All right. You guys may be wondering exactly what we’re doing here. Yeah, you know it’s game development, but I wanted to take a minute to lay my personal philosophy out before you.

Game development is a conversation. It is a conversation between us, the developers, and our players. If we continually talk about subjects our players aren’t interested in, it just can’t surprise us if they eventually wander away to talk to somebody else.

I can hear the grumbles already. “Are you saying we should be completely ruled by marketing data? What are we – Electronic Arts?”

No, but I am saying that it will be up to us to express ourselves through our games while still providing games that the market wants…so we can stay in business. Because in the end, we are playing a game too – a real-time simulation-strategy game called “run a successful game development company and maybe get rich doing it”.

So don’t chafe against these restrictions – revel in them! Restrictions breed creativity! Artists like to fantasize about the day they will be so famous and rich that they’ll finally be able to do whatever they want and realize their true vision – even though every time an artist has done so, the results have been disastrous.

In the end, never forget that our job – our goal – is to try to make people happy.

So let’s do it!