Ex WoW dev explains - game ideas are worthless

hey welcome back everyone it's Coffee time make sure you grab a nice beverage to enjoy we're gonna be talking about game ideas this is probably where it all starts you've been a game player or you've been maybe in another field you've been a filmmaker or a writer or you aspire to be a storyteller or you basically have always just enjoyed games and you want to get started making your own video games so you basically go huh I've got this great idea no one's ever thought of it before it's gonna be fantastic I'm gonna get in there and I'm gonna pitch the idea to the studio and they're gonna be blown away and they're gonna make it well I hate to tell you that in all my experience being a CEO of game publishers and game developers as well as a designer and programmer and artists and that ain't just gonna happen that way it just doesn't nobody cares about your idea that's the cold hard truth of it all now let me explain that a little bit so before I do that let me give some background so I have a lot of experience in the industry I've been making games since I was in college even before in high school and I've worked at the biggest companies and launched the biggest franchises I was team lead for world of warcraft I also worked on Starcraft Diablo 2 and a raft of other games for interplay and Naughty Dog so I'm here to tell you that if you have a great game idea that's wonderful but it's not worth much the idea itself I mean anybody can think of an idea you can sit there you know in your car in your shower and dream anything up you want you can even write it down maybe you'll write like a 60 page document on it because you're so passionate about your idea and you walk into the studio and use and you manage to get an appointment with the lead designer or the CEO you slap the papers down say I've got a great game idea well the first thing they're gonna ask you is that's wonderful here are the other great game ideas we get and they're going to show you a submission folder of everything that people have sent them over the years which is a mile high of all these different game ideas the first problem you're going to encounter is that it's a legal liability to accept game idea from people that you don't know or even your customers if you're running a game studio and you happen to get sent a submission for a game idea and let's say you didn't like the idea but years later you made something that was in the same genre or even remotely similar to what they sent you you could be in a lot of trouble because that person could make a claim that they gave you the idea in the first place and that you basically copied or ripped off their idea no matter how tenuous the connection this claim can be made and the more successful that your regain is at a studio the more likely is that someone is going to sue you for the idea if they happen to submit a similar idea to you sometime in the past these lawsuits don't often go in favor of the plaintiff the person who's complaining that you know they submitted the idea and that you stole it from them because it's very hard to prove but on the other hand Studios also don't want to take the chance and get bogged down in a lawsuit so they're not going to accept your idea off hand you'll basically get a form letter and I've written and I set this policy up at Blizzard where basically if you were to submit a game idea to Blizzard you get a note back and your submission back it says thank you very much but we haven't even looked at this nobody in development has seen this you know only our receptionist has or whatever and it's it's never gone beyond this point but unfortunately we can't accept idea submissions to our studio why did they do this it's because even though you may not win in a lawsuit against them later to prove that just because you had a four-legged main you know lead character in your game and Blizzard has a four-legged character in their next game that that's enough of a connection to sue them for it they still have to go through all the legal hassle to deal with that and if a lot of people do that it becomes a real weight on the organization so if you're starting a game studio or if you're running a successful one already you definitely want to protect yourself from that you don't want to accept ideas submissions on our own forums we have an end-user license agreement on forums Emad are calm the game we're building which says that anything posted to the forums the ideas are in public domain so if any user submits an eye on the forums which users are like to do nobody owns that it's free for taking for anybody and that way that keeps us out of any sort of legal legal jeopardy that you know might be incurred by having people post ideas on a forum so that's the first hurdle you're gonna have is that people just can't accept your idea or even review it because even if they look at it now they've put themselves in some kind of legal jeopardy potentially in the future doesn't happen very often and it doesn't often win but it's a big hassle to deal with okay so that's the first reason just it's not legally feasible for game studios to listen to your idea if they don't know you or if you don't have a business relationship or if you don't work at the company itself the second main thing is ideas are cheap I hate to say it I mean everyone's got a great idea for a book but unless you've written the book it's really not worth anything everybody's got a great idea for a movie but unless it actually gets made it's not worth anything everybody thinks they're a game designer right everybody I know thinks that game design is easy and they think you can go design a game they just need the right idea and that is so far from the truth there is nothing difficult about J daydreaming in your shower and coming up with a game idea that is the easy part the hard part is distilling that idea down into something that can be made practically with today's technologies and the limitations of game budgets and be entertaining enough to hook a large enough audience to be worth it so this is a real problem because you know a game idea maybe took you half an hour to think about on the bathroom sitting on the can but the actual distilling of that idea into a product takes years and millions of dollars and so that you know people are asking themselves studios and lead designers and CEOs when they see your idea or they hear your pitch at dinner they're thinking themselves why should I give this person the risk why should I give this person why should I take the risk of giving this person millions of dollars and backing of my studio to get this idea of May the first thing they're gonna ask is who are you and what have you done before have you ever taken an idea from the idea stage all the way to completion and nobody unfortunately even within a company is gonna take a risk on any one person's idea unless that person has a huge pedigree behind them and a demonstrated track record of delivering results because it is the journey that multi-year development journey from idea to execution to release that's the difficult part so some are you're saying well mark I hear you you know I understand but my idea is so good and I've put so much work into it I put so much work into it I have spent a year crafting a design document that lays out every detail of the game and you know basically I've done so much work therefore my idea is worth something no it's not I'm sorry you can spend a year working on a paper document and absolutely nothing happens sometimes designers that only work on paper and never have experience executing are called like paper tigers basically or paper designers they basically only are good for coming up on stuff on paper but they can't script they can't work with a team they have no experience they've never made a game before and they just don't know how to translate their idea into a workable game games are hugely complicated there are so many moving parts and so many disciplines to consider just because you dream up of a feature it doesn't mean it's actually possible or that actually will translate into fun or that even it's a team can get behind it because you have to get the team excited about your idea - okay so we said there's legal barriers to getting your game idea accepted by game studio and that there are is a simple reality of no one's going to trust you with millions of dollars on a game idea no game idea is so brilliant on paper that it's going to be a no-brainer back I mean that's just it's just never happens

