Slashdot Mirror
Pitching Game Concepts To Developers?
Andonyx writes "When I was in college, every third person I met had a screenplay they wanted to pitch. Now every fifth person I meet has a game idea. Well, there are books-a-plenty that teach you how to format, pitch and sell screen plays, but what about the aspiring game designer? Where does someone with some design experience but not the resources to develop an entire proof of concept go to pitch a game idea to an established developer? Or does that even happen? Thought the Slashdot crowd might have some useful advice." This question touches a little on the 'supervising game designer' concept discussed a couple of weeks back, but more specifically asks how/whether you can successfully pitch externally-created game concepts and documents to developers.
Creating a game is more than creating a nice story or idea.
You have to design the mode of gameplay. Rules, potential interactions, outline a potential game engine. Technologies that might be used, etc.
Game designers have lots of ideas that could be made into games. But the games are incredibly difficult to create, so they are not in need of ideas. What they really need is talent to turn those ideas into something fun.
In order for an idea to be considered, the specification document must read like the game manual to a paper-based RPG with all the little details, and preferably storyboards, sketches, etc, not to mention a requirements document as well. Basically, the amount of detail required goes above and beyond the idea of a movie script.
You have to probably have already coded some test environments in an existing game engine just to see if your ideas could hold water.
At this point you could probably pitch it to someone if they were in a slump.
I used to sketch out ideas for games in boring classes. So did all my friends. Are any of them going to see the light of day? Hell no! If some of us were good game coders, then maybe they might have a chance. Otherwise they're just ideas. Anyone who plays games has tons of them, and most aren't original.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I'm a developer on an in-house team for a medium-sized game publishing company. We're self-publishing, so there's no problem getting our stuff out of the door. We also publish other people's games, as 2nd party titles (PC), and 3rd party titles (consoles).
Here's the cluemobile in an easy-to-encapsulate format:
(1) Nobody gives a damn what your idea is. Game ideas are a trillion / dollar. 99.99% of the work in making a game is implementing it and making it fun - an average dev. team isn't stupid and each person on that team could immediately come up with 5 ideas that they would like to make into a game. So why should they ask you?
(1.25) And then there's the fact that you do not know if a game is fun until you can play it. By which point, you've already invested quite seriously. Your magical idea is not worth the paper it's printed on. Shut up. No "but", "look" or "perhaps". YOUR IDEA IS WORTHLESS.
(1.5) Your idea is probably a bland re-hash of some other game. If you can describe is as "It's like $BIGTITLE but with $FEATURE", then it's passe and nobody will look at it. If it truly is groundbreakingly original - nobody will be interested because it's a total unknown and they're not willing to take a risk. It's their money, not yours. If it's that great, fund it yourself.
(2) Nobody gives a damn if you have a rolling demo / movie of a game that you've built. Okay, so you've got a skeleton of a team together - but nobody cares that you can produce pretty graphics. Seriously. Demo reels are 30 a dollar.
(3) If you've built the first few levels of a GAME that is in a PLAYABLE STATE on one of the MAJOR platforms - ie: Playstation2 - then a publisher might be interested. Note that having a playable demo on the PS2 means you already have existing contracts with Sony - you wouldn't have the PS2 development kit otherwise.
(4) At the moment, the market is absolutely flooded with games looking to get published. And 99% of it is complete shit. There are literally hundreds of products being shopped to publishers each week. Maybe one or two a month are worth looking at in detail.
(5) There are a lot of very bright and talented people already in the industry - and *they* are finding it hard to publish games. Think of some of your favorite game developers that went out of business... if they couldn't hack it, you probably won't either.
(6) Only the cream of development houses (or software houses making games to order) are able to ship products with any regularity.
(7) NOBODY makes serious money off games (not even Microsoft can manage to make a profit with Xbox), except those elite few who are entrenched (eg: ID Software) with their rabid fanbase, or their technology so advanced it's alien (again - ID), or they bought the rights to a franchise (eg: Harry Potter).
So anyway - I may sound a bit harsh. Yes, I am. But if I pussyfoot around the answer, you'll go.. "well maybe", then wonder why your game concept gets shot down.
Actually, even if they like your idea, a lot of pubishers won't even look at a concept unless you sign it over to them - this was the norm for studios developing their first game back in the late 90's when the money _was_ flowing. It provides some measure of control over their investment. And then they'll make you change your concept to maximise it's market reach - which you'll hate.
So the very best way to sell a game today probably one of the following:
(1) Shop publishers an alpha-quality game that's playable.
(2) Self-publish online for version 1 (then get publishing for version 2 - using version 1 as an example to prove you can make a game).
(3) Write a best-selling book / make a hit movie, then sell the game rights. Tada.
Of course, history is written by those who break the rules and win. But don't be suprised if you try anyway... and fail. Best of luck.
Game concepts are easy and plentiful. Poke any gamer, much less any experienced developer, and out will pop a dozen concepts like cash from of a corpse in GTA. What makes a great game is not the concept but (in part) the design. It's the fleshed-out design that will determine whether the game will be any fun and whether the high-level concept will have any "legs". But a great game design can only come from experience, a highly attuned intuition, a lot of intelligence, and more experience. (Not to mention that game design is an iterative process -- the design of a great game is practically always determined coextensively with its development.)
The conundrum of this industry is that communicating a great game design, unlike a game concept, is extremely difficult if not impossible. Very few people can write or read a game design document with any sense of whether it formulates a successful design. Think about all of the elements of Doom -- visual, audible, spatial, and temporal -- that made it such a great game. Could you truly communicate this in terms of text on paper? Not even if you were Tom Clancy or Stephen King.
For the most part, publishers couldn't tell a great game design if you locked them in a room with it. So the irony is that publishers do not, for the most part, evaluate game designs so much as they evaluate concepts -- what can be communicated in a few dozen pages at most. You can't blame them for this -- few people could. I wouldn't want that job -- betting millions of my employer's dollars plus my ass on whether some rag-tag bunch of geeks can put together a game that will fly.
If publishers made their funding decisions on the basis of game concepts a such, in isolation, they would be out of business in short order. Lottery tickets hold much better odds. So instead they hedge, using the experience and track record of the developers the way a mortgage company uses your credit report. An interesting game concept coupled with a proven development team is still very risky, but at least has a chance of getting funded, and if one in five hits big, the publisher might remain solvent.
This, in simplistic terms, is why game concepts by themselves aren't worth diddly.