Brian seems to ask this question a lot, so I thought I’d answer it:

I do have a minor quibble with this. Why focus on the “top 5″ games?

There are two answer to this: the dreamy answer and the business reality. The latter first. When you work for a large organization (as both Jeff and I do), you find that they really aren’t geared to think small. The PC and Console business is incredibly hit driven, and as such, publishers build all aspects of their organization towards their numbers.

When you come up with a game that’s only going to sell 20K boxes in an organization that’s used to selling 200K of their cruddiest console product, you’re going to get a lot of resistance, even if your 20K game would end up earning more money over the long haul. Every aspect of their business, from QA, Marketing, Distribution and Billing is designed for games of a certain size. Even if you can get them to make your game, you run the risk of being seen as a second class citizen inside the organization the whole way. And getting them to build a secondary distribution model for your one game is a challenge at best.

Earth and Beyond had many more subscribers than Meridian 59 when EA cancelled it. A smaller company could have ridden that subscriber pool to eventual success, but if you look at it from EA’s point of view, they probably figured they could take that group of developers, have them make Harry Potter Discovers Puberty, and earn a lot more money per dollar spent.

Developer expertise is hard to justify locking up in a low-margin product. Especially when, the smaller your subscription numbers, the harder it is to spin off your developers onto another product. One Anarchy Online dev shortly after ship told me privately that their studio was in ‘purgatory’ – making too much money to die, but not enough to work on anything else. Since then, they’ve been successful boosting their population, and have since been building new IP.

Then there’s the other reason: I dream big. Personally, I love the Combat Missions and Puzzle Pirates of the world, and I think I’ve got a few of those in me, but I’m not satisfied with games with small devoted fanbases. I want to build ideas that expand the market, and get a lot more people interested in online gaming. You’re not going to get there very fast making 10K population games.

But I also believe you’re not going to break that ground with endless men in tights games, either.