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Afraid Someone Will Steal Your Game Design Idea?
Lemeowski writes "Game studios go to great lengths to protect their IP. But board game designer Daniel Solis doesn't subscribe to that philosophy. He has spent the past ten years blogging his game design process, posting all of his concepts and prototypes on his blog. Daniel shares four things he's learned after designing games in public, saying paranoia about your ideas being stolen "is just an excuse not to do the work." His article provides a solid gut check for game designers and other creatives who may let pride give them weird expectations."
Didn't we have several articles before this one discussing how abused the NDA is in software development? Games are no different.
Your game won't be copied until it is successful, than there will be a dogpile of imitators.
He's creating a public record of his ideas and innovations by blogging in this way. It seems like it would encourage people to steal them, but could also be used in court to prove he had the ideas first. It may or may not hold up in court in the end, but at least it gives him the opportunity to get the credit he deserves publicly for his innovations.
No, nobody is going to steal your board game design. Or play it.
Ideas are a dime a dozen ... what matters is execution. That's not just for games but pretty much everything in life.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The Cult of the NDA:
Written 10 years ago; still just a relevant today.
>> Game studios go to great lengths to protect their IP. But board game designer Daniel Solis doesn't subscribe to that philosophy.
I think you're confusing IP with "ideas." IP is often the successful and repeatable implementation of an idea (e.g., a patent). Furthermore, when game studios license IP, it's often to latch onto an established entertainment brand, like "Batman." The actual games themselves are usually formulaic at best, and their "plot" will be exposed on the Internet anyway as soon as the first public Beta comes around.
We got this guy. He goes around and shoots his enemies.
Or wait, we got this guy, he will jump around and avoid his enemies.
Oh Oh wait, how about a car racing game!!!
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Which is pretty much the point of TFA (and in the case F really does stand for fine) but it's worth repeating, over and over, until people get it through their heads that "stealing ideas" is a meaningless concept. Good for this guy for having the guts to say it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The fact is that a lot of my ideas require a team and a lot of years to accomplish since they're expanding games that might already exist. I figured I'll give my ideas out for free a few months ago, and maybe it will inspire other people to make better games. I'm so tired of MMORPGS where you gain lots of power during the game and it is pretty fun, then BAM, you're at level max with all the best gear, and there is simply nothing else to do but quit. A lot of my blog revolves around how to make end game MMORPG fun. But I also cover other marketable designs.
One of my favorite ideas lately is expanding upon minecraft to allow for bots. Not a lot of people remember the game Cholo for commodore 64. Essentially in Cholo, you play the man of a guy in the bunker, and the storyline in the instruction book is one of the best stories I've read in an instruction book. You need to acquire bots on the surface to be able to test the radiation if it is safe to come out of the bunker. Well there are all kinds of bots that do different things. In Cholo everything is a waldo(manually piloted bot), but imagine porting this to Minecraft with scripted bots.
Scripted bots in Minecraft with premade diagrams of structures you want to build from creative mode would result in: You start out just like normal minecraft, but when you make your bunker, you can build bots. The AI for the bots could be stuff you start with, stuff you wrote, or code found in game in vaults. The bots would mine for you, build for you, scout for you, hack other robots, or fight for you. The goal would be to create a solid robot army to seek out and kill your opponents on the map. The game could form up to 64 players at once, and when you die, you get thrown in a queue for the next game. There would have to be code to deal with stalemates after a few hours. If you also add ladder ratings on top of this, I think the game could get popular.
TR:DR The reason I give out ideas now is that I'm not just a greedy guy. I actually like playing fun video games, and there just isn't enough innovation lately.
God spoke to me
"The player moves and turns pieces made of four squares as they descend into a rectangular playfield one at a time. Any row of the playfield filled with squares disappears, freeing space for more pieces." Lawsuits have been won over the "theft" of the idea that I just described.
Soon gives way to the ugly realities of the business: sleepless nights, rushing to meet deadlines that still whoosh by, browbeating managers, piracy, glutted markets, capricious consumers, sleazy publishers. Goddam, what's not to love?
I wish I was wrong. Somebody tell me I'm wrong.
Game studios go to great lengths to protect their IP. But web designer Mr Phuket Map doesn't subscribe to that philosophy.
