Are game ideas realy worthless?

People usually like to say that all you need to become successful, is a good idea, but the more I learn the more it seems like ideas doesn't mean anything anymore and it is all about luck or cloning.

Do you know any good game ideas that went successful? Post some in there.

 

Ideas alone are worthless. Execution is the main factor. A good idea can be executed poorly. I prefer the "game concept" over idea, idea can pretty broad. There are lots of great concepts that have been executed well. Someone mentioned recently Black & White, I loved that concept. The Room (series) is a great concept that did well. One that have been playing a lot recently is Monkey City, which is basically tower defense with async php and world building.

 

I don't think anyone says that.

--Eric

 

I would've thought it would be extremely hard work, and the brains to back it up. Tiny bit of luck since you never hold all the variables.

 

Tiny bit of patience sprinkled in never hurts either.

 

I've heard plenty of unsuccessful people say it.

 

Well, that's 1% of it. The rest is perspiration.

 

A more realistic way to phrase it would be something like "success starts with a good idea". There is no doubt ideas matter. A lot of people have wasted a lot of effort and time on bad ideas. Despite all of that effort it never amounted to anything because it was just not a good idea to begin with. Put that same kind of effort and time into a better idea and the result will likely be different.

 

I wouldn't say "anymore" because, as others have said, on their own ideas aren't of much value. They're the first link in a chain that leads to some kind of value. Without the other links they're worthless.

I think it's selection bias that makes it seem, intuitively, that ideas are valuable. When we see successful people the first thing we often learn about them is the thing they did that made them successful. We hear about the concept of that thing, and the execution is generally skipped over. So it seems like the idea is what made them successful, even though what really did it was the idea followed by execution followed by the savvy to grow it supported by things like skill, luck, timing, and available resources. None of those things on their own are worth particularly much.

 

A common view in the start-up world is one where ideas are considered a multiplier on execution:

https://sivers.org/multiply

What I find amusing is that this is used as an argument for ideas being worth little, but really the logical conclusion is that they are worth a lot to anyone with the ability to execute them.

Consider you have a $10 token for a roulette table, if I had a token that multiplied your potential win by 5, 10, 15 or 20 then it would be worth quite a bit to you (e.g. the expected value for my 20x token on a bet on red is just under (20 * 10 * 0.5) - 10 == $90).

Make of it what you will

 

I really don't know if ideas are all that important. Well developed and executed concepts for sure. But plain ideas? Here are a bunch of successful ideas that don't scream good at me.

A game about animals crossing the road
A game about controlling a bird by tapping the screen to dodge obstacles
A game about shooting birds at a building to try and kill evil pigs
A game about matching candy
A game about monkeys popping balloons

Look at those ideas and tell me they are destined to be top selling games. Nothing about the idea screams "a great game". In fact if you go look at the ton of terrible clones built on the same ideas, you will see its not the idea that is the critical difference.

 

The simple way to a successful game:
Step 1 - Think of a good idea
Step 2 - ?
Step 3 - PROFIT!!!

It's funny how so many people actually think like the underpants gnomes haha

 

Just because a good ideas can make a good game, it doesn't mean a good idea is required to make a good game.

I'm also not sure you picked the right ideas behind those game. An idea doesn't have to be a setting or a simplistic description of gameplay. For example:

Candy Crush was more about the company's deeply analytical approach to game design where metrics drive all design decisions in order to maximise revenue.

Angry Birds was mostly about the use of characters and high production values in a genre/platform that (at the time) didn't really have them.

Flappy was a reflex game that is extremely easy to understand, but so hard to play that it keeps users on the edge of giving up.

- - -
I think a lot of these were driven by some combination of luck, great execution, and novel visual design but I do also think the devaluation of ideas goes a bit too far.

 

You can't play an idea.

 

Awesome - this needs to be in your/someones sig.

 

People say things like "They were lucky to get into IndieCade at E3" *Ignores fact that developer spent 70 hours on a pitch to send* or "They just got a job because they knew someone" *Ignores fact that developer spent 5 years building a strong reliable network and showing growth and ability over that period*.

Luck is just a BS term that people who don't want to try use as an excuse.

Success in anything is the sole product of the effort put in. Sure privilege can have a huge impact on this but for most people we have nearly the same level of privilege so it's a nearly even playing field.
An equation for this is:

Success = Effort * Relevance * Time

You'll notice that if any of those things is zero it will result in zero success.

 

I was totally straw manning it there. Ideas aren't as useless.

