Grant Baker

Game ideas are a dime a dozen. Look at it like this. If I locked your mom in a closet with some sandwiches and said, "You're gonna be there all weekend. When you come out, I want some awesome game ideas." 48 hours later, I'd get some good game ideas. Literally ANYONE can produce them. Go talk to a 9 year kid and ask him for a cool game concept. You'll get one. People give me game ideas all the time under the impression that they're hard to create. The ideas are trivial. What's hard is the implementation. If you're creating a video game, you spend maybe 1 day on the game's fundamental idea. Then the next 18 months put it into action. This is why I never resented having a corporate suit assign me a project, such as "Sandy - write a Ghostbusters tabletop RPG" or "Sandy - make a pirate game, but it's also Diablo" because the corporate suit's job is done in a minute. Then I am going to be doing that game for months - putting my mark on it, making it my own. So when you're looking at a game and you think, "Whoever thought THIS would be a good idea for a game?!" you're not really critiquing the game's underlying idea, which might be great. You're critiquing the game's implementation of that idea. For instance, Concord's IDEA was a science fiction FPS with team-based strategy. Which naturally leads to each hero needing unique abilities that supplement each other. Yes, that's basically Team Fortress, but Team Fortress is pretty old, so why not a new one? Concord's failure was implementation. Character design sucked (as has been gone into in depth by others). Networking code sucked, hence the loooong delays between matches. And some of the problems weren't the game dev's fault - like the pricing policy and dismal marketing. But the game idea wasn't necessarily terrible - just unoriginal. On the other hand, Pikmin has an absolutely bonkers idea. "Let's lead bean sprouts into battle." Nothing about the fundamental idea seems compelling. But man alive it's one of my favorite games of all time - probably one of yours too. Again, the idea isn't what counts. It's the implementation. Anyway that's my opinion, based on 45 years of game design.