Polls And Their Help In Development

Recently, Mark Darrah, the executive producer on Dragon Age, took to Twitter to create a poll. He asked players if they would ever consider playing “a Dragon Age Tactics game,” referring to “tactics as in a game like Fire Emblem or XCom.”

As it turns out, 49% of people said yes, out of 12,415 votes. He specified what kind of tactics he meant just 4 minutes after the initial poll started, but votes were pouring in already anyway.

This does bring up an interesting notion, other than his creative idea, obviously: voting and development. In game development, everyone on a project focuses on their ideas, under creative direction. When considering something new, such as a new concept, or opinion, it’s not unheard of for a voting process to occur, so all the team members can be heard.

Now, that’s mainly an indie development thing. Larger studios work differently, generally.

That being said, what about the voting outside of the team, as in, the players? Mark Darrah was onto something when he created a poll to put out feelers. He wanted to know if his idea was worth pursuing, and he reached out directly to a mass audience of potential players.

Imagine what would happen if more developers put out feelers, and brought their creative ideas directly to the players, to see what would best entertain everyone. Imagine what that would accomplish in the industry, where people would go into their projects knowing they have mass appeal, right from the start.

Imagine the creative fuel…

What do you think about this? Should game developers take their ideas directly to players for approval, before investing time, effort, and money? Obviously, it wouldn’t always be the case, but do you think it would help from time to time?

Let us know in the comments below!