I recently read an interesting comment from a director at Pixar, Andrew Stanton about his views about creating content in the animated movie industry.  Below is an excerpt from the article which I first saw on Ragnar Tornquist’s website:

The day we start thinking about what the audience wants, we’re going to make bad choices. We’ve always holed ourselves up in a building for 4 years and ignored the rest of the world, because nobody are bigger movie geeks than we are, so we know exactly what we are dying to see with our family and kids. We don’t need other people to tell us that. We trust the audience member in ourselves.

Anyway, I have to say that I agree with this statement full-heartedly.  I have personally experienced games being made at companies based solely on user testing.  It’s truly amazing to see a game designed with passion and excitement by the team involved and seeing it destroyed by integrating too much marketing, user testing, and what people think the audience wants.  What started out with some really interesting characters, storyline, and gameplay got morphed into something that was flat, boring, and in general no one on the team liked.

It always amazes me how marketing has the innate ability to turn something that is marketable into something that is completely unappealing based purely on market research.  Furthermore, I have also seen how “making what the audience wants” has severely impacted the development of a game that people on the team thought was good.  This in the end lead to detrimental results.

Beyond just making something that appeals to an audience, I think there is something to be said for creative content created by a sole visionary.  Having a singularity of vision is another reason why creating something for an audience can be particularly bad.