don’t look at the pictures of their phones on Google or watch the reviews on YouTube. You buy their phones, give them to your engineers and give them some time with them. They then discuss the features, what they felt was good, what was bad and you try to build a great phone based on that.
Why would that be different with games? Game developers discuss other games. The game developers are gamers themselves. They are influenced by games long before they even start working at a game developer studio. What would a racing game fanatic bring into your fantasy RPG? A different view maybe, but that’s hardly the goal. If you would be making a fantasy RPG you would hire people that play those type of games. If they play them it usually means they like them. You would have RPG players as developers and RPG fans would be your target audience.
Now what does that have to do with Splash Damage (still, just in my opinion). If there would only be PC FPS players at Splash Damage that completely ignore other genres and systems they would probably be developing a pure FPS game for PC’s. It probably wouldn’t be innovative or ground breaking, but it would be a proper PC FPS experience with all the things a hardcore FPS no-life could ever dream of.
The people at Splash Damage aren’t all hardcore PC-only FPS-only gamers. They play console games, RPG’s, puzzle games, RTS and even Guitar Hero. The more they play all the other genres and systems the more they drift away from a pure PC FPS. Of course this is a good thing if you build a FPS with a very wide target audience. And, in my opinion, Brink will be exactly that. A fun teambased multiplayer FPS for the general gamer and will not be another Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. That’s the plan and the favourite games list is another confirmation for me. I would have been a little bit happier if I would know for a fact that someone is still trying to put some hardcore into Brink but I don’t see that on this list. Yes, as I said, there are many more people working at Splash Damage, but, it’s a trend.
One more thing (which should be obvious), since it seems like a requirement these days and you can’t state any opinion without it: I still think Brink looks great and will most probably be fun, I understand that people at Splash Damage will play whatever games they like, it should never be a requirement to like a certain game for you to work on something else. The decision making people at Splash Damage know what they are doing and know what they want to achieve. I’m no expert on game development, the whole post are just my opinions and speculations.
PS English is not my first nor second language, don’t assume I’m uneducated or simple minded by looking at my grammar.
Trendy smilie 
What better way to ring in a whole new year than by picking out our favorite games of 2009? Last year brought us some fantastic gaming experiences, with both sequels and original titles delivering The Fun in serious quantities. With so many games, we put it to our team to select up to three of their favorite games of 2009 and share them with all of you.
