Website / forum development. Maintaining, posting, moderating, everything.

You don't need to do this on day one.

Business Transactions

Such as?

Marketing / Press Releases / Setting up for Funding Push

You can do some of this early, such a preparation of all this, but don't actually start doing it on day one, because that's way too early.

Finance

I thought you had no money. Finance what?

1. Going out to draw customers into the forum to start discussions about what the game should be like.

2. Polling those customers over, and over, and over until we've boiled down exactly what they're looking for.

You've mentioned this a few times, actually. I think this is a bad idea in general, and certainly not something you should be focused on doing so early in the project. There are, frankly, millions of people who have opinions about what a game "should be like" and most of them have no idea how terrible or impractical their ideas might be. You're going to waste a ton of time sorting through that feedback (as well as open yourself up to potential legal hot water; this is why most game studios trash unsolicited "game idea submission" mail without reading it or opening it -- I've seen this done in person several times). Besides, it's too early for that kind of polling even as a method of gauging the wind direction. You need to spend some time alone with your initial partners and develop a concrete game idea and some practical implementations. You shouldn't just go out there and announce you're making a game and ask what people want it in. That way lies madness.

I have anti-cheat system in mind that will pair with any of the major AAA anti-cheat engines and AAA games.

But you're not a programmer and have no technical background as far as I can see, so your ideas about anti-cheat systems are probably useless. Keep in mind that anti-cheat is a pretty trivial problem. The problem is not protecting against cheating, the problem is protecting against cheating while still having a game that is fun and feels good to play. These two are odds and often making a game feel fun and responsive involves making tradeoffs in security (for example, not validating every single client movement input, because the resulting latency is unacceptable; this is reasonably common in many MMOs).

If I can get the game going, the existing developers would get a profit share in the new business that would dwarf the initial game sales of the Survival game by several orders of magnitude. Example, in any FPS AAA game, the cheating is usually pretty rampant. Anywhere from 5-20% of the player base either has cheated, is cheating, or will cheat at some point. With this system I can get it down by ninety percent to 0.05% to 2% of the player base. The best part is, you can integrate it into any game that uses AAA anti-cheat. So this system could be in COD, BF, The Division, etc, etc, to provide customers an almost "cheat free" experience. It does require players to pay for the program and pay a monthly fee though.

There's a lot of pie-in-the-sky handwaving here that I think hurts your pitch more than it helps. I strongly advise you abandon this aspect of your pitch until you acquire yourself an engineering lead with the technical chops to reign this in to the realm of practical reality, if you actually try to recruit engineering talent with this you'll only be weakening your position.

Once it is released, it's literally so simple of a concept, you'll slap your head and say "jeez why didn't I think of that". Because of this secondary business I'll be 100% committed to the first one succeeding because without a "proof of concept" of this anti-cheat working in OUR game, there's no way any other AAA development team would even consider it. But if we can prove it works in OUR game, the sky is the limit. Every AAA anti-cheat and AAA developer can use our new anti-cheat.

If it's literally that simple, than people have already thought of it and already determined it's not practical for games. But good luck regardless. I think this is far more insane of a business plan than your initial game pitch, under the circumstances.

The main problem in the industry isn't the programming or the programmer's vision. It's that the programmers don't actually take the time to find out what the customer wants.

Hell, they don't even understand that there are 4 distinct and totally separate groups of customers in the survival genre (hardcore, casual, PVE, roleplay). Those customer groups all want the same base game, but with some changes for their individual servers. Nothing catastrophic, but 60% of the game programming needs to be the base game, and the last 40% split between what those individual groups want. None of the groups are happy when you shovel them all into the same server. Yet here the programmers are, ignoring all those different groups needs, and trying to focus 100% effort on a "one size fits all" server.

That's the reason they're failing:

1. The artwork in DayZ Standalone was breathtaking, but they have 4 cars, no air vehicles, and no bases (DayZ Mod had ALL of those things and it was years older than DayZ Standalone). Those cars, air vehicles, and bases are huge missing core features players want.

