Summary: I've found that combining emphasis on creativity along with market research to be a good focus. If you're interested in strengthening your creativity muscles, you could check out Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit." I finished reading the book this past spring, and now I've got the PhilosophersNotes summary to refresh and remind myself of the key ideas. Here's a direct link to the PDF if you want to download the summary. With that in mind, here's a super simple rundown on market research from Steve's original article (which you can read on his blog here): I’m not really too particular about how I conduct market research. There are so many variables that you can get bogged down in analysis paralysis if you overdo it. I take a pretty light-weight approach to it. Mainly I look for two things: What are people already buying? Where are there gaps with relatively high demand and low supply that I could potentially serve? Sometimes it’s hard to answer #1 directly because you probably don’t have access to other people’s sales figures. But you can often use other public data to make some educated guesses. I didn’t know other game developers’ sales figures, but I could go to download sites and see how many downloads each demo had and how many games there were in each category. I could then calculate average downloads for each game in a a particular category. If I saw that one category had triple the per game downloads of another category, well… it wasn’t hard to surmise that one genre might make me triple the sales of another genre.
