Area 161

OpEd: It’s safe to discuss your game ideas

// August 9th, 2010 // By LordBron // Game Dev, iDevBlogADay

One thing I’ve never understood is Stealth Startups. You know, they are those companies that don’t talk about what their doing for fear of people stealing their ideas. I can’t recall any stealth startup that has went on to major success.  A while back there was an #iDevBlogADay twitter discussion on whether it’s okay to share your game ideas. I think it’s perfectly fine to do so.

I know what some of you are thinking, “But what if someone steals your idea?”  I’ll admit that’s a possibility, but here’s what I think people forget:

There is only one you and only you can really execute your vision of your idea.

Let’s take a look at StarCraft II.  I mean, really.  It was 10 years in the making and anyone could’ve attempted to make another space alien RTS game, but people didn’t. “Well, they’re brand is too well known, they’re safe.” Okay, so a multi-million dollar franchise is not ripe for the picking, but that multi-hundred dollar to (the rare) hundreds of thousands dollar idea of yours is?

I was watching this Jeff Bezos interview and in it he talks about the iPad and says something to this effect:

Do you know what the #1 selling app on the iPad is? A game called Angry Birds where you launch birds at pigs.

The thing that caught my attention was the way he talked about the app.  It was in this, “Who would ever care about that?” Now, granted, he was talking about the iPad in relation to it’s competitive level with the Kindle, so that may be the reason for the tone. However, I think he partially thinks that Angry Birds is one of the silliest things he’s ever heard of.

Let’s take other ideas that have caught on. Jesse Schell (one of the few geniuses walking this planet) gave this talk at DICE. In it, he says something I whole heartedly agree with. To paraphrase:

If someone told you they were going to make a text based mafia game and make millions, you’d laugh at them. If people told you they’d make a game that required $80 plastic instruments to play, you’d have told them they were crazy.

He’s right. Mafia Wars and Guitar Hero weren’t successful because of the idea, but rather, the implementation of the idea.

I’m a comic book reader and there’s a great indie comic book that was around for 300 issues named Cerebus. Dave Sim was the creator and writer, while Gerhard drew these amazing backgrounds. When asked what would happen if the two got into a fight and split up, Sim responded in a way that showed he understood it was not the idea but the execution of the idea:

“We can each do our own version of Cerebus. His would look prettier, but mine would read better.”

It’s funny how we share ideas about other unique things, like children. No one ever “stealth parents”. You don’t keep a child locked up until the child becomes a perfect adult. Same should be for your games. Yeah, sure, have a 9 month germination period where you knock out the basic ideas and lock down your thoughts. After that though, throw it out into the world.

We’re hoping that in the next couple of months, we have a prototype of the mechanic for our first game. However, we can spill the beans on the game concept right now: Darts.

“Oh, darts have been done before!” You’re right and they’ll likely be done after us as well. However, we have a fresh idea that we think a lot of other people will enjoy in our version of darts over someone else’s. Plus, it’s better than yet another Zombie game, right? LOL

Maybe we’re right or maybe we’re wrong, but all we know is that it’s something we would like to play and currently can’t because it doesn’t exist. Therefore, we sort of owe it to ourselves (and really, the world) to build it.  Why? Because no one *can* build it like we can and thus we should do everything possible to bring our full vision to life.