Comment by delhanty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delhanty | Hacker News Reader

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>Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

John Carmack is unusually direct and asserts pretty much the same things a couple of weeks back. [1]

>This will never, ever work. Nobody will build your game idea and give you money for it. If you go through the development process, you will find that the original idea is a very small fraction of the value.

[1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/931653803199275008

Edit: typo s/in/is

Ideas are a multiplier of execution — https://sivers.org/multiply

I agree and disagree with this one. Of course, no one is going to pay money for your game idea, but there are ideas which require an NDA. Those ideas typically take years of development and a person with such an idea would be able to present hundreds of pages of alternate designs and their pros/cons. For example, if I have a design for a 3mm x 1mm mechanism that can actuate a rod by 2mm and I know what kind of power consumption said mechanism will have, that design might be expressible on a single piece of paper, and be worth millions of dollars.

>a person with such an idea would be able to present hundreds of pages of alternate designs

Arguably, that's much more than just an idea - it's the idea plus the development of the idea, with most of the value being in the development bit.

True, but if I know that you have been working on the idea for 5 years, and that you have those hundreds of pages of alternate designs, then even just the end result may be valuable enough to me that you would want an NDA.

I think the quote is talking about the original idea before work has been put into it, not an end product

But a sketch isn't an end product. It is not a "realization".

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