

Why Won’t Developers Listen to Your Game Idea? - codebungl
http://www.jeffwofford.com/?p=783

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jonnathanson
This is good information, but there's something else that probably needs to be
said: nobody wants to get sued.

I've worked only tangentially in the games industry, but I worked for many
years in TV development. And people often asked why we (NBC or FOX, in my
case) wouldn't accept unsolicited submissions of show ideas. The primary
reason we didn't is that it was a legal minefield. If you read someone's
submission, and you rejected it, and years later you developed a show with
even the slightest _hint_ of an element from that concept, the person who
submitted it could sue you. And, even if he wouldn't prevail 9 times out of
10, he'd still eat up a lot of time and work and money in the process.

The problem is that there's really nothing new under the sun. Every basic plot
imaginable has been conceived. Every core concept shy of the truly insane or
inane has already been pitched (and even those have been pitched, trust me).
The chances that your unsolicited submission will bear more than passing
similarities to a concept already pitched, or already in development, are
quite high.

Aggravating this problem is the fact that people have sued over the most
facepalmingly generic bits of supposed intellectual property: character
names(!), broad-stroke concepts (i.e., "I sent NBC an idea about superheroes;
NBC made a show about superheroes!!!11!1"), and so forth.

At the end of the day, opening an unsolicited envelope is more hassle than
it's worth. I can't say if this is a motivating factor for game developers or
publishers, but I imagine it would be.

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wiradikusuma
Can't they just put disclaimer, "If you insist on submitting your idea, oh
well, thanks. We might agree to realize your idea or part of it, but you must
know that we can't compensate you in any way."?

~~~
jonnathanson
The problem is that there's not a central hub or gate through which all
concepts and submissions must pass. It's not like a website, where you simply
post a disclaimer or agreement that everyone must encounter before submitting
something. People can theoretically try to submit to TV networks in any number
of normal to bizarre ways: email, snail mail, stalking a development exec and
accosting him at Starbucks, throwing a package over his fence at home, etc.
You name it, and it's happened.

It's nearly impossible to retroactively disclaim things submitted through such
varied means. So the safest course of action is just to send things back, or
disregard them altogether. If someone's really written a brilliant
masterpiece, then he should get an agent and go in through that door.

It's an imperfect system, but it's a system born of necessity. Even big
networks typically have scripted development staffs of no more than 10 to 15
people (sometimes considerably fewer), all of whom are spending 100% of their
time working on existing projects, or hearing pitches from agencies and
producers. These people don't have time to read everything that comes their
way through the mail, even if they wanted to, and even assuming that more than
1% of what comes in unsolicited is actually worth reading. And none of them
wants to bear any legal liability. (Imagine greenlighting a show about
superheroes, then opening a random envelope and finding a pitch that's very
similar; talk about a potential "Awww, fuck" headache moment).

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SimHacker
Ideas for games are not at all scarse. They are not at all hard to come up
with. They are not at all unique. In fact, ideas for games are much more
trouble than they are worth. Game developers don't need any more ideas. The
only way to ship a game on time is to brutally throw away as many ideas as you
can, until you have the smallest design that will actually work and be fun,
and then EXECUTE on that.

Execution is what matters, not ideas. Everybody wants to be the "idea guy,"
because they think that's the easy part, and the glorious part, where they
just sit there and tell other people what to do, and get all the credit. But
there are very few positions in the industry for "idea guy", and the only
people who get them have a proven track record.

I work for Will Wright, who is an idea guy. It's my job to execute on his
ideas, come up with prototypes that let him play around with the ideas, and
then throw them away and start from scratch when he gets different ideas, or
rewrite, iterate and polish the good ones until they're production quality.
The designs he gives me are high level enough that there's lots of room for
creativity, filling in the gaps between the design and the implementation. But
the only reason I get the privilege to exercise any creativity is because I'm
also executing on the hard part: implementing the code.

If you don't want to actually do the heavy lifting and grunt work of writing
code, and if you aren't willing to throw it all away and start from scratch
when the designers decide they want something else, or work on the complex,
tedious plumbing that nobody will notice, then it's going to be very hard for
you to find a job in the games industry.

The best thing to do is to write your own game, all by yourself. Then you will
have something to show. But nobody in the industry wants to hear your idea, if
you don't have something to show that works and is fun, because it's just a
distraction from executing on their own ideas.

But now days it's entirely possible for one person or a small team to actually
execute on their own idea and produce a good game, like Minecraft for example,
as long as they're willing to do the hard work, and not just into it just
because they think it will be an easy, glorious job to be the "idea guy" who
tells other people what to do and takes all the credit.

And for god's sake, if you have no intention of doing any programming or other
hard work, and you are just looking for a programmer to do all the "easy" work
for you for equity instead of salary, now that you've done the "hard part" of
coming up with the idea for the world's greatest game or iPhone app, then
please fuck off and die. There are already enough narcissists polluting the
games industry, thank you: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Games>

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michaels0620
That's pretty amazing that you get to work with someone like Will Wright at
such an early point in the creative process! Has it given you ideas for your
own games?

You hint at one of the other issues that arises. So much of what a piece of
software becomes (game or otherwise) is formed as it's being written.
Something sounds great, you implement it, it doesn't look so good but leads
you to something else, etc. In the end the game might end up being 50% of the
original and 50% from prototyping.

One of the things that gets me is the person who says "Implement my idea. I
don't have any money to pay you but you can have a percentage of the profits".
Is there a single word that means naivete + ignorance + hubris? This is
especially true for those who say they have a great idea for a game, but don't
want to tell you because they don't want you stealing it.