But in general execution is more significant then the initial idea. And that's true in game dev or in engineering.

I tend to think of it in addition to work, rather then one or the other. People create their own luck when they position themselves to be able to take advantage of opportunities that come their way. Its often not so much about the opportunities that exist, and more about how well you can take advantage of them.

 

Still amazed at Papers, Please. In fact, a game that I will be working on, hopefully by the end of the year, has part of the game mechanics of that game.

 

I disagree, luck is equally important. Take Flappy Bird for example, barely any effort or time required, but you can't say it wasn't successful. It was luck that had the game go viral.

What do you mean by relevance btw? And wouldn't you call time and effort the same thing?

 

I think it all goes back to the old saying...

"It's not what you say, its how you say it".

You could take the dumbest game idea, give it amazing gameplay, artwork and replayability, and it will do well with good retention numbers.

But a great idea with poor execution, nobody gives a crap.

Same as nobody gives a crap if you are talking and nobody is listening, no matter how interesting what you're saying is.

And the same as someone is talking crap, but they say it in such an entertaining way that everyone is enthralled and listening carefully to every word.

Anyway, you get the idea. Both are important, but the execution is much, much more important and is worth 80-90% of the success of what you are delivering.

 

You can spend plenty of time on something, but if you don't put enough effort in it, there won't be much of an outcome.

 

Idea * Design * Implementation * Testing * Iteration * Polishing * Release * Promotion = Ideas Worth

An idea is worth what you invest into it. Some can and have changed the world others are merely daydreams e.g:

• Darwinism
• iPhone
• Magna Carta
• Relativity
• Minecraft
• Emancipation

Also ideas seem to have a time, the technologies and society their are born into have to be in the right state to make best use of them.

For example a precursor to Minecraft was created but did not take off, and it took a long time for Women and African Americans to gain equal rights.

 

Or a simpler way is:

Idea * Money and Time = Ideas Worth

And in a crowded marketplace once you share your idea anyone can apply Money and Time to it and find your Ideas Worth.

Or look at cloning all people are doing is seeing which existing ideas have worth already and applying Money and Time to recreate them.

 

Yeah I can have the greatest idea in the world but if I can't pull it off it is worthless but if some guy just makes a really good version of game x then he's laughing.

Nacular drop, vavle gave them the AAA team so they could turn into portal

 

Ideas are the most important part because they are the foundation, the beginning, and without them there is absolutely nothing.

This is true of any cerebral part of humanity, any artform or technical achievement.

Games, Inventions, Religion, Ethics, Improvement, Cloning, Innovation, Stagnation. All require ideas.

Without the idea to clone a game, you have no game. Without the idea to create a game, you have no game.

There are many parts to selling a game & being monetarily successful. Marketing is the most important, as you can take a bad game & profit from it with good marketing. You can even scam people with a broken product or crowdfund vaporware. You can have a masterpiece, but ruin it monetarily by making it unmarketable, too niche, or too free.

Also: Any game can sell. The better the idea, the better it sells. But this applies to other aspects of a game too. The better the graphics, the better it sells. The better the fun, the better it sells. etc.

I also shouldnt have to point out that crowdfunding like Kickstarter is literally selling an idea. Marketing is just selling an idea to people's minds. So yea, people sell ideas all the time. It's a billion dollar industry, maybe even trillions.

 

Well said. I've often thought I was the only person around here who looked at things this way.

Not just the idea being the foundation of all things but also the reality of the sales being linked much more to the marketing of the product than to the actual quality (or even existence) of the product itself.

I think many times people look at a popular game and want to have some "easy" explanation for its success. By easy I mean something they can actually see. So they will point out the graphics, or some unique aspect of the gameplay. Truth is all of these things pale in significance to the perceived value or perceived quality of the game. And that is the heart of marketing. It can present a piece of junk (or even vaporware) as something fantastic or it can make a great game seem like the most boring thing ever created.

 

Ideas aren't worthless. But within a modern context, I can definitely tell you that no one is going to pay you for ideas. "Worth" is not simply a measure of monetary value. Something can be worthy without being marketable. But there is no space in the modern game development industry for people who only peddle in ideas. That's snake-oil salesman work, and pretty much everyone around here knows it.

One of the big reasons for this is that almost everyone in game development is creative, to one degree or another. It's a requirement for doing this sort of work. The very act of developing a game is a creative endeavor. There wasn't anything there before, you do your work, now there is something. Creation. Game development is lousy with very creative people. And those creative people are coming up with creative ideas...ALL THE TIME.

