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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> Many of them want a partner–they’ll be in charge of the idea, and I’ll execute it.

Boy, does that sound familiar. In my experience, they'll also get most of the money and credit, and will plan to kick me to the curb, once it gets to alpha.

> I hate to break it to you, but your idea–any idea, really–is worthless. An idea only has value when it is executed, and it only has a lot of value when it’s executed well.

And that "executed well" is important. I have seen so many promising ideas and systems destroyed by being written by "lowest common denominator" implementation talent.

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If I could upvote this more than once I would. When people hear that I'm a hobbyist game developer (video and board), a significant number of them will say (paraphrased) "I've got this great idea for a game, would you make it for me?" I've learned to just say "maybe someday when I'm not so busy," because the truth of the article offends too many of them.

The same principle applies to patents. Ideas are worthless, but execution is everything. Patents prevent other people from executing on an idea, meaning you are stuck with an obnoxious patent troll controlling the idea forever. We need to abolish patents.

false dichotomy

> Patents prevent other people from executing on an idea, meaning you are stuck with an obnoxious patent troll controlling the idea forever.

Better than an obnoxious oligarch controlling all ideas forever, which could happen if you completely abolish patents. Do you have any more nuanced (i.e. realistic) suggestions for reform?

Serious question: how would an oligarch control anything in a patent-less world? I mean, you just have an idea for a SQL Server, you just go ahead and do it, how does the oligarch stop you exactly?

I think your example is interesting because it shows just how much we’ve all been spoiled by software. If you have a great idea for a piece of software, you can code it up on your own or in a small team for more-or-less ‘free’, minus time and opportunity costs. As soon as your idea has a physical component, though, you have to start worrying about manufacturing and logistics and materials and personnel and space, all of which are costly and time-consuming and finite. What if your idea requires negotiating for land rights to build infrastructure? What if you need to build an assembly line to manufacture your product at scale? If you’re competing against a counterparty with effectively infinite money, you might need all of the lead time a patent gives you to level the playing field.

As opposed to a corporation with effectively infinite money preventing the development of 3D printing as an industry and a hobby because they sat on their patents until it expired?

I don't see how this is different today. If you're a small guy with a patent trying to bring to market a physical product before a giant...good luck with that. I can think of several examples where a large company stuns the development of a technology just because they can (3D printing, LCD monitors, electric cars, e-ink). Can you give me some examples from today where a startup used the patents as a sufficient moat to get to success? There are many successful startups, I am referring to specifically some that were protected by patents.

Even if you do, the second you do it and it sells, it gets copied in China faster that you can say IP.

> examples where a large company stuns the development of a technology just because they can (3D printing, LCD monitors, electric cars, e-ink).

I work in the display industry. I've never heard that e-ink "stuns" the development of technology. Could you elaborate on your meaning? Please see my comment history to see why I keep asking about this.

> Serious question: how would an oligarch control anything in a patent-less world? I mean, you just have an idea for a SQL Server, you just go ahead and do it

Network effects and the ability to spend 100x what you can raise to destroy you as an example to others or just to duplicate it. I mean, great, you have a new SQL Server. I'll even grant that it's 1,000x better/faster/etc than the current SQL because you sprinkled fairy dust everywhere. How are you going to roll it out to customers before Oracle/Amazon/MS/Google reverse engineer it and deploy it to all their existing customers?

At least with IP, there is a bidding war among those companies to buy out your tech - you'll probably get paid. And a limited period of ownership before the world gets the benefit universally.

Patent duration of 3 years instead of 20. Long head start on execution but removing the ability for patent trolls to sit on them for decades.

I think the patents might have had a good role sometimes in the past, when small people could protect themselves from the big guys. Or protect small guys stealing each other's work.

These days, the big guys can just trample over small ones, and use the list of patents they have as a counter-sue threat against other big guys. Small guys are constantly threatened by big guys with patent lawsuits, they can't really dream about enforcing a patent a large guy. Even if they have the perfect patent they just get bought up for it. And now the patent is part of that big list mentioned above, where it can be used for development or just sit in a drawer and have the project killed just so that competition can't use it.

