Hi! I have a very very good idea of a game but i dont know programming! x)

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12 comments, last by the incredible smoker 6 years, 8 months ago

Hi! Mi name is Dani, i have an idea for doing a game, but i dont know programming. How can i send my idea to a game developers company?

Or maybe if u want i can explain my idea and we can make a team for do it!

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How do you communicate with a company? Look at their website and look for a phone number or email address. That's pretty much the best answer possible to such a generic question.

But ideas are a dime a dozen. I personally have at least dozens of interesting ideas I am interested in working on; there's no way I would just do something someone else wants to see for free. So if you want whatever you're thinking of made, either learn to make it yourself, or pay someone to do it (as in, an actual, hourly wage, in advance; no, "profit sharing" is not a magic solution, probably hundreds of people who know nothing about game development try this and fail each year). If you're not willing to go that far, post the idea you have somewhere and hope that an actual game developer finds it, likes it, and chooses to incorporate it into something you're doing.

1 hour ago, Daniel Mari said:

i have an idea for doing a game, but i dont know programming. 

That's okay, not every game designer knows how to program. There are lots of programmers who don't have ideas for games. 

1 hour ago, Daniel Mari said:

How can i send my idea to a game developers company?

You don't want to do that. Only publishers can afford to fund a game. Developers don't have money to develop other people's ideas. For information about how to send your idea to a publisher, read http://www.sloperama.com/advice/lesson21.htm

1 hour ago, Daniel Mari said:

Or maybe if u want i can explain my idea and we can make a team for do it!

Please don't say things like that in our discussion forums. The proper place to say that is in the Careers section (see Careers tab up top) (maybe the Hobby Project Classifieds, for instance). 

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

I'll just add that many game development companies actively discourage you from sending them game ideas. For legal reasons they cannot even open emails that look like they contain game ideas. The reason is that someone might try to take them to court for stealing their ideas if a game they are developing happens to contain ideas or mechanics sent to them from an outside person.

If you send your ideas to game companies, whether they are developers or publishers, they will just ignore them.  They dont need or want any game ideas.

If you want to make a game without any programming experience, then your options are very limited.  You could 1) learn to program, or 2) try to convince some programmers that your idea is so great that they should join you, 3) try to get a job at a game studio as a designer, or 4) use your own money to hire a team and make the game.

I'll leave it to you to decide which if any you can or want to do.  None of these is an especially easy option for someone who's coming in with just an idea.  Honestly, a lot of people think they have great ideas that are worth a lot of money, but no one who works in games will really care.  As said earlier, ideas are a dime a dozen.   Truly good ideas are more rare, but even then it's more about the execution than the idea itself.  When you'r making a game, a good initial idea will have to change as the development process goes on.  No idea survives an entire development process unaltered.  What's more important than an idea is the ability of the designer to continually come up with good ideas throughout that process.  And, the way you know that a person can do that is by looking at their track record.  Without a proven track record, or programming experience, or a lot of money, getting a game done will be next to impossible.

8 hours ago, GuyWithBeard said:

For legal reasons they cannot even open emails that look like they contain game ideas.

For real? Is there a problem with patent trolls masquerading as random schlubs in the gaming industry? I can't think of any other explanation for fearing reading about people's ideas. I've always assumed they just ignore them for the same reason I do: just not being interested.

They DO ignore them because they are not interested.

However, it can still be a problem if a person writes to Random Game Developer LLC about this awesome game mechanic they just came up with and ask the developer to hire them as a designer. Later, if Random Game Developer LLC releases a game that happens to use a mechanic that is similar to the one the person wrote to them about, he may be angry and write mean things on the internet about it.

Most game developers just don't want to deal with these things at all, so they would prefer if people did not send them ideas.

A quick google search gave me this, for example: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/contact-us.html

"The purpose of this policy is to avoid potential misunderstandings or disputes if products, services or features developed or published by Ubisoft might appear to be similar or identical to ideas that may have independently occurred to you."

 

That is a great link, and Ubisoft has a well-written page there. I love this line:  If, despite our request that you not send us your ideas, you still choose to submit them...  

Yes, it really is a legal issue. Creators of successful products are invariably sued because someone else once wrote something that was vaguely similar, and the person feels that even though they didn't bother to develop their own idea, they still deserve payment from the people who invested countless hours and untold fortunes to turn the idea into a viable product.  

 

EVERYBODY in the industry can come up with a list of game ideas, many people have their own products.  Even people who don't think of themselves as gamers can come up with a few game ideas given a few minutes to think on it.

Game studios have more great ideas than they could ever possibly implement.  Many of them are excellent ideas that could be commercially viable given enough resources. A lack of ideas is not the issue.

 

If you have the money to hire people, then you're talking about the scarce resource.  If you've got a few million dollars along with your idea then you're in position to have someone else convert your idea into a product.

29 minutes ago, frob said:

That is a great link, and Ubisoft has a well-written page there. I love this line:  If, despite our request that you not send us your ideas, you still choose to submit them...

I'd like to note that that page talks about "submissions", not just "ideas". The reason for that is because their statement is very generalized. They are also inclusive in that word of "materials". What they're really protecting themselves from is copyright claims, not "stealing my idea" (which, I might add, has no legal implications unless patent infringement is involved).

A simple concept such as: an MMO where the player is a wizard and uses magic points to buy potions, and then you give them a recipe to make a new sweet drink; is not subject to copyright. The sentence describing the idea might be, but you can just rephrase it in your own words, so that can't really cause a problem. But an actual drawing, for example, or a fully fleshed out story written out, is subject to copyright, and that's what they need to protect themselves from. Not because of the idea, but because of the particular creative work.

27 minutes ago, JulieMaru-chan said:

What they're really protecting themselves from is copyright claims, not "stealing my idea" ... is not subject to copyright ... you can just rephrase it in your own words, so that can't really cause a problem

There is much to the law, and the big three of copyright, trademark, and patent are not the only protections in the IP landscape.

Regarding rephrasing things, that can be infringing on many rights, including copyright. Wikipedia's article on the subject leads with "Paraphrasing of copyrighted material may reduce the probability that a court will find that copyright has been infringed; however, there have been many cases where a paraphrase that uses quite different words and sentence structure has been found to infringe on a prior work's copyright."

There are many good reasons to reject unsolicited content. Copyright is only one of them.

If you're on the sending end, stop. They won't accept it, and nothing good will come of sending in unsolicited ideas.

If you're on the receiving end, stop. You've already got a long list of great ideas that includes some amazing ideas, use those.

 

Getting back to the original question, nobody else is going to make your game for you unless you pay their wages to do it.  No company is seeking for your unsolicited submissions, they've already got more ideas than they can fund. No indie group will want your ideas, they've already got their own.  

If you want it done you either build it yourself (optionally paying people to help you), or you work at a company and they take your (solicited) pitch during the extremely rare event of asking people to pitch their most amazing game designs for a new product line.

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