This sponsored post is produced in association with Murka. 

Novelist Herman Melville once said, “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” While that may suggest you’ll have to stomach some failures to succeed, in today’s gaming marketplace flooded with imitations, originality is essential to stand out and find an audience worth serving. And the safe bets that companies often rely on aren’t always as “safe” as they may seem.

Take, for example, Murka, the mobile game maker behind Slots Journey and Scatter Slots. In the summer of 2011, the company couldn’t find an opening in the lucrative, yet, crowded online gambling simulator business. However, after researching their competitors, Murka discovered how it could differentiate its product from other gambling games online: By taking players around the world.

Slots Journey stayed true to the Las Vegas experience of pulling the handle in the hopes of winning big, but uniquely constructed the game with challenges that took the player to Ancient Egypt, China, the Caribbean, and more. Murka continued on with the idea of slots being used as a tool to achieve various special goals rather than being the only goal, in the fantasy based game Scatter Slots.

“By getting rid of the typical Vegas atmosphere with both graphics and game experience, we focused on users who were not previously interested in such games. And showed them another side of gambling,” Murka CEO Anton Krasnyy told VentureBeat. “We gambled, and won.”

Don’t be the “Bad Choice”

Murka’s success with Scatter Slots isn’t the only clear example of originality triumphing over predictability. Randy Pitchford, the head of Gearbox Software, spoke at the 2013 D.I.C.E. Summit about the company’s success with the Borderlands series. In his speech, Pitchford discussed the lesson applied to the first-person shooter/role-playing game hybrid.

“If consumers are given a few choices, the choice a person makes suddenly becomes ‘the good choice’ and the product the person didn’t choose becomes ‘the bad choice,’ Pitchford explained. He used this rationale to explain console fanboyism, such as someone buying an Xbox 360 over the PlayStation 3, causing the latter to be viewed as the “bad choice.”

Pitchford’s advice to developers was to avoid putting their games in direct competition with other games and find a marketplace of their own.

“We don’t like going head-to-head with good things because we don’t want to be the loser. We blended genres in Borderlands so we were the only choice — we couldn’t be the loser among consumers’ choice. It’s not a Coke or Pepsi decision — it’s a yes or no decision.”

By experimenting with different genres, Borderlands went on to become a juggernaut for Gearbox and publisher 2K Games. The 2012 sequel Borderlands 2 has gone on to sell over 12 million copies.

When you sacrifice creativity for marketability

Pitchford’s advice about finding your own niche to dominate is sound advice. However, not all gaming companies take this lesson to heart.

Insomniac Games learned the hard way about how mass-appealing your game could lead to a bland product when it developed Overstrike for EA. Originally revealed at the 2011 E3 show, Overstrike won the attention of the public and the gaming press with its stylized cartoon art style and over-the-top presentation. The four-player cooperative third-person shooter wasn’t seen again until 2012, where the name and everything else about the game was heavily reworked. Now called Fuse, the once memorable game now had generic realistic visuals and a sci-fi/military theme common in any shooter.

The reason why Insomniac overhauled Overstrike into Fuse, as explained by creative director Brian Allgeier, was to make the game appeal more to an older crowd. Fuse failed to appeal to an older audience, or any audience for that matter, as critics panned the game for being uninspired with poor sales following its 2013 release.

Insomniac president Ted Price described the failure of Fuse as a learning experience; convincing the developer to stay true to its roots in developing “colorful, vibrant games with an edge.”

Diversity: The route to originality

With success tied to originality established, the question now is how to spark creative thinking in game development.

Professor David Stark researched the development teams behind the most successful and innovative games and the qualities they shared. From 1979 to 2009, over 23,422 titles were analyzed, along with developers’ career backgrounds and work relationships with past colleagues.

Some of the patterns Stark noticed when conducting his research was that the teams behind innovative games were diverse in background. He explains:

“Say you put a team of developers together and you ask them to be inventive, but they’ve all been exposed to the same things in the past, i.e. they’ve worked on similar games previously or for the same companies. Well, it’s not very likely they’ll come up with something new.”

But by hiring people who have been exposed to different things, the chance for innovation increases dramatically. Sometimes, a diversified group could lead to tensions regarding ideas. While the thought of friction within the workplace sounds haunting, Stark explains it’s actually beneficial to development, as long as there’s a social structure to support it.

On how these principles could be applied to other industries, Stark had this to say:

“We say you need a diverse mix of staff and enough social structure, i.e. enough people who have worked together in the past within that team, to make innovation work – and on top of that you need people in the organisation to say ‘don’t rush it.'”

As the results show, striving for innovation is more prosperous than playing it safe. To rephrase Melville’s quote, “It’s better to succeed in originality, than fail in imitation.”

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