Say you manage to fix this, but then you go to China and they will copy everything you do and sell an exact replica the next day with impunity.

There is no win, I don't see any benefit of patents in the western world today, they're only used to slow technological progress - the exact opposite of the intent.

What am I missing here? This is a very shallow take with my little knowledge, but I just don't see the benefits of patents.

I think the patents might have had a good role sometimes in the past, when small people could protect themselves from the big guys. Or protect small guys stealing each other's work.

OK. Has this ever been true?

I remembered a story about the Wright brothers suing competitors and engaging in a patent war, instead of spending their time and energy continuing to innovate.

Say you manage to fix this, but then you go to China and they will copy everything you do and sell an exact replica the next day with impunity.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? These Chinese firms made open source 3D printers more accessible to the hobbyist communities, and some of them are even known for quality. Granted, some of them cut corners so much that a burning 3d printer became a meme.

3D printing as a hobby only becomes a thing once the patent expired.

I am sympathetic to the idea of the small inventor trying to make it in the world. But people, big and small, corporations and individuals, can and did abuse patents, even innovators.

> Is this necessarily a bad thing?

It pains me that I have to explain this to adults on HN, but: yes, this is bad. The foreign investor/customer paid dearly with time and money for the research and development. The factory runs an additional night shift and makes another batch of product. They then sell the night shift products at a reduced price undercutting the original vendor because they do not have to recoup the development costs. The vendor with the higher price cannot sell his stock of product because the demand is already satisfied from the cheaper night shift product.

OK. That wasn't what I am talking about. I am talking about 3d printer vendors entering the market, not being duplicitous about it. 3d printers are often open source, completely out in the open. So you would naturally expect clones.

So there's no duplicitous dealings going on here.

Actually going to court only happens when things have broken down - what you don't hear about are all the stories where a simple letter resolves things, or where there's no fight in the first place.

There are definitely cases where an innovator gets a patent and then is able to make a successful company that makes life better for everyone, even in software (e.g. RSA). Pick your favourite small inventor success story (Dyson?) and they most likely have a patent on whatever it is they made. The argument for patents is that they make that kind of basic research profitable (including for hobbyists) and therefore encourage more of it to happen. It's very hard to actually confirm that counterfactual one way or another, but it sounds logical at least.

... or only grant patents if the inventor has a fully functional prototype of their idea.

It works like that in many countries...

I'm not a patent lawyer...

In principle, a patent is supposed to cover this. The text of the patent has to provide a recipe for reducing the idea to practice. As I understand it, if the recipe is unworkable, the patent is void.

Whether the patent office is stringent enough about this requirement is an open question of course. It may vary from one field to another. For instance, a patent for a new kind of optical lens is required to include a complete "prescription" for the lens, which is recognized as a sufficient set of data needed to replicate the idea. (One of my patents is like that).

IMO we'd be better off without intellectual property at all, but it's probably worth pointing out that weaker measures can accomplish a similar goal.

If independent invention were a valid defense and the terms were a bit shorter then the only patents which would actually affect your business would be those which you legitimately couldn't come up with on your own (which seems like the point of the whole system -- you get a monopoly and we get blueprints in return). Shorter terms of 5-10 yrs would allow for faster iteration on important ideas.

Alternatively, compulsory license agreements like you have for some aspects of music could substantially reduce the chilling effect on new inventions. You don't have to worry about somebody suing for multiples of revenue; you just always have the ability to pay a reasonable royalty -- the patent owner still gets handsomely compensated, but important new inventions can start rolling out immediately.

Or else if the bar to get patents were a little higher then the system would work a lot more smoothly. The fact that cloudflare was able to invalidate the vast majority of patents when a troll sued them strongly indicates they shouldn't have been awarded in the first place even under current guidelines.

