Does Balance Matter?

Some of you out there are probably familiar with the game Gamma World, for those of you that are younger or more familiar with the most recent release of it (quite fun btw) it is a very fun and very bizarre game. One thing that I find is that there are a lot of people who enjoy Gamma World in part because it is so crazy and to an extent because it is imbalanced. You can be a super mutant with radiation powers and have a suit of power armor alongside a crazy feral person with a sword, and oddly it doesn't matter too much. The game does somewhat assume frequent deaths, but really you can have people of wildly disparate power levels in the game and it will still be fairly fun.

Now some of it might be that Gamma World runs heavily off of the weird factor, IE a big part of the enjoyment is more the bizarre spectacle than say balanced gameplay. On a note with my own group, I have mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Deadlands, my group currently has a Deadlands game going. When I set up a Savage World jaunt for them briefly I got a few positive responses but a lot of negative ones. Now Savage Worlds is more balanced, and the response may have been more rooted in either a desire for familiarity or something similar but I found it interesting that by and large their reaction was relatively negative towards it. A few of them even commented that the relatively imbalanced nature of the game was part of the fun.

For the record my group does generally care about game balance and if someone has abilities that are dominating combats and the like we usually talk about either nerfing or altering how the abilities work. And I'm sure that's true in most games. Maybe the question should be if balance really matters but also what we mean by balance.