[Intrepid Homoludens]

I'm gonna borrow a truism from the fashion industry and mod it for the games industry: You're only as good as your last collection game.

Evidently you have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. For Irrational, they clearly know and understand their market. By focusing specifically on their fanbase and their own uncompromised vision, it's at the expense of excluding any other potential market. Which means that the potential money made has a ceiling. They don't expect to make millions anymore, they accept this. They're depending on the reputation of their previous game.

If you're a fledgling developer it's trickier. You need to know what your market is and what other kinds of people might be drawn to your product. How to reach them? That's where publishers come in. But the publishers need to make money (and profit) as well, so they have their own ideas which may or may not conflict with yours. Big publishers tend to pay more attention to those devs who have a good great reputation, hence more potential sales and profits.

I doubt what Irrational is doing will become a long lived trend in the industry, mainly because it's become such a huge business. I'm all for publishers supporting more creative, original, and visionary games, but it's very difficult, partly because of how this industry has grown in the past several years. It's become so f#&king corporate like anything, and creativity, originality, and vision have been forgotten in favour of big name licenses, sequals, and movie tie-ins. Big mouthed people who most likely have never passionately played games have taken over, they have no intimate understanding and rapport with the games themselves. Remember that one company, Gathering Of Developers (GOD)? They had such noble intentions supporting bold new ideas but in the end they couldn't get their act together.