I do this myself. I've woken up in the middle of the night to write down an idea that came to me in my dreams. I have a notebook crammed with ideas for all sorts of things. Pitches for TV series, story outlines for novels, proposals for websites, and game design documents. My brain is spewing this stuff out constantly, whether I want it to or not. And a significant chunk of what I come up with is actually marketable.

But the plethora of ideas swirling around degrades the perceived value. Everyone has ideas, so no one with money is going to pay for just an idea. Not until you've managed to prove that it works. In an industry this risky, you need a proof of concept first.

 

@RichardKain ...everybody may have ideas but does everybody have great ideas? Or even good ideas? You mentioned "proving the idea works" ... which implies that not all ideas will work, right?

I completely agree that a great idea not acted on is worthless to all of the people who chose not to act on it. It may take someone else to see the potential of the idea and invest in bringing it into reality.

 

Define idea, is it one line or 20 pages long? Is it a detailed plan or a notion? If an 'idea' can be described in one line it is of course utterly worthless until you make a game of it.

If you want proof, just consider the last 'epic' dream (dream as in sleep) that you had. It was probably an incoherent mess of Freudian symbolism, but it sure felt earth-shattering at the time. Now try and convince someone to buy a book or a game based on that incoherent mess. Fat chance.

So a game idea is worth nothing, an experience is worth a lot, and the quality and impact of an experience has very little to do with the 'idea' that gave birth to it.

Edit: I realize I'm heavily assuming story 'idea', game mechanics idea is a little more concrete and relevant.

 

Well, yes. Clearly there are plenty of bad ideas. But even bad ideas are not necessarily "worthless." Evaluating and analyzing bad ideas is a good way for a wise designer to learn. Even the worst of ideas can serve as practice and an object lesson to a nimble mind. I'm not saying that all ideas should get a fair shake at the development process. But to categorically call them "worthless" is short-sighted.

There are plenty of people who have terrible ideas, ideas that should NEVER be made into games. We even occasionally see one of those ideas get made into a game. But even these I do not consider to be entirely without worth.

Also, from my experience with this industry, I know that there are a very large number of people who work in games with a very large number of great ideas. Some of them I would even say border on the spectacular. And some of them are even marketable/could be turned into a viable product. A lot of the people currently working in video games are quite talented and creative. And a lot of them genuinely do have great to incredible ideas. And that's the competition you're facing when you walk around hoping to "sell" an idea.

No one's going to buy an idea when they are practically swimming in a sea of talented people with great ideas. They could easily reach out and select whichever idea they think is best, and pay nothing for it. (and in this industry, they frequently do)

 

@Billy4184 Using that dream to idea analogy I'd look at it like 99 out of 100 of those dreams would most likely be a flop if turned into a book, game or whatever else despite the amount of effort put into execution. The other 1 out of 100 may have the potential to be a huge success. In reality probably some of those other 99 would see some small amount of success. Of course, a lot of the end result also depends on how they are marketed, timing (current events, fads and such) and so forth.

 

It is an interesting discussion. Another thing we probably should consider is out of all of the manuscripts submitted each year why are only a few chosen. When a smaller game publisher receives 2,000 game submissions this month that all basically look good and play well why they do choose only this one to publish? Why do some companies such as Ketchapp seemingly scour the mobile markets looking for games to clone?

 

@GarBenjamin what I was trying to get at is that something can be a really bad idea but theoretically still create a great experience, in my dream analogy, the dream is a total mess in terms of the 'idea' but because you're in a semi-conscious, receptive state it has a really powerful impact.

While not directly relevant, I think this does show that the idea can be separated from the experience to a great extent, it's much more important to make people receptive to the experience of your game than it is to simply try to create a compelling idea. An idea can never be anything more than a scientific description, it does not imply quality of experience.

Just think of jokes, a good comedian can crack the most boring joke and manage to get the theater in uproar. On the other hand someone else can try to tell a great joke and have it fall flat. The difference being that the comedian is able to structure a funny experience for the audience around the joke, which is pretty much worthless in itself.

Or what about if someone gave me the idea for the Mona Lisa, before it was painted - would I now be famous? Obviously not, since I'm not skilled at creating the experience that people have when looking at Da Vinci's work.

Or how about the idea for Fast and Furious - the idea is boilerplate and worthless, but it's the actors' skills, the execution, the marketing budget, the whole blockbuster experience that people feel when they sit back and watch it, that's what makes it successful.

