

The Value of Game Ideas - alexyim
http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/08/the-value-of-game-ideas/

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sjsivak
The idea may not be, but the moment it becomes a demo it can be worth quite a
lot. The story, characters and gameplay can be very valuable, it is how the
idea is sold to publishers. This is just like scripts in the movie industry.
Most publishers have internal studios, that could possibly be sitting idle.
While it is not often done, there is the opportunity for a publisher to move
on a developer's idea much faster than the developer could.

The video game industry is brutal, especially with people doing copy cat
projects. Look at the current farm games on facebook. The first one was
FarmTown, made by a small group. Now some of the facebook powerhouses have
released the exact same game with nearly identical gameplay and even similar
art (FarmVille from Zynga and Country Story from Playfish).

Or just look at the rivalry between Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

The execution is still worth much more, but I think there is still a need to
protect the idea.

~~~
lacker
This may be nit picking, but FarmTown hardly invented the social farm game.
The genre has been popular in China for a while now.

[http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/08/04/five-minutes-
ada...](http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/08/04/five-minutes-adapts-
popular-chinese-social-game-happy-farm-for-facebook/comment-page-1/)

Also, it's not like FarmTown is getting destroyed in the marketplace after
it's been cloned - they're still the third most popular game on Facebook with
18 million monthly active users (behind FarmVille and Mafia Wars).

<http://appdata.com/>

~~~
sjsivak
Sure, they probably were not the first ones to come up with the idea of
bringing a social farm game to facebook either. However, it is clear that once
Zynga and Playfish found this idea they could rapidly turn it around too.

It is a bit scary as a small developer to know that you need to share your
idea with publishers, but to also realize that they can turn around and dump
so much money on your idea that they could produce something much much faster
that you cant even hope to compete with them.

It is just a different climate than web based startups. Console game
especially are pretty much not possible without publishers, which is not
something a 3 man web startup ever really has to worry about.

If VCs were keeping tech teams in house that could potentially jump an idea i
think the startup community might see the value of ideas a bit differently.

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aplusbi
Game ideas are worth $0.008333.*

* A dime a dozen.

~~~
matthew-wegner
I've been cranking out reasonably full-size games every 8 weeks with a few
guys for Blurst.com, so we're in the idea generation phase pretty frequently
(Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, Minotaur China Shop, Time Donkey).

As a general statement I think it's fair to say that game ideas are worthless.
If you want to get semantic on it, though, I think the problem is that most
people think theme/treatment/context ideas are game ideas ("You wake up in an
insane asylum with no memories").

If you define a "game idea" as something that clearly states what the player
is actually _doing_ , from second to second, then I think game ideas have
worth. People who demand NDAs just to hear their brilliance as still full of
shit, obviously, but ideas distilled to the brink of execution have merit, and
can be bandied about in discussion in a useful way.

Of course, boiling a game idea down to that level of granularity is quite
hard, so if you have that done you've done much of the mental clarification
already.

~~~
xsmasher
At that point you may be talking about a game design, which is more than the
idea. Just as there's a long way from the idea of a program to the program
itself, there's a long way from a game idea to a game design.

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crux_
Coincidentally, the Ludum Dare contest just finished (I didn't enter this
time.) Here's a crapton of games, all written in less than 48 hours, and all
themed around caverns! :

<http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview>

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req2
I thought this would be more interesting, but it's just a rehash of the basic
"execution is key" message; the "game ideas" aren't even game ideas so much as
generic genre themes. They could just as easily work as pitches for books,
movies, or tv series. The mechanics are the message.

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endergen
This conversation comes up time and again.

The mistake people make in framing this conversation is that while some people
come up with high concept ideas and don't think about the execution. Most
people at least, myself and other professionals I've worked with(In game
development or web development) tend to come up with clever implementation
hacks as well as ideas. And really it's the cleverness that you don't want to
share, often you've spent much time figuring out and collecting economically
creative implementation details. It's these that we worry about sharing
easily, and really are what make an idea feasible beyond it's artistic merit.

I don't favor keeping all things to myself, just wanted to frame the debate
more succinctly to discuss the aspects of the debate separately.

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ekiru
Although I agree with the article's overall idea, his example of Okami and
Legend of Zelda as games with totally different ideas and similar game
mechanics is a horrible example. Okami's game mechanics are quite different
from Zelda's.

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hughprime
There must be some game ideas which are worth plenty on their own. Tetris, for
instance. Or... well, actually that's the only example I can think of. But
it's a big one.

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presidentender
Is there any arena in which the idea in and of itself is important?

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foulmouthboy
Patent law.

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presidentender
Doesn't a patent require an implementation?

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anamax
There's no implementation requirement for US patents, but there is a
requirement that can be satisfied by demonstrating an implementation.