> we'd be better off without intellectual property at all

So there's absolutely nothing at all to prevent a situation where you put time and money into developing something, and as soon as it gets legs, a megacorp instead of buying you out or licensing it from you, just copies it and pushes you out of the market?

There's also nothing preventing a megacorporation from preemptively inventing and patenting everything under the sun. They also have infinite money to fight patent lawsuits.

Moreover, these patent lawsuits mean that said inventors spend more time talking to their lawyers instead of getting these inventions to market.

Is that worse than the current situation where you accidentally infringe on a dozen patents from the megacorp's warchest and get sued to oblivion if you don't quietly agree to their favorite terms? Is that worse than all the innovation being stifled by agreements requiring work on your own time and dime to belong to your employer? Are first-mover advantages and other sources of natural monopolies not really that important in building your moat? Is intellectual property the right mechanism for limiting megacorp power?

I'm open to the idea of some intellectual property rights remaining (like the "natural rights" you see in a lot of the world, or retaining current trade secret laws), but I still think we'd be in a better place than we are now if the current system were completely abolished.

One idea I had is when you get a patent approved, you also have to set some money aside for a bounty that is paid to anyone who invalidates the patent through prior art.

Forever? Patents have a 20-year lifespan and require you to disclose your methodology, allowing others to copy your idea as soon as your exclusivity period is up. In a world without patents, small inventors would have their ideas stolen immediately by corporations that have the resources to build and sell the invention.

The big corporations have the resources to build and sell the invention and defend against a patent lawsuit regardless.

Moreover, the big corporations already can use patents against smaller competitors and can fund more R&D to get patents and can simply sit on it.

Also, it isn't always a good idea to disclose how your stuff work. For example, SpaceX doesn't do that because the Chinese government will copy their stuff. Not that it matters. The problem with the space industry is that the old space contractors and governments rest on their laurel even when SpaceX became the Goliath of the Space industry.

That theft happens now. Small fish cannot compete with big fish without risking getting eaten alive.

You think one pathetic patent would stand up against a FAANG’s warchest, if they really wanted to implement it? They will use your idea and bury you with their own patent portfolio, unless you license it under terms that are generous and favorable to their interests. If you want to play hardball, they will use their lawyers to drown you in legal debt before a judge ever hears the case.

In this light, it should be clear that innovation has been completely crushed under the heel of the present system of fascist corporatism. Eliminating patents will not solve that overarching problem, though we know such an outcome would never be permitted to happen. Patent pools do not solve it, as that sacrifices the autonomy and independence that is the very essence of being a small fish.

> You think one pathetic patent would stand up against a FAANG’s warchest, if they really wanted to implement it?

You can sell your patent to a troll that can stand up against FAANG.

I don't like patents. I like the 20 year life span. I can live with the compromise. There is no compromise for copyright.

> Patents ... require you to disclose your methodology, allowing others to copy your idea as soon as your exclusivity period is up.

When I was taught to read a patent, I was told to skip to the claims, and the rest was useless except to provide definitions for words used in the claims. The description is _supposed to_ allow another practitioner to reproduce the invention, and many engineers who write patents do take the trouble to do this right. But as far as I know, the patent office does not verify that the description is valid or useful. They do try to check for novelty. I've also heard advice that engineers should avoid reading any patents because when there's a patent fight, damages are greater for willful infringement. Given that the usual practice is to ignore a patent's technical description, is a patent really useful as a disclosure of methodology? It seems like in practice, the only point is to plant a legal claim on some intellectual territory. As you note, the legal aspect may have genuine benefits, but the technical disclosure aspect seems to be useless.

Yeah...I recall a family member telling me once "I have this great idea for a novel", and I immediately tuned out. I'm not a writer, but I know that -everyone- has a great idea for a novel. The difference between authors and everyone else is the authors did the work to actually get it down, edited, and published (to where I even have a little respect for the people who self-publish obvious vanity projects, simply for the fact they had the self-discipline to actually sit down and get it on a page).

As I’ve been working on my first novel since 2016… I agree completely. An idea isn’t much without the effort backing it up.

