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Best Way To Sell a Game Concept?
dunng808 writes "If a couple of young, game-crazy guys wanted to get started designing a game with the intention of selling the concept, how should they proceed? In the music industry they would make a demo MP3. In the film industry they would write a script (and I would recommend lyx with the hollywood document class). Should they develop some sample game play with a well-known engine? Is the one in Blender good enough? This somewhat dated list suggests it is. Or should they focus on textual descriptions and static scenes made with Blender and the GIMP? Is there even a market, let alone a convention, for selling game concepts?"
Too many ideas too few developers
I hate to break this to you but the ideas are the easiest part of game development. My group has dozens of ideas on our wiki and we add great ideas all the time. But we've been working on our current project for YEARS now.
Taking a great idea and making a great game is hard and expensive. Taking a great game and making a mediocre game is also hard and expensive.
In this case, make a prototype. If it's good enough and your marketing skills are up to snuff, you might be able to get a publishing deal or self publish on the internet. Retail is still the most important part but some of the indie devs out there have proven you can at least survive if your games are decent.
You won't be able to sell an idea, but a working example of the game might.... even if it's only one level.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It's $100 for a dev license for the iPhone.
If you want to make money at it, develop the game and sell it yourself. If you can't recoup $100, you'll at least learn a lot in the process.
-Dan
Nobody is going to give you money though unless you have a tangible business plan or documented examples of your ideas. i.e. concept art, playable demo or mod of an existing engine, extensive design documents. Plenty of people can come up with good game ideas, the trick is to mold that into an actual workable idea and that that all down on paper or in a playable state. Having something that people can actually play, even just a simple demo, can go a long way in convincing people you can make a FUN game.
When you send a demo tape to a record label, you're not selling a song - you're selling your talent as a musician. Wouldn't make much sense for the label to sign you and only release a single.
Similarly, when you send around a screenplay, you're selling an idea. It will be reworked, changed around, modified - not too seriously, hopefully - but the studio, director, actors, and physical constraints will all modify the script. You're trying to sell a compelling plot and set of characters, not an implementation.
But who ever heard of a videogame selling based on individual talent? Or character development? A truly great video game will have a good plot, but that's not the central point of the game.
A videogame is 'worth' something because it's fun to play. Everything else is secondary. Who cared about the plot of Super Mario Brothers? Who complained about the artwork in Tetris? Why does Asteroids need a catchy score?
The upshot of all of this is that nobody cares about your videogame unless you have something you can play. And it really needs to be quite close to the intended final product, since otherwise a lot of work remains to be done on the gameplay - the core idea - and you have nothing to sell.
Now, let's say you do a lot of work finishing one level of a videogame, with character sketches and plot for the rest of it. You may be able to sell that, but by that point you've done most of the work of putting together the game. If you needed to write a new engine for your awesome and new gameplay, you're done with that. If you were reusing another engine, you've already got it set up the way you want it and can basically start plugging in models, textures, and maps.
So if you've done the work required to get to a marketable object, why not just self-publish? Stick it on Steam, they're very friendly to indie guys and pay quite nicely (ask 2D Boy). If it's any good, it'll do quite well.
Good luck, whatever you end up doing.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
You're not contradicting his experience, you're validating it.
"At best, your analogy for a "demo mp3" is a playable "demo game"."
Which is exactly what Narbacular drop is. Read more better, k.