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?"

Comments

No way

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many ideas too few developers

Re:No way

[Zaphod The 42nd]

Agreed. I'm in the industry, and everyone I've ever spoken to has agreed completely that we have all the ideas we will ever need, and that is not at all a thing the games industry is needing or wanting to spend money on. I'm sorry, but your geek dreams aren't worth gold. We get thousands of ridiculous fan emails a day with game ideas that are mostly laughable, but even the good ones, who cares? The "idea" boils down to a story/setting, and some gameplay. If the gameplay can be done, it probably already is, and otherwise if it can't be done, then the idea is worthless. And if you think you have the best story around, who cares? Write a book. The challenge in making good games is not finding good stories, its organizing development teams and trying to produce "fun" which is unquantifiable and subjective.

Fundamentally different.

[slimjim8094]

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.