12 Lessons for New Game Developers

The article is solid and brings up a lot of good points, but I have a lot of beef with the first point:

Don't keep up with trends, keep ahead of them

OK, so other than this being a truism (I'm sure everyone would love to be ahead of all trends all the time), there's some serious flaws with this idea. Getting ahead of trends is different from jumping on trends early. Often times creating a trend is about as hard as creating a hit within a trend, so you're taking a very small chance for success and squaring it. I feel like you're better off examining the beginnings of trends and then adapting/simplifying them in a unique way (ie open virtual worlds -> Minecraft, or popularity of web-based Flash physics games -> Angry Birds)

 

Jumping on trends early has lots of real world success stories, typically by folks who then advance the trend in interesting/compelling new ways.

 

Well many points are completely inadequate for indies anyway like 3-4-5 for example. Audience is everyone, yes and niche games wouldn't exist? and so on. Overall I didn't find it really useful from my personal experience.

 

Great I'm not the only one. The article looked like points from all the web put together by someone who doesn't have real experience... and if he does, then by this article he might want to sabotage you

You have much higher chances to succeed by doing trend evolution, than revolution, not to mention creating new trend.

 

didn't find it useful at all either... for instance, indeed being ahead of trends is like almost impossible and to be fair if you are a small indie dev it's about 1% of chances it pays off...

 

I remember Steve Pavlina blogged about this years ago. He said don't go where the ball is, go to where it will be in the future. He got out of game development what seems like 10 years ago, so he must not have liked the trends.