My father-in-law wrote five books during his lifetime. To his credit, they were ok. But he refused to ever work with an editor. And thus none were ever published.

I wrote a book on how to publish your ebook. The people who read it seem to love it but I haven't marketed it real well. In any case, you might find it interesting if you want to publish your own book or if you wanted to publish your father-in-laws unfinished books.

There's even a bit of information in there about using your computers text-to-speech tool for editing. You have it read the book back to you in order to catch mistakes.

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00A4112ZM

The text to speech idea is brilliant. I've read some books several times in print, but many finer details escaped me until I listened to the audio version.

I've had great ideas for novels ... until I started to write them. Then I realize there has to be a middle too. And it has to be interesting to read.

yes, yes, yes. the middle. if you can't keep a reader from taking a bathroom break until page 140, you can't write a novel.

There are a lot of novels that would beg to differ.

I do wish it was easier to publish and get short stories in a similar way to novels. Like, I don't need a 300 page tome every time. But even anthologies of short stories by new authors (as opposed to Sci-Fi classics) seem to be out of style.

I think the future for this is online publication. On a personal blog, or a shared website.

A bit like stories such as Sherlock Holmes’ were initially published in episodically in newspapers.

Many platforms now offer subscriptions options, so it definitely could work.

That still leaves the discovery & editing issues though.

Any thoughts on that?

In the west this is still growing, but in Japan at least, it's way more common, at least regarding 'light novels' (kinda of like YA?). I'm not sure about earning money through subscriptions, but there people who write to those sites (similar to Wattpad) often struck a deal with a publisher to adapt the 'web novel' to a 'light novel'[0]

Edit: I know that for webtoons (korean comics) subscription is turning into a reality, at least in English markets. Not sure about how's it in Korea though

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LightNovels/comments/6hgw1w/konosub...

That’s how Andy Weir did The Martian. It’s also how Isaac Asimov wrote the first two or three Foundation novels.

The Screwtape Letters (C. S. Lewis) were done that way.

Lots of prior art. Also, it makes the books easier to read.

Internet makes it fairly easily to publish your short novels on a personal website. You are not going to make a profit or be marketed but at least your work is now out-there. Reading qntm's ones [0] got me to buy his self-published books.

[0]: https://qntm.org/fiction

I agree that internet makes it easy to self-publish short stories. And sure, if you are using it as promotion it makes sense. But I was specifically referring to short-stories as a viable commercial enterprise.

Just write dozens and publish them 10 at a time. In fact, two of my favorite authors growing up did exactly that, Andy Griffiths and Paul Jennings.

There’s a whole market for short fiction actually if you look. Magazines, anthologies, etc still exist. Where do you think “the best American science fiction and fantasy” anthology sources from every year? Check out SFWA (science fiction and fantasy writers of America) qualifier list for short fiction, duotrope, and the submission grinder.

(Caveat: publication is competitive at these magazines/anthologies. Good luck to you.)

I'll look into it, thank you.

https://365tomorrows.com/

I was listening to an interview with John Greene, the author of A Fault in Our Stars and the excellent The Anthroposcene Reviewed podcast.

He talked about how one of his books basically sat on the shelf for ages (possibly a year), he just couldn't get the idea to work, until one day he came back to it and figured it out. People massively underestimate how much work it takes to turn an idea for a story into a working novel with a coherent plot and characters.

In sci-fi and fantasy I think this is particularly obvious. There's a lot of sci-fi that has an interesting idea or concept at it's heart, but the actual story just falls flat. I think it's why short stories are often a better format for sci-fi ideas.

Similarly I've encountered a lot of fantasy that was all about world-building but where the book itself just went nowhere. World building is kind of easy compared to actually writing a novel with a compelling story. It seems to be common for aspiring fantasy authors to spend years doing the former and never getting round to the latter.

> Similarly I've encountered a lot of fantasy that was all about world-building but where the book itself just went nowhere.

It’s like bands that spend years polishing their sound, but never actually write any songs.