Phuket Map
Bringing you shitty SEO since forever. I hate my life.
As Todd Howard pointed out during a keynote "Your ideas are not as important as your execution." The games that are loved and that endure are not the ones that had some amazing idea that nobody could have every thought of before. Heck, they often draw heavily on literature, film, myth, and popular culture. Rather they are the ones that execute their vision well, that are fun to play, that are a good ride.
I can't think of a single game that I've seen succeed just because the idea was so good and so unique. Always, always, always, it was accompanied with good execution. In fact many of my all time favourites are not particularly original ideas.
Good example? Civ 4. One of the all time greats in my opinion. I still play it from time to time. However an amazing original idea it is not. As the number implies, it is the 4th game in the series, they've done the same thing 3 times before. Also it wasn't an original concept to begin with, Civilization was a board game before it was a computer game. That aside, the idea of "a game where you conquer the world" is not that original of an idea.
The reason it is a great game (and its successor not quite as good in my opinion) is the execution. It is well put together, fun to play, well tested, well balanced, has good visuals and music, it is stable, and so on and so forth.
If you think the only thing that will make your game succeed is that its amazing idea be protected until it is released, well then it will fail. Good games are ones that would be good, even if someone had done something like them before, and does something like them after. They stand on their own.
Just look no further than WASD. It's everywhere. It's a good idea, and it stuck. Personally, if I had an idea, put it in the wild, and saw it used later by someone else, I'd like to think I'd be charitable enough to say "Wow - I thought of that and people like it enough to use it." Developing a card game myself now, and a mite paranoid that someone like White Wolf or Steve Jackson might give me a slapdown due to some mechanics minutia. Reading this, I figure, heck with it. Make it, turn it into a PDF, throw it into the wild, and see what happens. Cards Against Humanity seems to be doing well for themselves. My day job pays enough. Why not?
imagine porting this to Minecraft with scripted bots.
You mean like 0x10c, which got shelved?
Ideas are not protected
But expression is, and good luck convincing a judge that what you copied is the idea, not the expression.
There are already enough copycats out there, just look at an app store
And some of these App Store copycats are getting sued.
In terms of video games:
Every single project started by a person "with a great idea", and who won't tell anyone else, that I've ever seen, came to nothing. Hell, I was dragged into a few being a "programmer" when I was younger and it usually revolved around some crap idea that hadn't been tested or even defined to the point you could start implementing it.
Every single project that was successful was successful LONG before it got to the point that other people thought about stealing its code. It got those people coming BECAUSE they thought it was a good idea and worth copying etc., but still they had YEARS of head-start on any cloner coming along.
Ideasmen are cheap. A coder who can turn it into reality is much rarer. And that coder will probably make a better ideasman than anyone else.
Games are no different.
U.S. judges have tended to draw the line between idea and expression in different places for games compared to other kinds of software. On the one hand, you have Lotus v. Borland and Oracle v. Google that weaken copyright in interfaces between a program and a user or between a program and other programs. On the other hand, you have Tetris v. Xio that strengthens copyright in the basic rules of a game.
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. -- Howard Aiken
Ideas are easy. Successful ideas are not. I can come up with a hundred game ideas that no one would play. That's why people are concerned about their designs. If I come up with something unique and one of the infamous App Store copy cats decides to throw a ton of resources into replicating it, you could find yourself overwhelmed regardless of how first and best you may have been.
Look at some of the other App Store apps that have been ripped off by power players that turned the original developer's app into an also-ran.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I'll all for ideas, and sharing them, but most people seem to be completely incapable of having any ideas, never mind being able to have good ones, regularly and inexhaustibly. A lot of people will even copy down the finest details, how a neighbor with more taste has furnished their room. And I mean copy - down the finest details, not even adjusting it to their own room shapes or circumstances.
If you have a good idea, the confidence that you know enough about the market or technology to know that it will work, and the ability to execute on it... it's easy for the sheep to jump on as soon as the idea is explained to them or is actually put into action. Of course you can just suck ideas out of people, but our creative types may get a little drained, frustrated, and well -private- after a while. So why share ideas at all?
So your call sounds much like ... unattractive people saying that attractive people should be forced to smile at them.
