Out of curiosity and intrigue, I will pose three questions to anyone who stumbles along this thread:
1. What is your favourite game genre to develop?
2. What is your favourite game genre to play?
3. What do you think is the most popular genre in the marketplace at the moment?
Ok, it's not all for curiosity. Kind of looking to survey developers and want-to-be developers and whether they think they are their own typical player and whether they find that they enjoy playing what they may enjoy developing.
my answer would be...
1. no idea :/ I guess for me it would be more about the art and how much creativity is involved rather than a particular genre. I mean, have you seen mini ninjas? How awesome would it be to work on that! Anyway, it wouldn't even matter if it was even pixel art or low-polygon stuff, as long as it's interesting work. But if you put a gun to my head, I would say casual puzzle game.
2. online FPS with focus on class based teamplay with objectives.. so Enemy Territory:Wolfenstein, Quake Wars, and Battlefield 2.
3. most popular? Man, that's a hard one (that's what she said). Wasn't Wii sports the title with the most number of sales ever? Ok, it was lumped in with the Wii, but there are games that have some absurd numbers of sales that just don't register in the regular gaming websites that I visit (which cater for a certain niche, I reckon). Heck, how many sales did Bejewelled get? Over 25 million, wasn't it? By that count, I would say casual games.
hrm
1. If I was employed in the industry, I'd have to say working on an RPG would be awesome. In fact, working on just about anything would be awesome. However, as a wannabe game designer I think genres can be potentially restrictive, and in my own time tend to ignore them as much as possible.
2. RPGs that aren't too heavy on stats, or FPS games that aren't too heavy on the shooting. Or just about anything within the two genres with an interesting gameplay hook, or an engaging narrative.
3. I would hazard a guess that casual, family-oriented games are probably topping the charts right now :)
-Soul
1. RPG/RTS and RTSRPG or Arcade style games (platformers) or (my long time project) a MMOFPSRTSRPG space sim..
2. FPS/RPG/RTS - It depends what mood I'm in. I like elements of all of them but I don't like some elements of each.
3. Either FPS or RPG. Most new games are FPS due to the graphics quality that we develop now (in comparison to 5-10 years ago). RPGs have the WoW, TES and Fallout games. It is also shown more and more in non-RPG games that there are RPG elements coming in (however minute). For example: Red Alert 3's powers/command thingos w/e they were called. Games that weren't meant to be RPGs ended up having lots of RPG elements - it is what people want these days, the ability to customize their game to their play style.
Thats my 3 sentences worth..
-- Sabre