2. The combat in WarZ was good, but they relied too much on soaking customers with microtransactions and completely ignored cheating (which is why the development team tried to hide behind new shell corporations and say "new management is here!" even while nobody believed them).

3. The overall game mechanics in H1Z1 were good, but they went off the rails spending time building things people weren't even asking for (comfort meter) and completely ignoring what they were asking for (better base building). These guys actually started out the BEST of any of them. I had real hope for the H1Z1 team. That is until the Russian venture capital firm came in, gutted the dev team, and focused on short term profit generation instead of long term player retention.

4. Not ONE single developer in any of those titles even tried to separate the 4 groups into 4 different servers. Sure some have PVP and PVE servers, but that is NOT what the 4 groups are looking for. Those groups are looking for 4 separate server types to cater to their 4 different play styles.

Customers are HUNGRY for a title where the devs ask "what do you want", then go do it, then ask "what do you want" then go do it. It's not hard, even if it takes time, even if there are setbacks, just find out what's a priority for the CUSTOMER and go do that. Communicate with the customer, try your best to do what they want, and they will stay forever. Think Everquest. That was a game made in 1999. That's literally 16 years old now. People still play it. Why? Because the dev team is accurately cued into the market and they make things players want.

If I saw another company actually doing what I'm thinking about, I would pre-order the game before they even made it.

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No, I'm not a programmer. But the anti-cheat is so laughably simple I could build it with a 100k budget. But building it wouldn't be enough. It has to have a game that was "somewhat successful" actually use it for a proof of concept.

Nobody has thought of it yet for precisely the reasons you laid out. The struggle is to get the most anti-cheat detection (wallhack, aimbot, teleportation) while remaining lag free. This anti-cheat goes in a totally opposite and unconnected direction. It's out of the box thinking at it's best.

I'm confused. It sounds like you have specific ideas about the game design, but nothing you said about what you bring to the table has anything to do with design. Also, while you sound like you're confident in your ideas about the game, you also dont have any game design experience. So presumably you'd need a design lead to handle the game design, and you're not planning to do any design work, but you also want 100% creative control. That all doesnt add up to me.

I'm confused. It sounds like you have specific ideas about the game design, but nothing you said about what you bring to the table has anything to do with design. Also, while you sound like you're confident in your ideas about the game, you also dont have any game design experience. So presumably you'd need a design lead to handle the game design, and you're not planning to do any design work, but you also want 100% creative control. That all doesnt add up to me.

I have ideas on how to start the game design. But if the customers don't like "one" of my ideas, boom, out the door it goes. Heck if they hate "all" of my ideas, boom, out the door they all go. My ideas don't matter if the customers don't want it. Same thing goes for the programmers, they can have ideas, but if they customers don't like it, boom all those ideas go out the door as well.

The problem in the industry is the developers spend all of the time working on their "vision" of the game, then the customers don't like it, so they go right back to their "vision" of the game. Players get frustrated because it's not fun, leave, and the game fizzles out.

I'll give you a prime example from the H1Z1 reddit:

1. Customers were asking for more content, better basebuilding, and less cheaters.

2. What the devs did give them was a "comfort meter". When you eat food next to a fire you were more "comfortable" and healed slightly faster. There was not one single post in the entire reddit asking for a "comfort meter". Nobody, not one single person asked for it. That was 100% developer "vision". So hence, the customers did not get anything they wanted, but they got something they didn't want. Since then, they finally got some anti-cheat in, but all these months and months later base building and content is still not addressed.

Here is why listening to customers should be king:

http://steamcharts.com/app/295110#All

Old Peak Players: 30k

Current Peak Players: 5k

The devs are trying their "vision", not listening to the customers, and they've gone down 80% of their playerbase from their peak.

I'm confused. It sounds like you have specific ideas about the game design, but nothing you said about what you bring to the table has anything to do with design. Also, while you sound like you're confident in your ideas about the game, you also dont have any game design experience. So presumably you'd need a design lead to handle the game design, and you're not planning to do any design work, but you also want 100% creative control. That all doesnt add up to me.

