To me it comes down to this: if you can’t actually make games or contribute to their making, then how can you have any experience behind your ideas and/or designs, and if you have no experience then why are your ideas or designs going to be any better than mine?
Also, everyone has so many ideas that they don’t have time to implement even 1% of them. Ideas aren’t rare, even good ideas are easy to come by. So if that’s all you’ve got, what value are you bringing to a team?
… and this is why the Collaboration section here is still moderated, because “idea guys” are a dime a dozen.
Good article.
Most ideas I hear about or see fall into a few categories:
-
Not thought through enough (Red flag questions: You don’t know what a design doc is? What happens when we follow this idea to its conclusion? How do we get from point A to point B… can I poke holes in the idea? What is your reaction to me poking holes? I’ve run into some pretty defensive people (not here))
-
Too vague (This sounds like a description of the top 3 games on gametrailers.com mashed together like a bad mixtape. No, I’m not going to make Medal of Call of Battle Duty Honor 5)
-
Too complex (So… you want a mobile MMO that leverages the synergy of the clouds to lower your TCO and maximize ROI using forward-thinking monetization that retains clients using a collaborative online learning model in a pseudo FPSRPGRTS?!? Too many buzz words.)
-
No self-investment (You want me to make this game and feed my wife and dog using good karma that will just magically come my way and fill my cupboards? I actually had to ask someone if they were serious because I actually heard this. They were serious.)
The big thing about all the non-idea people:
- We want to be paid relative to our effort.
- We need to know where we are going or else we want to do it our way. And even then we might still want to do it our way. Give us good reason NOT to.
You should sticky this along with The answer to every ‘Can it be done?’ and ‘I’ve lost my way’ post.
These idea guys have no skills, not even able to do anything. They are extremely insulting people. Even worse, they want to be paid, boss people around and tell lots of lies upon lies.
Best, most concise description of the problem I’ve ever seen.
Considering what still gets through, I’d hate to see what was blocked. TBH, I think a little more time needs to be spent on each post. Yesterday I ran across this gem.
My favorite part?
Then there’s another post with this:
EDIT: Just want to mention that I am very grateful for all the work the mods do. 
Very good description of what’s happening. Thank you !
Seen this article on Gamasutra? A classic. “No One Cares About Your Stupid Game Idea”
Gigi
I no longer moderate that section. But each moderator has his/her own requirements for what passes as a collaboration post.
“99% of the times” non lucrative collab projects can only be described as hilarious.
Since no one’s really is in charge, everyone feels entitled to be the idea guy… so everyone brainstorms all these extremely long storyline ideas, loosely tying it with existing ideas, but mostly wanting to change everything! And from the visual content, of course everyone has their own art style… and odds are strongly against they ever matching!
I think it’s very hard to pull off a collab game project based solely on trust, if not impossible.
Perhaps better chances of success are favored by having less team members, with matching skill levels, and even better if they actually know each other well. But if this is true, sadly such scenario is out of the question when gathering a random team in a forum collab section 
This is a great article on the actual value of ideas:
Yeah whats sad is you look for jobs more often then not you will find these type of people trying to recruit a team – they are always very aggressive with it (I saw a guy posting on both craiglist, kijji everyday for over a month now).
They arent programmers, or artists, game-designers or musicians all they are is managers trying to get other people to do the work for them, of course these people actually want to have a lion share of the profits.
That video is very inaccurate.
We have way more than chips and pop… there is juice, energy drinks, beer, jerky, and huge range of nuts and candy. And some fruit.
@zombiegorilla,
You forgot chocolate bars! 
Well… I didn’t want to exaggerate. We only have those little halloween mini chocolate bars. We don’t have fancy-shmancy full size ones. I think you have to make console games to get the full size ones. 
Since you said “look for jobs”… There’s nothing wrong with that if the “ideas man” has the money to pay for his ideas. The one valid answer I know to the “how I see it” question I posted is “they could afford to purchase the skills”. And if you look at many large game or software companies you’ll find some of those people at the investor/director/shareholder level - people who have or had ideas about software and hired other people to make it for them because they didn’t have the skills.
There is nothing wrong with that.
In fact, while they’ll have just as many lemons as everyone else, those people quite possibly have fantastic ideas as well. For instance, experts in non-software fields often hire programmers because they need some software and oddly enough don’t happen to also be experts in software development.
And if they’re going to take all of the risk (ie: invest all of the money) into the venture then why should they share the profit any more than they’re already doing by paying for your time? If your time is paid for you’re losing nothing by contributing your skills (to the contrary, you’ve got employment for the duration), yet they’re putting everything they invest on the line in the hopes that a) their idea is of value to others and b) you can do your job well enough to make it happen.
If you’re willing to take the risk (ie: not get paid for your time) then you get to take a share of the profits afterwards.
But going back to my other post… those people don’t call themselves “ideas men”. They call themselves “investors” or “entrepreneurs” or, if they do it enough, perhaps “producers”, or something else along those lines. And I think that we can all agree that the successful ones are generally successful not just because of the money they pour into them but also because their ideas are, in fact, of value.
I am taking about them not having any money, for example they want a demo ready before they make a kickstarter pitch and then pay people with a % of the profits. I remember posts like this back in my gamedev.net days but I recently saw a guy on craigslist aggressively posting, calling himself a studio (when its one guy etc).
Yeah, I agree with those guys pretty much always being nothing more than hot air. If I were looking for jobs I wouldn’t pay any attention to anything like that, though.
How to detect an idea guy and his friends:
- Give an arts test - Fail.
- Give a simple modelling test - Fail
- Give a coding test - Fail
Dunno why these people are asking for $6,000 - $10,000 wages a month while doing nothing. For that price, I can hire 3 ex-Gameloft or 2-ex-UbiSoft employees who do more work than these people.
Even to offer an intern wages and let them learn the trade, they don’t even bother trying.