Saturated Topics, do they exist?

I think game authorship in a genre' is like novel authorship in some ways. There are many, many books of most genre', but you may enjoy the way a particular author portrays it, and have some authors you really avoid. I don't think you have to worry about oversaturating a particular genre' if you have a good game. On the other hand, coming up with some really unusual genre' may put a lot of people off. There are probably good reasons some genre' have been neglected/avoided.

I don't think you can say that one is generally more important than the other. What do you find more important?

Personally, I would like to create a game that is a huge commercial succes and a game (not necessarily the same one) that stands the test of time. I think the latter will be more difficult achieve, though.

I think that depends on what segment of the market you're talking about; I think that sticking to the European market, there are certainly more enduring games than there are breakout hits. There are only 3 breakout hits (Settlers, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride), but many games that are proven greats. I think you're way more likely to achieve the latter than the former.

If you're zooming out to the scale of the mass market, I think that's equally unlikely; the best sellers there are household names, or, in the case of Cranium, have a retailer aggressively pushing them. (Trivial Pursuit is probably an exception to this analysis).

I think that designing a game with an eye towards huge sales could be a frustrating endeavor; I think even if you design a game that could sell well, there's no way of knowing whether it actually will; it seems kind of intangible. Nothing wrong with trying, though!

To address the original question of saturated genres, my personal answer is that I tend to dive in to saturated thematic areas head-first, but I recognize that (a) I'm going to have to do something truly different if I want this to stand out and (b) even then, it probably will be very difficult to get it published. But if you keep these in mind, why not? There's a reason why saturated genres are saturated: people like playing games about pirates, the stock market, etc. But ultimately, you should make games about subjects that interest you, saturated or not; in my opinion, that's the only hope for making an exceptional game.

I don't know the history of chess, but I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to call it "crap"; what are your reasons for this assessment?

I think that chess is in a unique position by being so familiar: it can get away with complexity in a way that newer abstracts probably couldn't. In other words, if a new abstract came out that had as many rules as chess, it would probably not attract much interest. But all those rules have a payoff, in that there's also a great deal of richness to chess created by the asymmetric abilities of the pieces, whereas most abstracts I'm aware of have fewer piece types (speking generally here, obviously there are probably many exceptions). So, I agree with you that chess occupies a position of greatness in part because of the same self-perpetuating cycle that keeps Monopoly a big seller. But "successful" and "crap" don't need to be synonyms; chess may not be the greatest game ever, but I've always thought it to be quite good. And note that the behavior and play styles of world class chess players shouldn't really be used as a criterion for judging the game's merit.

-Jeff

About chess, I don't like it either. I am just bored to play chess, I simply have no interest to play chess. I played a lot of time and participated to some tournaments. Now there is just no replay value.

It would be more interesting if I could, for example, customise my army by selecting pieces from a list. Or use chess variation like nightmare chess and tile chess.