People massively underestimate how much work it takes to turn an idea for a story into a working novel with a coherent plot and characters

A common piece of advice often repeated for fiction writing: when you finish your novel, leave it untouched for a few months (e.g. six months). When you return to read it again with a fresh eye, you'll spot all the clunky passages, clichés, and poorly written characters you didn't spot when you were immersed in the writing. The space of a few months gives you a more critical eye.

That's the advice. Whether writers actually heed it I don't know. (A pause of some months might feel too long for some writers itching to be published.)

Note 'one of'. In my experience all ideas are different. Some ideas just naturally work almost straight off the bat, and others take an inordinate amount of fine tuning.

In fiction writing, people who don't have any skills or experience often assume they can just sit down and write a novel because they have a cool idea. This is never ever the case, regardless of how cool the idea is, because writing a (readable) novel is actually really hard.

Source: have written several unreadable novels.

> Similarly I've encountered a lot of fantasy that was all about world-building but where the book itself just went nowhere. World building is kind of easy compared to actually writing a novel with a compelling story. It seems to be common for aspiring fantasy authors to spend years doing the former and never getting round to the latter.

I'd actually be interested to read some of those - I wish there was some kind of standard media form for that. E.g. I enjoyed reading the Eclipse Phase sourcebooks much more than actually playing the game. And while I didn't actually enjoy Christopher Priest's The Islanders, I liked the idea of the form.

in the video game industry, I remember reading a person (an indie maybe, but I'm not sure) saying that values are basically: idea = 1 prototype = 10 shipped game = 100 shipped game that actually earns money = 1000

Can you explain this quote?

1000 ideas are as valuable as a shipped product.

> 1000 ideas are as valuable as a shipped product

that earns money.

It would benefit with commas or semi-colons after each number. It took me a bit to parse as well.

Think of it as XP.

And then prospective gamedevs took this to heart and build a flappy birds clone, ship it and feel they accomplished something. Shipping a game you know is shit wont teach you anything at all! You need to pour your soul into it first, try to work out the kinks and ensure it can be fun to play before shipping, and then see how what you think matches with how players feel about the game.

My dad would always tell me about his ideas for smart phone apps, if only I would build them (and in my mind---he'd get the money). I would always then search the app store for his "idea" and find N number of apps, already there. He never did stop with his "ideas" though (and he never bothered to do a simple search either).

have you considered creating a fake or 2nd account?

LOL, so often....

I tell them instead, "Great idea, you should learn to program so that you can write it."

While that sounds snarky, I am sincere. I explain to them that is exactly why I am a programmer: I wanted to write my own computer games so badly that I learned programming in order to do it.

I should add, since developing for iOS, now it's "I've got a great idea for an iPhone app!"

What I do is I explain to them the concept of MVP and tell them to come back with specifications for one. Noone ever came back yet...

I make apps and nearly everyone says, "I have a great app idea." Not a one has checked if this idea exists. I had to send a friend this article as he is fairly blunt but wants to dump ideas a lot. Your response is a good one for most people.

I had a similar experience, they were really cagey even sharing the idea in case I stole it. Searched play store and app store as she told me about it and there were dozens of this type of app already.

Statistically speaking, if you have an idea for an app, and there aren't already apps for it, you have an idea that there is no way to make money with.

I'm sure there's a lot of spaces where there's room for a better app, but I can't imagine there's much space left for money-making apps that have no competition today. I believe there are such spaces, but we're probably talking species-wide blind spots at that point, and you probably aren't the first to penetrate whatever the veil is.

If trying to come up with one of these ideas anyway, that is a good way to find one.

Ask yourself, if there is one thing that I might be able to think of, that almost nobody else in the world can, what would it be? What unique combination of experiences, perspectives, talents, etc do I have that is extremely uncommon and what unique ideas can I think of because of this?