~~~
SimHacker
I fell in love with SimCity when I first saw it in the 80's, and I got a
chance to port it to Unix as a third party contractor. Although it didn't make
a lot of money, it did show I could make something work while respecting the
original design, so he later hired me to work on The Sims.

His approach to game design is very exploratory, which involves making a lot
of prototypes, playing around with them to evaluate the game play terrain, and
then climbing the fun gradient towards the high points, and looking around for
new ideas from that perspective. He purposefully designs for emergent
behavior, but nobody has any way of telling what that behavior will be without
actually playing around with a working prototype. It's the kind of stuff you
can't just imagine, that you have to experience. So I would say the end
product is more like 5% of the original idea, and 95% from prototyping!

The kind of person who wants to do the fun part for glory and have other
people do all the hard work is very common, and I've run across many of them.
It's a form of narcissism: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism> . Will is
not at all like that: he's very humble and willing to listen to anything
anyone has to say, and very good at explaining his ideas, and that's why he's
been so successful, because people enjoy working with him, and enjoy playing
his games. Though I don't know him personally, I get the impression Notch is a
lot like that too. (Although I'm sure his lawyers wish he wouldn't shoot his
mouth off all the time! ;)

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jwcacces
Because everyone has ideas.

Your ideas aren't worth anything. Execution is worth something. Game designers
are doing the execution themselves, so you're not worth listening to.

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wccrawford
I think the reasons depend on the company, too. Large companies have different
reasons than indie devs and amateurs.

As an amateur game programmer, I have a -ton- of ideas. I don't need anyone
else's because I've got too many of my own.

As an indie dev, I imagine that the above applies, plus they already have a
game or 2 released in a certain genre, and changing genres can be problematic
with the fans.

As a major developer, you can break the 1-genre rule, but you become a target
for lawsuits, as jonnathanson noted in another comment here.

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5hoom
The people making the decisions probably spent a long time wanting to realise
their ideas too. If an idea isn't good enough to convince you to work on it
day & night, it will be a hard to convince someone else to do so.

The authors advice is right: _"If you want to get your game made, make it
yourself"_. If your idea is good & you can show it in action you have a much
better chance of getting noticed than if you just post a wish-list on a forum.

[Edit: Is it just me timing out? Google cache: <http://goo.gl/ez5e4>]

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bitwize
About ten years ago there was a kid named Imari Stevenson. He had a gigantic
site dedicated to his game ideas which he hoped he would sell to Sega,
Nintendo, and Square. I won't get into the content in much detail. It suffices
to say that flaming breast milk was usable as a weapon in one of the game
proposals.

I told him the same thing that was written here, though I'm nowhere near a pro
game developer. I said, if you're so dedicated to these game ideas you will
probably have to write them yourself, and oh by the way, it isn't all that
hard to do. He basically ignored me and insisted that his skill was in concept
generation, not programming or art.

Some people just don't want to download GCC or the JDK and get cracking. They
have a GREAT idea, they want it NOW, and they think it's up to a triple-A
studio to make it happen. Yeah, only if you have brain cancer and can cajole
the Make-A-Wish foundation into helping.

These days the name "Imari" can still elicit fits of giggles from some of my
friends in the game industry. He's an "indie filmmaker" of sorts now, creating
low-budget CG films about women who can shoot flaming breast milk or
something.

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johnnyjustice
I agree with this author completely. To his point George R.R. Martin thinks
that fan-fiction is a bad exercise that doesn't force you enough out of your
element.

People write your own games and change them enough not get sued(hey, at least
you get to be creative)

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signalsignal
Idea guys are great when they bring lots of money.