Channel: Em-8ER Massive Planetary Wargame

Views: 45,516

Keywords: gamedev, world of warcraft, game development, programming, art, sound, design, game design, gamesbiz, game industry, videogames, video games, howto, how to, tutorial

Id: DSi2PkiLQLY

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Remember: You can be the ideas guy as long as you are also the money guy.

[u/[deleted]]

Well what am I supposed to do? Make a game with the resources and skills that I have? Keep making games until I get to a point where I can sustain myself and perhaps a small team? Treat it like a real business? Then finally make my dream game after the years of hard work that I needed to be able to become the person who is able to realize my dream?

Nah. I'm just an idea man.

[u/too_tired_bicycle]

This forum, and so many others, are full of guys with "awesome ideas!" I'm often perplexed by the fairly frequent posts from guys saying they've quit their job and are devoting themselves full-time to their incredible dream project of a game that they've literally spent their whole lives dreaming about creating and it's... a Super Mario Brothers clone.

The other thing you see all the time is the Stone Soup guy. "Hey guys, I've got this incredible idea for a game but know nothing about coding, graphics, sound, etc. So I'm gonna need someone else to do all that but, hey, my incredibly original idea for a game will be awesome! (it's a Super Mario Bros. clone)."

[u/fraudulentecon]

When I was much younger, I had hundreds of great ideas for warcraft 3 maps, and I'd go crazy on the forums. No one ever bit and I got discouraged. It wasnt until someone actually directly messaged me and said that everyone has ideas, you need to bring something akin to a starting point and get people excited about your work rather than beg for help.

Since then I've yet to ever ask anyone to work on something without me having put significant work into a project and have it in at least prototype status.

There's a triangle of possibility for game development:

Money Ideas Talent

Generally you pick two, though money kinda sorts itself out. But just ideas will leave people saying why should I care or pay me to care.

Keep ideas, but understand that they're not the currency, you are in either talent or money.

[u/scopa0304]

He briefly mentioned it, but a huge hurdle is “who is your target audience? How big is that target audience? What’s the Venn diagram of people who like your game idea, people who like your theme, and people who play on the platform you’re developing for?”

Basically, how much is it going to cost to make, and how much money can you reasonably expect to make? Where are you getting your data that you used to form those projections and can that data be trusted?

That’s not even going into the whole “can you actually make the damn thing?” Series of questions.

[u/GWinterborn]

My favorite ones are the people who won’t publicly mention their ideas, or most hilariously try to make people sign NDA’s, because they honestly believe the person they’d be telling, with any interest or ability to make games, doesn’t already think their own game concepts are better and more interesting.

The most likely reaction you’re going to get by demoing your game idea to someone you’re not paying to build it for you is a bunch of constructive criticism, comparisons to existing games, or rude deconstruction.

Nobody wants your ideas. Everyone has “better” ones.

However, in talking about ideas in a public space, they can be “distilled,” to borrow that word, much more quickly and from the broadest possible perspective.

[u/Ebon13]

TL;DR: Talk is cheap, action speaks louder.

[u/ScubaAlek]

See, I'd say that ideas are like a locked safe. They can have immense value (or none)... but that value is only realized through the effort you put in to bring forth that which lies within.

If you spend your life going "Check out these awesome safes, they are full of tremendous stuff!" then yeah... your ideas effectively have no true value because that value has never been realized.

A safe breaker without a safe or with a safe that holds nothing but air has no value either though. So the street runs both ways.

[u/NEED_A_JACKET]

The point to really stress is the distinction between how things look in your head vs how they are in reality. You can be so certainly convinced that something will work in your head, even as an experienced developer, but it just doesn't play right in practice. When picturing an idea you focus on the things that interest you about it or the cool aspects or what looks good, when the feature (or game) is working in it's perfect use case. It's easy to overlook obvious flaws and exploits.

It's best to approach new ideas with a more "pessimistic" method where your goal is to disprove it or break it before you even implement. You're much better at thinking why someone else's idea wont work than your own, so it's handy to try to be able to use that skill/ability on your own ideas. Someone else tells you their idea, they're super keen on it and only see roses, but you don't share the same excitement or vision as them because they're just explaining via words the idea (which they have a perfect visual picture of in their head). So when you hear the concept in a more objective form it's a lot easier to think why it wouldn't work.

​

It's 1000x easier to come up with a new idea than to implement a feature and scrap it because of problems you could have foreseen. It might seem negative or frustrating at first if you're shooting down all of your 'great' ideas before you even begin, but it's saving time. Your game is only as good as the ideas you throw out.