Not super practical in this case since the odds of success are still pretty low(but not 0), but looking at things this way can be useful in other scenarios as well. It's kind of similar to how I often spin negative experiences into a positive in my head, they're still experiences and experiences can always be useful, especially if they're unique

Some people I like to hear out. Then I'll maybe discuss the merits of the idea, meanwhile tally in my head and leave it as "well, sounds great, would probably take me about 4 months to build it. You could probably get it done in 1 month if you had $x?xx,xxx to put into it"

Aren’t most of their ideas bad, though? That’s my issue with this article; usually both the idea and the execution is lacking.

It’s very funny that this is the top comment, because just seeing the headline before seeing the comments or article the first thing that came to mind was all the people that have approached me to be 50/50 partners where their 50% was having an idea and mine was spending months programming and designing.

This is a great summation of the article. The pandemic gave me the time to start executing some of my favorite ideas and it's really something to see features drop off the timeline as the execution complexities start to spin out geometrically.

Yeah I've been there, being the person who executed the idea. It sucked knowing the person giving the "idea" (which I actually gave most of the directions) had so much leisure time for fun, while I was sitting there coding something I'm not interested in. I only execute my own ideas now. Even sometimes I can't finish it, I can only blame myself.

Well there is much more to do than coding... They should be doing sales and marketing and other stuff. If they're doing nothing, that's a bad sign

Even that's lopsided. Assuming the idea is purely software (no hardware manufacturing involved), then the vast majority of the actual work is to make the product.

I would not accept a 50/50 split where he "has the idea" and I do the software. I wouldn't even accept a 50/50 split if the Idea Partner also does a little sales and marketing. I would maybe accept 50/50 if the Idea Partner also provided all the capital. Now we're talking...

If your "ideas man" has fully committed to doing all the sales/marketing and the dance of raising capital, leaving you to work on the product, I think that's a very fair division of labour. After all, a finished product is almost as worthless as an unexecuted idea if no one ever actually purchases or uses said product. I say almost because, in theory, your product could have enough "obvious" value on its own that you could just sell it to another company and exit comfortably.

But now they are taking all the risk and it would make sense to just pay you a salary and keep the 100%

But if anything this an argument in favour of the idea that ideas do have value, as it's equivalent to the situation where the capitalist pays $10,000 to set up the ice cream stand and wanders off while their partner does all the work. The arrangement may be unfair on some level but that's a whole different question.

> I only execute my own ideas now. Even sometimes I can't finish it, I can only blame myself.

Don't blame yourself. It's okay to not finish something.

Sometimes I just want to prove to myself that something is possible. That I'm not insane for thinking it. Once the result is clear, I usually lose interest. It turns into the exact kind of boring execution work the article's talking about. Better to find some new idea to explore...

I've had a whole bunch of random people message me to implement their idea for some small fraction of equity. They want 95% for their one pager.

Are there any good examples where the opposite is true, i.e. a relatively terrible idea executed so well it succeeds?

If it succeeds, there's a pretty serious question about whether it was actually a terrible idea. I'd be doubtful about the premise accordingly. I think the successful outcome is inherently invalidating of the notion it was a terrible idea.

I've been reading about business history for decades, I enjoy it. I can't think of an example that matches that setup. Ideas like the pet rock or chia pet or electronic dancing flower pots jump to mind, however my thinking is immediately that: well, they weren't such terrible ideas then, lots of people wanted to buy those things.

A combination of disposable income and endless desire to be amused/entertained, is a potent consumption formula. The pet rock for example was a relatively inexpensive tchotchke of very temporary curiosity and amusement. People love to be amused, entertained and to have trinkets to talk about or show off. A lot of seemingly bad ideas fall into that space.

That's true. "Terrible" is in the eye of the beholder.

Many, many companies make bank, by taking classic ideas, and executing them well.

It's like Joe Cocker made many obscure songs into mega-hits.

If other companies are making lots profit doing something then it isn't a terrible idea. A terrible idea is trying to build something that will never make lots of money, like the pet dating sites or so.

Like the songs that Joe Cocker often covered, the ideas may be languishing, with little-to-moderate success.

