it's pretty much like frob says, spend an few weeks/months building and re-playing the same game over and over. don't care how much of a fan you might be, it burns you out in the end.

Frob And slicer that's not what I meant. Of course after countless hours of dev you tend to feel burnt out on the idea. I was referring more to the time before you even get started on developing or coding anything,
coming up with a general concept even tho it, does not actually appeal to yourself as a gamer.

Again, I bring my example from op how Ive been having a reccuring craving to make a strategy game... Even tho I never play strategy games and they don't really hold my interest much.

Of course developers write games they wouldn't want to play otherwise Zynga would not exist.

Of course developers write games they wouldn't want to play otherwise Zynga would not exist.

What's your logic there? I really had fun playing Castleville, I'd definitely design a game like that. So if I fee that way, the people who actually developed Castleville could too.

Frob And slicer that's not what I meant. Of course after countless hours of dev you tend to feel burnt out on the idea. I was referring more to the time before you even get started on developing or coding anything,
coming up with a general concept even tho it, does not actually appeal to yourself as a gamer.

Again, I bring my example from op how Ive been having a reccuring craving to make a strategy game... Even tho I never play strategy games and they don't really hold my interest much.

that just means you'll get burnt out faster. sure, if you work at a game company, you're not likely to have too much say in what is made, and you'll have to make the best of it you can, but in those cases it can be easier to see it as a job, rather than a passion for you to create. either way you'll likely get sick and tired of it in the longrun, or you might find new appreciation for the game(then get tired of it.)

and yet I happily finished my first (terrible) strategy game. Ho hum

I think it happens as a result of ignorance. With any subject, the more you know about it, the more you realize you don't know much about it. So I guess if you don't play many modern strategy games, you don't realize how complicated and amazing the best ones are, so you have nothing concrete to scare you away. But what if you want to make a fighting game? You probably know you're going up against stuff like Smash Bros., Soul Calibur, Street Fighter and Tekken, so you feel discouraged, and less imaginative.

But also, we all know making a game is nothing like playing one. I play a ton of fighting games with friends, but I hate the genre in general. Characters are always either stupidly unbalanced, or just a collection of reskinned copy/paste jobs, and there's always some game-breaking move that every character has (Leg-sweeping in Mortal Kombat, rolling in Smash Bros). But I love making them. They're straightforward, and you can knock out most of the hard stuff very quickly. So maybe you just enjoy what goes into making certain games, but don't enjoy playing them.

Personally, I wouldn't care to make games I wouldn't play. While I have a programmer background, what attracts me to game development is the game design aspect (I don't really care about engine programming...) so the kind of game I'd be making would play a role in whether I'd be excited or not.

So yeah, I'd rather have an ordinary programmer job with twice the pay and half the stress than working on games I wouldn't even look at in a game shop. Right now, I prefer working on my own little project and go indie if it looks like I got something. Now, if Blizzard, Bethesda, Arenanet or Nintendo opened a studio in Montréal, my interest for joining the industry would go way up.

Making != playing. So yeah, the fun you might get from making a particular kind of game you might not get by playing that particular kind of game, because the two processes are completely different.

Maybe I'd enjoy making a D&D based videogame, even if I find that their rules simply don't fit in current games and their interactive possibilities (80s and 90s yeah, but today? We can put realtime interactions anywhere we want, without dice rolls at all).

I'd probably enjoy making something akin Mount & Blade (original or Warband), yet I'm not the kind of guy who would play it to the extent of making a kingdom (hell, I'm don't even try to besiege anything because it takes so much time!).

In any case, making is a different experience than playing. So its no surprise that you would enjoy making something rather than playing it. If you like to eat chocolate it doesn't means that you'd also like to fabricate it, for example.

Making != playing. So yeah, the fun you might get from making a particular kind of game you might not get by playing that particular kind of game, because the two processes are completely different.

Pretty much this, especially if you tend to geek out on development side of making videogames. The fun and challenge of writing a pathfinding routine for 20 individual units in an RTS doesn't mean that you necessarily like to play RTS games, or (in my case) learning to to make an input processor for fighting game commands doesn't mean that I like / am good at fighting games.

The side benefit to all this is that there are tons of ideas, techniques, etc. that are transferrable across genres, so there's almost always some gain involved.