Any idea can be turned into something great at the hands of someone who is skilled at creating experiences that people want to have. Even something so simple as a slot machine can make you money if you know how to create the experience that surrounds it.

 

Da Vinci was just "lucky".

Actually there is a good argument that the Mona Lisa is so popular because of 'marketing'. Da Vinci himself was well known and popular, a celebrity of his era. He worked on the Mona Lisa for ~12 years and carried it around with him. Some accounts state that he often showed it off claiming to be his personal favorite. There is even evidence that the some of the later mysteries surrounding were floating around during the days of Da Vinci himself.

 

Ideas aren't worthless, but they are a tiny fraction of what makes something actually compelling. I never would have thought a show about a high school chemistry teacher that started cooking meth would be that interesting.

 

I guess it's a bit too much to say that they're worthless, but for most practical purposes, it's true. It of course depends on how much you've developed it, that's why the question doesn't really make very much sense. If you're making a movie and you consider the first draft of your screenplay to be an 'idea', or you consider a 20 page GDD that covers the mechanics, art, planning, budgeting and marketing strategies to be an 'idea', well that's a different story.

 

A fleshed-out game design document (or screenplay or whatever) does seem like more than simply an idea.

If you buy the Wing Commander games on GOG, you also get PDF's of some of their original pitch and design docs. Pretty interesting how they try to convey not just the game mechanics and story, but they stress the visceral and emotional "feel" of the game. Of course you still have to be able to implement everything well to pull it off. "Can you really do all that bullshit you just said?" to quote Independence Day.

 

The company I work for is super anal about posting concepts publicly which is really frustrating. Can't show anything I work on at work, which is fine since I'm paid for it, but they still want to dictate what I can and can't share about personal projects developed outside of work. Even if the idea already is out there, they don't want to show competitors neat tricks so to speak.

 

I used to hear that in the 90's and maybe the 00's, mostly from self-help gurus and books about how to get started as an entrepreneur. What was always left out was that you needed a good idea AND the will to see it executed properly. (Mostly because someone was selling you something, even if it was only hope.)

To me, an idea alone is as worthless as a piece of fruit on a tree nobody ever sees. If you don't have the gumption to go out there and pick it yourself, or perhaps the money to hire yourself a good fruit picker, that idea does nothing and finally falls on the ground and rots there.

The idea, however, is still necessary, just as you need that apple to make apple fritters. I look at a game like Braid and think, "That's an awesome idea." But that idea would have gone nowhere if a developer hadn't spent three years turning it from raw potential into a finely polished game. (I think it's three years; I could be off on that.)


PS: I think I should give up on being an "entrepreneur" as it took me like six tries and finally had to ask Google how to spell it...

 

I think to make a good game idea that will really worth it is by knowing how to make a good idea properly from play testing and reading more game design books. I think to make a very good main idea might need to take a few months of fixing your ideas. I think the good idea pitch is the most important for the small entrepreneurship.

 

It's good to have a solid foundation. Choices you make on one day may affect months of work.

 

Interesting read.

I would agree with some people here that idea increases the value of the whole effort and therefor should be worth a lot but considering that there are already good ideas around most of people decide to just take one of those safe ideas instead of taking the risky one.

And because passionale people left that industry, nobody wants to take risks anymore so new ideas are worthless unless they are compact enough that one person can make them work, then yet still nobody wants to pay for it so technically it is still worthless.

 

I don't know, what i like in a game is the background that needs to be unique and appealing , and the story that pushes me to keep playing or the game goals and progression keeping me coming back.
Sometimes you only need to take some existing game and add new gameplay ideas, new unique background and characters.
And lot of people would like to see coming back old days game genre like platformers, arcade 90 games and many others. Another factor is what audience you target ? Making some hard game like Dark Souls will attract these players while making a turn based RPG will attract other people.
There is some genre games that are lacking today and lot of players wold really like these to come back, Divinity Original Sin demonstrated it very well

 

All you have to do to get a half a million views is sing Happy Birthday on YouTube!

 

Fixed.

 

The point is still in there, for those willing to suss it out. Also, word of the day!

 

Wait, did you just liken all of us to a bunch of comics getting booed off the stage?

 

I disagree as it all depends on money and an impoverished indie can have an amazing idea but only when you add lots of money can you really benefit from it's potential.

Just look at Marvel, $1 comic book scripts turned into million dollar movies.

 

I don't think Marvel is a fair comparison. They're not exactly indie.