Until done properly, or combined with other ideas or good marketing.

Until they make money, they are derided as "terrible ideas."

Of course some ideas are hard to recognize as good, but you can't say that there aren't any terrible ideas out there. Trying to implement a terrible idea will never work out no matter how well you execute, unless you make it into a MLM scam but I wouldn't call that success.

I could make a case that Airbed and Breakfast was somewhat of a "terrible idea" at the beginning... now with an $80+ billion market cap... they executed well.

Why do you think it was ever a bad idea? From the Airbnb wikipedia page, it seems apparent that, right from the beginning, the plan was to tap into the market of people who liked the idea of playing a professional Host but did not have the capital or desire to run a full fledged hotel/BnB; some of the margin gained by these lower costs of operating could be passed on to guests, thereby attracting them to the service.

However, HOWEVER, there are/were some gigantic risks Airbnb was taking, I will agree with you on that -- the risk of people staying at random strangers' houses and the wide spectrum of horrifying experiences that can lead to. There's an excellent Bloomberg article that does a deep dive into Airbnb's somewhat-shady "Trust and Safety team"[1][2].

The point I'm trying to make is that although the idea came with certain inherent risks, skillful execution can mitigate those risks significantly. Similar risks were also attached to Uber's idea of random strangers offering rides to people, and those risks were somewhat mitigated as well.

[1] archive.md link: https://archive.md/nyBFY

[2] original article link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-15/airbnb-sp...

Ten million authors throughout time, and maybe the scurrying multitudes of the social media scene, might suggest that just communicating the idea renders substantial value all by itself.

Unless you consider successful communication an "execution" phaze.

But ya, if we're talking about "making machines". You could call that a way of communicating via solid example.

It reminds me of the generative art scene. So many valuable ideas communicated via relatively lightweight example. More lightweight than, say, a whole big game.

lol,

reminds me of some guys that once contacted me.

"We are five business people who have a cool idea for an app and now we need you to build with us!"

Like, even IF we would split equity equally, 6 people to start with, wth?

Split? How good of an idea would they still think it is if you told them to pay you hourly ($$$!) and they could split the profits five ways?

Also, there's more than one way to execute an idea. If they are executed simultaneously, the better execution will win, making the alternates worthless. The implementation itself IS the business.

Ideas are a dime a dozen.

True, but you can also make a career out of preying on these types.

If the son of a Tencent executive had a video game idea, it has a ton of value.

I don’t know, there are a lot of games out there that are “well executed” that no one plays. Lots of indie developers who repeatedly make hits, and yet still no one finds (or finds) their next game.

These takes are kind of obnoxious.

If we followed your line of thinking, we’d never have Doom. You’re just unabashedly proposing a plutocracy.

You couldn't be more wrong, do you have a single example of a rich kid with an idea spending many millions to make others build a game and it was successful? I haven't heard that happen even once!

The reason AAA developers almost never innovate and instead just release the same game year after year with new sequels is that good game ideas are extremely rare. Most games wont sell well enough to make back the money if you pour 100 million into making them, so each AAA studio haves one or two ideas that they know will sell and then they just repeat it.

Indie developer are the ones building new ideas and they do it for a very small amount of money. See factorio, hollow knight, valheim, darkest dungeons etc, lots of games that sold many millions beating many AAA studio products with new ideas and very modest budgets.

Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill were rich kids who spent millions on other people to develop League of Legends. We don’t talk about them as indie developers obviously, even though in 2009 they were independently publishing (and continuing to independently publish) because the formula of capital, namely a rich kid, is really successful in gaming.

It just goes to show how obnoxious, again, this kind of take is. I don’t get why people are so obsessed with purity of creation in games.

League of Legends wasn't their game idea, they hired the guy who at the time maintained Dota and told him to make a stand alone version of dota. Giving money to someone who is already successful to make them more successful is a great business idea and has been done by others as well, but it isn't the same thing as some rich kid coming up with a game idea and telling someone else to implement it.

Jobs/Woz?

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