I have ideas on how to start the game design. But if the customers don't like "one" of my ideas, boom, out the door it goes. Heck if they hate "all" of my ideas, boom, out the door they all go. My ideas don't matter if the customers don't want it. Same thing goes for the programmers, they can have ideas, but if they customers don't like it, boom all those ideas go out the door as well.

The problem in the industry is the developers spend all of the time working on their "vision" of the game, then the customers don't like it, so they go right back to their "vision" of the game. Players get frustrated because it's not fun, leave, and the game fizzles out.

Well, listening to players is a good idea, but you cant listen to players when you start the project because there's too many people and they all have their own ideas. This would be "design by committee" taken to the n'th degree. What you need is a core idea of what your game will be and then you can try to flesh that out or find further focus, but you need to walk a fine line between being rigid and deaf and being too concerned with what your players or focus groups tell you. I guarantee you that whatever feature you think of, some people will love it and some will hate it.

I think you're making a common mistake of people who have never taken a game from concept to completion. You're thinking that you can mine players for some great set of ideas and then you just have to implement those and you'll be golden. It doesnt work that way. Just because players say they want something, doesnt mean they actually want it. Or, just because they want something doesnt mean it will be fun in the final game. When you design a game you have to be willing to iterate a lot, and make changes and additions based on how the game develops. That could mean player feedback, absolutely, but at the end of the day you need one person in charge and not a committee. If that person doesnt have a vision, you're basically like a ship at sea without a rudder.

Another thing for you to consider is that if you're recruiting people to work on their spare time, or full time at their own expense, then they will want to work on something that they enjoy. Promises of success years down the line might be nice, but if the project doesnt have a clear vision or it's something that the project contributors are not interested in themselves, then your chances of getting and keeping them in the project long term are slim. And, since you're setting yourself up as the person with 100% creative control, anyone who joins you will expect a strong vision. If you say "we'll do whatever the players want" that automatically tells me that I dont want anything to do with it because it will fail.

No, it's not 100% controlled by me. It's 100% controlled by the players.

You're always going to lose players no matter what you do, but what you do makes a huge difference on "how much" of your player base you keep. Customers also appreciate it and are more forgiving if you are "trying to do" what they want. If you're "trying to do" what they want, you definitely won't go from 30k players to 5k. Making customers happy, or at lest trying to make them happy, will keep them coming back.

If the H1Z1 devs ditched their "vision" and worked on base building and more content, they wouldn't be down to 5k players. If they completely reworked the base system and added some more new content, that 5k would begin to grow.

In the end, they're doing what most dev teams do. Go with the vision, don't bother listening to the customers. And they've all paid the price.

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Let me ask a hypothetical:

You go to Applebees. You want a steak, fries, and a salad. The waitress says "well we really want you to try our new sushi". You've never had sushi, so you try it, but don't like it. So you ask for your steak, fries, and a salad instead. Then the waitress says "well we don't really want to go that direction with your dinner, you can have fish stew instead of that". You don't want it, but you try the fish stew anyways. It sucks as well and you never do get that steak, fries, and a salad.

You go to Airborne's. You want steak, fries, and a salad. We give you steak, fries, and a salad. It was pretty good. Then the manager comes by and asks if you'd like to see anything else added to the menu. You say some ribs would be nice. A LOT of the customer base agrees. The next time you go to Airborne's, you see that they've added ribs. So you get that. And it's pretty good. Then the manager comes by and asks if you'd like to see anything else on the menu. You say some pig snout would be great. But the customer base doesn't agree, so the next time you go, there's no pig snout. BUT you can still get steak or ribs. It's still a good place to eat. You appreciate that they listened to you about the ribs. There's things there you like to eat, and the management is very friendly.

Which restaurant do you go back to on a consistent basis?

That's the difference between "customer focused" development and "vision" based development. The funny thing is H1Z1 was going 100% customer focused development before they got bought out by the Russian venture capital firm. They had a huge player base, that player base was happy (minus some cheating problems), and they were growing. I was in reddit every single day reading the posts. The devs were listening HARD. When the patch notes came out, I could go line by line in the patch notes and say "yes I saw multiple posts in reddit about that" to 90% of the patch notes (meaning 90% of everything they implemented was direct suggestions by players from reddit). But the Russian venture capital firm killed all that, fired most of the devs, and went with a "money first" / "content almost never" vision. The H1Z1 team had it right, but got derailed by the Russian venture capital company vision.

