As a game developer, I'd argue that thinking along the lines of #2 is very dangerous. Great games have a ton of subtle touches and content that only a small percentage of players will appreciate. The trick is that each player will notice a completely different set of features/content, and it makes them really happy when it feels like the developers went out of their way to polish some little bit of the game.<p>Think of Super Mario Brothers, one of the best selling games of all time. There are a stunning amount of hidden areas, tricks etc (even using an emulator with save+load, and a guide, it's not easy to explore the entire game world), but this is very closely related to how stunning the game world felt (especially for the time). An average player may only come across 10-20 secrets in the game, out of hundreds, but each time they'll have that warm fuzzy feeling where they are thinking, wow, they went to all the trouble to put this here?<p>Another good example is No One Lives Forever. They did a TON of funny lines with the guards talking to each other and notes that were left around (eg a note to employees saying no fornicating in the evil death ray storage facility). The chance of picking up on each of those was low, say around 10%, but since there were hundreds the game world, each player will have 20-30 moments where they were exploring some back room and they found something cool, which gave the game world immense amounts of character. If they instead made 20-30 moments and forced the players through them linearly, it would have felt cheap.<p>I'd also like to mention that, unlike many forms of software, it IS actually a requirement that game developers have fun making the games they play, because otherwise making the game itself fun is pretty much impossible. I don't think it's a coincidence that the developers of Diablo 2 took the time to put in the cow level, which most people never see, and spent a huge amount of resources tweaking leveling up for characters all the way up to level 90+, at the same time that they made such a fantastic game for the average player. If they made the game specifically for the average player, I think a lot of that magic that goes into development would have been lost, and paradoxically the game wouldn't have been as fun for anyone.<p>Of course you have to be somewhat rational about where you spend your development resources, but if you try to make sure that the majority of the players see the majority of the content, it's so easy to make a sterile game. And if you are often completely irrational about where you spend your time in the name of being artistic, it's surprisingly easy to make a game that is actually fun and gets attention. The difference in sales between the former and the latter, without a marketing plan B, will be orders of magnitude.<p>(I agree with the rest of your post)