I’m afraid I’m currently busy working on a program that can tell whether a program is halting or not. I’m not sure I’ll ever finish it 
I agree, it sounds like a pretty boring game.
A few ideas to improve it:
Maybe add a few more men. Make it 5-a-side.
Make players roll dice to determine the outcome of passes, tackles, etc.
Give each man individual stats that give a bonus to dice rolls. One may have a good bonus to pass, but weak on tackle, while another man is the reverse.
When rolling for tackle, if both players roll a six, it’s a foul. Award a penalty kick to the defender.
The way to handle this situation is to “admit” that you just don’t get it. “I’m sure you have a better sense for the prospects of this enterprise, but I’m just not seeing it.” Let the implication be a criticism of your own vision and not there’s. It’s not the most forceful rejection of your friend’s ideas, but it might still be cause for reconsideration…and you can remain friends.
Even with a shot clock, this game sounds boring as hell. If people wanted to play soccer, they would play, you know, actual soccer or FIFA games.
Your friend has a severe case of tunnel vision and likely Dunning-Kruger as well, and beyond the reach of reason. I suggest letting him crash and burn, and then needling him about this every time you guys meet after that.
If you lose him as a friend, then good riddance to him.
One path might be to try to separate his game-design aspirations from his tournament-business aspirations, and to hopefully steer him toward lower-risk ways of implementing his ideas.
Smashing those things together into one endeavor requires that he succeed at two somewhat difficult tasks together.
So he should pick one to do first, and ideally it’s the lower-risk one (the one that doesn’t cost a bank loan to implement). If he thinks he can organize tournaments, he doesn’t need a new game to do that. He can try to organize tournaments for an existing game. Offer some prize money, promote it, and cash in. And the only starting capital he needs for this is the prize money for the first tournament.
Or if he wants to implement the game, he doesn’t need to spend $X,000 implementing it online. Like others suggested, he just needs to mock up the board and, like, play it with some people first. It sounds like you sort of tried this and he realized that the game needs some work. You may not be able to convince him that it’s just never going to work (and, hey, maybe it will. A soccer/chess board game isn’t a crazy impossibility. There may be a ruleset out there that’s workable), but it’s possible you could convince him to make the game better before paying someone to implement it.
But… yeah. Everyone who designs games starts somewhere. And most of the early ones aren’t amazing.
Wow, I brought you out of message board retirement for that comment, TheGunIsMightierThanThePen. Thanks, and welcome back 
Yes I was surprised at the level of delusion. I guess people just really, really want to believe that they have something. A lesson for us all…
Tomorrow morning he’ll be showing me his presentation for the dev team. Ostensibly I am just giving feedback on the presentation itself, but I’ll question the business model and reference the big online games like league of legends. Hopefully that might make him appreciate the standard of competition and just how unrealistic his plan is.
My brother described a DVR to me in the late 80s, at least a decade before ReplayTV and Tivo first became available. I told him that it was a great idea but at the time the available hardware wasn’t up to the task. Even the largest hard drive available at the time would have been able to store under an hour of video and the hardware to build a prototype would have cost about $10,000. Then I would have needed to write most of the required software because open source solutions weren’t available at the same (it was about 5 years before the first usable version of Linux came out, for example).
I do one of two things when someone comes to me with an idea - I either tell them that it already exists or has already failed (95% of the cases) or I tell them what it would cost to start a company to develop it and what I would ask for a salary (I’m not working for “stock”). They might think I’m being a jerk but at least they stop talking about it.
That’s a very good way of looking at it, thanks.
And I agree that hypothetically a soccer-based board game could work. But I don’t know why he thinks his game idea is already good enough. If he were brainstorming ideas and this were one rough concept out of 10, fair enough. But that’s as far as it should go IMO without significant further work.
Thanks Mijin, but I wasn’t really retired, it’s just that my job became return-to-office in March and a lot of my pre-pandemic activities resumed around that same time, so I lost much of my free time for posting.
I predict he’ll dismiss all your feedback out of hand, because he is way too emotionally invested in his idea. Perhaps you can get some random strangers to play the game, get bored quickly, and slap him down hard, but I doubt even that would get through to him.
Reminds me of “Jump to Conclusions”…
I bet in his current understanding, he was a visionary, and should be a billionaire now. If only his friends hadn’t been so negative, or he had more self belief…
I think a lot of inventions and developments fall into that bracket, where the overall concept – “DVR”, “online payments system”, “jetpack” – is obvious, and has been thought of by millions of people.
It’s all the hard work, design, capital and luck that needs to be in place for it to happen.
Seems to me that the next step is to point that out. You don’t have to be like “Man, your game stinks out loud.” or anything, but just say “Hey- So-And-So and I played a few rounds, and we noticed some things- specifically if both players go on defense, nothing happens.”
Instead of commenting directly to a bad idea I just go back to the standard speech about how difficult and expensive it is to start a business and succeed, hoe it’s against the odds even with a great idea behind it, and how easily an idea can be copied and exploited by those with more resources.
I suggest you first try it on itself. Diagonalization is always good for incompleteness arguments.
Your friend isn’t implementing anything new. What he’s done is make a simpler, and worse, version of other soccer games.* Honestly, the rules you’ve provided above are more boring than Pong. The game mechanics are too simple for their ostensible purpose and simply boring. There is no way around that. The playability (disregarding how boring the game is) also suffers as it doesn’t have balance between offense and defense and can last forever. Edward de Bono actually designed a good game with the express purpose of the two players, if playing perfectly, having the game go on forever. (That’s the L game) The point, really, of his game is to determine what perfect play is. The game was used as part of a logic course, not as gaming for gaming’s sake. Any of the suggested fixes for your friend’s game will not create something new; it’ll turn the game into something that’s already been done.
Your friend’s dream isn’t really to create a good game, or to market it, or even to get it into tournaments. His dream is to get rich and famous. Somehow he’s latched onto the idea that designing and marketing a game is easy. You can let him down easy or let down hard. I think the latter would be more effective. Perhaps you could steer him to boardgamegeek.com and guide him through some of the relevant fora there. He’ll see that the business of games is just that: business and requires a lot of work, not just chuck something out there.
*Come to think of it. His creation may have already been tried.
I feel like people have been saying that since the days of Thomas Edison.
But then we get Flappy Bird.
~Max
I opened the thread expecting to read about how the OP was having recurring dreams about killing all his friends.
I would just be upfront and say, “I don’t think it’s going to work.” If he presses, just answer each of his questions.
You are doing him a disservice to do otherwise.
mmm
Note the apostrophe though
And, in case anyone thinks I erred: the topic was intended to be how to give tough but fair feedback about the dreams (plural) of our friends (plural). My friend’s soccer thing was just an example.
Well I wouldn’t say that we are *that* close friends that this is my responsibility. But I have decided that I am just going to say, unambiguously: “I don’t think you’re going to make money from this”.
Indeed, my bad. And I’m an apostrophe stickler.
mmm