If you are that sure about concept (and what you bring to the table) and business experience why not spend a minimum amount for proof of concept and then seek investment only to finish project in reasonable terms and a deadline by involving money into equation?

I'd love to do that :)

But for all the reasons these guys are telling me..........and a lot of what they're saying is right.............I won't get the funding because I've never shipped a game.

I have to get a team, get enough to showcase off the ground, then go for funding.

I did fail to mention what I'd be doing. It did sound like "hey, here's a good idea, go to work programmers, I'll be back at profit time". Definitely not the case though.

From day 1, I will be out there doing a few important things:

- Website / forum development. Maintaining, posting, moderating, everything.

- Business Transactions

- Marketing / Press Releases / Setting up for Funding Push

- Finance

Website / forum development - you're a web developer? In that case, you can probably learn to contribute to the development, web development requires some degree of skill with either coding or using tools. Of course you mentioned "posting, moderating" -- that's not a contribution to the game or company in any significant sense, and any of your team can do it just as well. If that's all you meant by "development", doesn't count.

Business Transactions and Finance - Not much work to do there if you don't have money. But if you're saying that you're an actual accountant, then that's something you can actually contribute to the company later on, and might actually be worth some share in the company's profits.

Marketing / Press Releases - not much work to do there until the game is ready to ship

Setting up for Funding Push - be more specific. Are you a skilled orator? Do you know many VCs personally? Does your day job require giving presentations on a regular basis? Do you just look really damn good in a suit and tie? What makes you better suited to this work than the typical game developer? Anything?

And I didn't mention the most important thing of all. I have anti-cheat system in mind that will pair with any of the major AAA anti-cheat engines and AAA games. It will basically tie into the game, the anti-cheat, and a third party program to reduce cheating in enabled servers by 90% more than the AAA anti-cheat alone.

Well, I believe that you think you do. And perhaps you actually do. But you don't have the scope to actually know that you do. If this is core to your current strategy, I wouldn't even bother with the game right now - I would find an expert in developing security-related software willing to sign a NDA and work a few hours a week on that in exchange for a share in the company you'll create. If it's as simple as you believe, there shouldn't be much work involved compared to developing an entire game; if it's as effective as you believe, the potential rewards will be much larger than you could expect from developing a single game. It makes much more sense to focus on this than the game.

Hell, they don't even understand that there are 4 distinct and totally separate groups of customers in the survival genre (hardcore, casual, PVE, roleplay). Those customer groups all want the same base game, but with some changes for their individual servers. Nothing catastrophic, but 60% of the game programming needs to be the base game, and the last 40% split between what those individual groups want. None of the groups are happy when you shovel them all into the same server. Yet here the programmers are, ignoring all those different groups needs, and trying to focus 100% effort on a "one size fits all" server.

There's your pitch. You want to make a game that not only fills the horror/survival niche, but also fits the needs of four distinct types of gamers.
We can get the gist of your game concept from the names of games you're referencing (even without having played them) through pop-culture lenses. But the specifics of how this game will be different from any other game in the genre is how you're going to get funding, developers, etc for the game. This is clearly something you care a lot about, and have done some research on. I realize that this isn't a recruitment post, but give us the details - it might actually help us recommend a specific game engine, it might get some of us interested in the project, etc.

I have ideas on how to start the game design. But if the customers don't like "one" of my ideas, boom, out the door it goes. Heck if they hate "all" of my ideas, boom, out the door they all go. My ideas don't matter if the customers don't want it. Same thing goes for the programmers, they can have ideas, but if they customers don't like it, boom all those ideas go out the door as well.

"People don't know what they want until you show it to them" - Steve Jobs
I understand that meeting the wants of your players is important. But you absolutely should not change direction based on input before the game has actually been played. Compromising your initial vision to satisfy a potential customer is foolish.

1. Customers were asking for more content, better basebuilding, and less cheaters.