Imagine: Game Studio Director

So let's assume you just bought yourself a game developer company. You've got a team of bright, eager young programmers, artists and game designers--they can do anything! But you've got to do it in a year. What do you do? First, stock the fridge with drinks with high caffiene content. Next.. let's figure out what you're developing.

Let's start with platform. How about some worldwide sales numbers?

• PS3: 12.8m
• Xbox 360: 19m
• Nintendo Wii: 24m
• Playstation Portable: 31m
• Nintendo DS: 122.4m

I think I know what platform I'd be targeting. (Hint: It's the one that has both the lowest 'next gen' presentation expectations, so we can get this thing done ASAP, as well as--ah, what a coincidink--the highest install base.) But what type of game to make? Yay, more research! Here are the top 5 games for the platform:

• Nintendogs: 18.6m
• Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: 14.7m
• New Super Mario Bros: 14.1m
• Brain Age 1&2: 23.7m
• Mario Kart DS: 10.4m

.. ew? Who really wants to make an RPG pet collecting simulator with platforming elements that keeps asking you ridiculously simple questions while driving you around in a go-kart? I know that's not something I'd want to put on my resume. If you look closer, you can easily see the connection between all of the titles on that list.. they're all Nintendo properties. Well.. gee.

So now that you've renamed your studio Nontardo, let's get back to picking a genre. What works well with a stylus and microphone, but doesn't require much in the way of graphics or screen real-estate to manage? No clue. Obviously, it's time to steal. So off to the store you go, and grab all of the games which have minigame collections built-in..

• Duck Amuck
• New Super Mario Bros.
• WarioWare Touched
• Feel The Magic XY/XX
• Brain Age

So after throwing Brain Age in the dumpster, you play through the rest and write down what works well and what doesn't. (You've also finally figured out that the top screen doesn't register touches from the stylus. Yay you!) Now you decide to build an RPG around those elements, and *yawn* time to call it a day.

What's left? Writing a design document, which outlines in painful detail what the game elements are, and how they all fit together. You need a writer to craft a narrative that fits around the whole bloody thing, and distracts people from thinking about the fact that they're deciding an endless stream of life and death battle with Tetris. And you get some marketing people on board to start pitching it to the folks at Walmart as the Halo 3 killer for the DS.

Then you make the product and sell it. Yay you.

More seriously, if you stop and think about it, it's amazing that companies bother putting the money they do into developing for Xbox 360 and PS3. The Nintendo DS is in so many more hands, and is so unbelievably cheap to develop for by comparison. From a business perspective, what more incentive do you really need?

NOTE: All sales figures and rankings gratuitously stolen from Wikipedia, which is always 100% correct, right?