I do not have the skill to create the game but I want to play it so I hope somebody does steal the idea. I will gladly pay to play. It is called Treasure . You fall off a cruise liner and end up on an island that is one of a series of islands. You must stay alive, find the treasure, and escape. It is an adventure game in the style of FPS. Pirates have left clues to the treasure location, like the skeleton pointing in a direction and maps carved on boulders. There are many booby traps . Each island has a theme like volcanos, headhunters, monkeys, parrots, etc. Traveling to each island is also themed, like coral caves, sharks, etc. Imagine a modern, graphics heavy combination of Myst and Far Cry.
The thing is, the only way to find out if your idea is good or not is to implement it. Some ideas that sound good turn out to be bad, and vice versa--and if someone else does something good with an idea similar to one you had, that doesn't mean you could have done the same. In the App Store example, it seems to me this is more a matter of developers copying each other's implementations, which is a very different matter.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's true for almost anything.
The world isn't divided between thinkers and doers. People who believe that generally see themselves on the thinker side, and they don't want to do, so it's a narrative that fits them well.
In practice, I've met very few good thinkers who weren't also doers in one way or another, simply because it's very hard to actually have good ideas if you never got down to implementing them. An idea can feel good and sounds great, but if you don't have the experience in knowing what works and what doesn't, how to see and deal with edge cases and exceptions, it's probably not that great - or, put another way, you are probably not a good judge of its greatness.
And that's the biggest problem with the "lets reinvent the world" crowd - if you don't know how the world works, why it works, and if you never actually managed to reinvent anything in your house, in your community, in your business, it's quite doubtful your great idea to save the planet is actually interesting. And it's also why so many of the world's doers seem to do so often the same things, and take the same decisions in front of the same situations - not because they are stupid and ignorant, but because more often than not, they already figured out what works and what doesn't, and the difference between what they can dream and what they can accomplish.
As a former IT Manager and head of security for a AAA game studio I can tell you it depends on the content and what is up for grabs. If you have mounds of concept art and CG that will not be stolen. If you have accessible and unique IK and motion capture that will tend to be stolen. If you have UnrealScript and generic level design components no one will care. If you have tried and tested AI and NPC logic that will be stolen. So it tends to reason that ideas along the lines of "I have a streamlined process for integrating dismemberment and AI and it is *******"...yes that will be stolen. Ideas that go like "It would be really cool if the player can ********" no one will care. Just to increase general paranoia I will tell you the biggest threat of theft is not from outsiders but existing staff trading stolen works for a better job if they are unhappy- if you run a studio and are reading this then keeping your staff happy is your number one concern or your whole studio will be traded out from under you for better job opportunities. Confronting such theft should never be done if you love something (or someone) in this case let them be free but just make sure to change whatever was compromised or make it better.
How unplugged in do you have to be to not know Zynga copies games?
Zacktronics Infiniminer Oh it's a minecraft ripoff... that minecraft rippedoff.
Tiny Tower
Look, I can post a crap load more, but I'm not your personal fucking google.
Shit's been going on since the first videogames. It's like you fools don't know who Nolan Bushnell is. So, here's the thing. They will steal your shit if it's possible. If you do the crazy hard work of cranking out a shit ton of games & prototypes and testing them to find what's fun, and get some popularity (read: do market research for them), they they will steal your shit.
If you're a random indie gamedev, then chances are no one will play your game except other indie gamedevs and a few fans of the indie scene. Do that 100 times and get even a modicum of success? Yes, those mother fuckers will rip off your shit. STFU, you sound like a damn Noob.
If you haven't had your game design ripped off and executed by someone with more resources in a tighter timeframe... Then you either haven't made anything popular yet, or you're really fucking lucky (or your games suck.... Just sayin').
So your call sounds much like ... unattractive people saying that attractive people should be forced to smile at them.
Where did you get the idea from my post that people should be forced to do anything? If you want to keep your preciousss ideas secret, go right ahead. Just don't expect the rest of us to pat you on the head for doing it.
