This pretty much hits the nail on the head. You can be an idea guy so long as you’re willing to pony up a tall stack of money to pay for the technical guys time. But as penguin said, the people who operate that way aren’t “idea guys” they’re entrepreneurs.
Pretty much every time I tell someone I’m learning to make video games they say “Let me tell you about my awesome idea for a killer video game…” And I’m all like, “Great! Give me a GDD or a script or even a few pages of detailed notes and I’ll get right on that.” Care to guess how many followed through? I’ll give you a hint; dividing by it is bad.
What if you are an idea+hardworking guy? As in, you do your best to learn to program, actually program, and do almost all(if not all)of the work on the game, no matter how complex or f***ed-up your ideas are? Are you still one of the annoying idea guys?
Given the context of this thread and the way that “idea guy” has been clearly described, that’s a contradiction. But to answer the question, if you have ideas and also implement them yourself then no, you’re not one of the annoying ones.
You’re also highly unlikely to label yourself as an “ideas guy”.
My ideas are gold…
NO YOU CANT HAVE THEM.
lols
ps, someone finish my game for me.
I find it amusing when people think their slight twist (which someone else has probably done) on a game a multi million dollar idea.
I had one guy make me an “offer i can’t refuse” to code his game (and make art) for 10% of the profit. It was essentially an angry bird clone but not as good but attempting to be funny.
Did you read the article?
Had a couple of those offers myself in the past. The guy goes on and on about his idea, I like riding it for as long as can as if I’m going for it, then I hit him with the, okay… it’s going to cost you $xxx… the facial expressions are priceless when they realise their idea isn’t great enough to get a whole development team to work on it for free.
I made a cartoon about such people a while back
indeed twaz so long ago back when I was using Ogre3D but the same thing occurred in their collab forums ("Hello I have this great idea and need 2 programmers, 2 artists, etc to work for me for free etc etc)
Looooll 
HAH!
95% of these forums would have quit in the old days. No internet. No instruction manuals. Just you and the machine. Go ahead and make a game.
The point here isn’t to say “I’m smarter” it’s to say you need to have a real backbone to develop. And these days its not very hard. So an ideas-only guy… well… let’s say I can’t respect them 
What I can respect is a dude working on the title itself coming up with ideas.
This topic seems to go against the whole ethos of Unity.
Honestly if you have an idea for a game and get hold of Unity you should be able to get a basic playable prototype up and running in a few days/couple of weeks (depending on free time).
I’m an ideas guy but Unity allows me to develop those ideas into prototypes and even sometimes games.
But it takes skill and polish to turn even the best ideas into a good game.
Now I think we as members of the Unity developer community should encourage ideas guys to pick up Unity and get creative!
“OK you’ve got a great idea, here’s Unity come back when you have a playable prototype of your game, and we’ll talk!”
The idea person refers to people who intentionally refuse to learn, but take advantage of other people’s generosity. They intentionally do not want to pick-up skills and learn how to do basic coding, basic 3D and even basic 2D.
Good examples:
- There are several people on the forum who post Jobs Seeking they are expert PHP developers, expert 3D modeller (and so on…) but outsource the work to others on Freelancer, then… do not pay them afterwards.
You’ll be quite surprised how many Freelancer Unity jobs there are with the same descriptions on this forum, but not by the person writing the ad but by the persons who responds.
- There are several MMO projects on this forum which show very little, maybe 3 or 4 in-game scenes and depend on the generosity of others to complete the project. They then make up funny claims - they have investors, hundreds of customers waiting, etc., when the whole thing is just made-up delusion by idea-persons wanting slave labor and not wanting to pay a single cent for development costs.
Once there is talk about renumeration, wages, payment for services rendered, buying UnityPro licenses, the whole project falls apart.
OK but there is a word for this type of scammer a Charlatan or Swindler, they want something for nothing.
Maybe Unity needs a reputation system, e.g. if a developer completes and releases a game they gain in xp or level up!
Unity can check this against their license database and forum login.
A bit like OneGameAMonth maybe http://onegameamonth.com/arowx
I’m glad that the caveat was ‘If the Idea Guy turns out to be the investor…then it’s actually okay to work with him.’ But man, having to work with this guy would be like working at EA and making their mobile Madden games.
I think the problem here is the widespread belief that ideas are special and equal to or greater in value to the ability to actually create a game; that you can simply sit around and offer “ideas” and still be a valuable member of a small team. By definition, anybody who actually plays a productive role on the team (level design, programming, art, sound, funding, ordering pizza, really anything other than ideas) is not an “idea guy” - and on this forum, you’d be best to call yourself anything but an “idea guy” since those two words raise red flags in the mind of anybody who’s been around here for a while.
You do make a valid point - instead of being negative about these people, we should definitely encourage them to pick up a skill. But first, we have to convince them that “ideas” have no value - and their beliefs are usually so deep that actually knocking any sense into them will require hurting their feelings.
You do need an idea, something that is going to separate your game from 100’s games we have already played of the same type, I prefer to win by default rather than having to compete so you try to at least bring something new to the table.
I’m pretty sure that most everyone can create an idea like that; the problem is being able to realize it. An Idea Guy can’t help with that goal, so why should I use their idea over mine? Especially when I will be able to set a more realistic goal.
The marketplace doesn’t buy into that. Most of the super successful games take traditional gameplay and tweak it/polish it. What’s the most anticipated game this month by the masses? GTA V.
Doing something completely new isn’t a “win by default”, as noble a goal as that is. Part of the point of this thread is that implementation > ideas, which I agree with.
Or even just the same gameplay done well.
Not that I don’t encourage new and out there ideas, but there is far more risk than picking something proven. Thats why big game companies like to play it safe because that equals sales. Indie devs can push boundaries more because failure means less to them. If something I make fails, it is like big deal, I have a job!