Oh yeah, and those attractive people who don't smile at ugly people? I guarantee you a lot of them aren't nearly as good-looking as they think they are.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
generally only stupid idiots with crappy idiotic game ideas are scared to lose it.
ideas are a dime a million, so there are not reason to be scared.
if theres anything theres a extra of.. is ideas. everyone have any, or lost of game ideas. is the actual money and skill required to make them into games that is valuable
I've done business in China for years. As you all know, copying is rampant. However, the rule I've learned is nobody will bother to copy something that's not successful. Worry about succeeding first, then worry about being ripped off. Don't put the cart before the horse.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
There are no unique ideas, everything is derivative of something else and it's almost guaranteed someone somewhere will have had your idea before. Ideas are cheap, plentiful and have very little value on their own. Even if you have an idea and throw it out to the world and six different people decide to rip it off, the games they produce will be wildly different from each other and your own.
The only people who make a fuss about people hearing their idea are generally "idea guys" with very little to contribute but a high opinion of themselves.
This was a really good point. Lots of people have lots of ideas that never go anywhere. Just last night I was musing about the old Chaum Digicash protocol and how it could be adapted to voting. I couldn't remember a few pieces, and did some searching and digging in boxes....
Then after a bit I moved on to see if there was already any software (GPG support) for blind signatures....I didn't really find much, except, when i looked for GPG support....
I found someone else, just days ago had posted on a crypto mailing list...asking if GPG had blind signature support because he wanted to use the digicash protocol and adapt it for a voting system...and a reply saying its not exactly a new concept but never goes anywhere :)
Ideas are great, but alone they are a dime a dozen.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This article hits the nail right on the head. In addition to the content in the article, I believe that strong laws regarding Intellectual Property have indoctrinated the public at large to believe that ideas are worth more than they are. These people focus on the idea itself while minimizing all of the effort that went into the research, design, and testing phases that took years of refinement before leading to the final product. It is the public's overvalue of abstract ideas that have allowed for the vast expansion of patents and copyright to reach beyond their original intent of covering the concrete details of a particular implementation. The simple truth is that execution is worth a million times more than the idea. Great ideas often fail due to poor execution and mediocre ideas can be massively successful due to exceptional execution. We should be working to loosen the tight grip of IP laws so that abstract ideas can be implemented by as many parties as possible while the concrete details of their finished products remain properly protected.
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. -- Howard Aiken
My favorite example is Raymond Scott. He had some interesting ideas about automated musical composition, (ala Joseph Schillinger I suspect), that as it ended up, he was so protective of that he took them to his grave. Now no one will ever know what insights he may have figured out...
Can ideas even be stolen in the first place?
Is someone who reverse engineers your product stealing your ideas?
If a big company wants your ideas, you're screwed anyway.
Publishing them in public is probably the best thing you can do about it, because it prevents them from taking it away.
I've seen many a "secret" MMO thread on work requests forums by kids with yahoo and AOL accounts. I've yet to see one "secret game idea" release.
The game mechanics and the rules are not entitled to protection
If the dimensions of a basketball court (94 by 50 feet, rim 10 feet up, size of free throw lane, etc.) and the official size, weight, and bounce ratio (2/3 of initial height) of a ball are considered rules of the game of basketball, then "the matrix shall be 10 cells wide" and "the pieces shall be the seven one-sided tetrominoes" and "pieces shall move by translation and 90 degree rotation" and "a row filled with squares disappears to make room for more pieces" sure sound like mechanics and rules to me. I guess I must be misunderstanding exactly what the judge found to be "expressive elements" in this case, other than perhaps the piece colors.
If you copyright the design and concept, ect ect, then you have nothing to really worry about
You still have to worry about other incumbent copyright owners claiming you misappropriated their copyrighted design and concept.
board games and video game are two entirely different industries.
If tabletop games and video games are irreconcilable, then explain World Series of Poker for Xbox and Xbox 360. Or explain the GBA game that includes Risk, Battleship, and Clue(do). Or explain Catan 360. Or explain NES games like I Can Remember, Classic Concentration, and Concentration Room, which are essentially an old card game with different card graphics.
Has anyone tried to steal the board game Monopoly and rewrite it as video game
There was "Atlantik" in KDE Games 3.
(tho it is patented)
Monopoly is older than I am, and I'm old enough to drink beer. Therefore, any patent will have expired.
Most gamers would find it to difficult to implement, and most programmers would complain because they would not have an excuse to add all the latest python and C++ libraries.
I don't worry about any one stealing it. First of all, its open source anyway, second of all, it mostly takes generic ideas from other similar types of multi-player online rpgs that have already been implemented several times over.
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