I homebrew my own beer. Had a couple people just insist I go into business and sell this shit (hey, it’s strong stuff, Man!). I tried to explain about the barriers to entry and the insurmountable legal bullshit you have to do being Booze and all… But No! They kept it up, evoking the Spirit of Sam Adams and shit. Follow Your Dreams! (not my dream to brew beer for a living) Sieze The Day! (it’s night
I finally said, “I’ll look into tomorrow!”, and cracked open another two liters. They forgot about it in the morning.
Some of us were having a discussion about this kind of thing on another board. These are people who do crafts/bake wonderful cakes/write excellent short stories/etc. and people have said things like, “Why don’t you do it for a living?” Among other things, the reason these people haven’t expanded what they do is precisely because they enjoy doing it, and want to keep it a hobby.
Tell you friend the truth and remind him that there will always be negative responses to whatever he releases to the general public, and if he can’t take your honest criticism, how does he plan to handle the criticism of others?
Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Turning an idea into value in the marketplace is extremely difficult, especially for lone inventors working out of their basement. The success rate is near zero for these types.
We’ve had threads and threads on just the points you make.
The problem with small or start-up business is that it’s 90% the business of business and 10% the making of the product itself.
Whereas lots of starry-eyed people who go into these sorts of hobby-becomes-business ventures are much more enamored of the making of the product and are woefully clueless or disinterested in their actual job as an entrepreneur: selling, building an organization, accounting, and regulatory compliance.
A home e.g. baker can hire somebody to make & cook dough. They can’t hire somebody to be their Owner / General Manager. Actually, in a way they can. By getting a job as a baker in an established bakery. That’s often a better course of action if they really want to break out of simple hobbying. It’s vastly less likely to cause them to drain their life savings down a rat-hole.
I got the feeling that some here were starting to become “invested” in my friend’s idea, so thought I’d post an update.
I told him that his “pay to play” business model was going to be…extremely challenging to turn a profit. He basically shrugged it off, and I decided not to shoot the whole thing down, yet, so left it there.
He has showed his idea to a development company. They gave feedback for the sake of feedback (e.g. investors would prefer if the game was not football-themed…think of a different theme) and quoted him $120,000.
I told him that’s nuts: at absolute maximum this project would take 2 developers and 1 artist 3 weeks to implement, and that’s being generous…I could probably do the whole shebang myself in a couple weeks.
I was quite forceful that he should not spend anywhere near that amount of money.
He is considering learning coding himself to do an android / ios prototype. I suggested he focus on delivering that prior to borrowing money…
I have told him what I think.
It’s just that I’ve been polite so far. It’s on him if he’s not listening to my feedback because I am not grabbing him by the ears and shouting in his face that it’s a bad idea.
But yeah, while we aren’t super close friends, I am not going to let him spend $120k…I will get to the rudeness stage before that happens.
The story of your troubles in talking to your friend about the hopeless of his game ever becoming financially viable sounds like the plot of a great movie. You should write it up as a screenplay and sell it to some movie company. I should get a cut of the profits of the film for making this suggestion. In fact, I should get a few million dollars right now for this suggestion.
Maybe you can make the pieces based on fantasy creatures and give them all special abilities that they can use to fight over the ball. Call it “Gutsball”.
So that Babale doesn’t have to explain his (excellent) joke to the uninitiated, this is a reference to the existing board and video game called “Blood Bowl”, which is indeed quite similar to the game posited by Peter Morris.
If I may pitch in a few thoughts from the perspective of tabletop game development. I used to be a little into such games myself; Germany is one of the world’s leading markets for this. Every year, publishing houses release dozens of new titles that compete for attention, there are prizes awarded to the best new games, etc. It’s a highly competitive industry, somewhat comparable to novels; somes games sell well but still don’t make the designer rich - most of them do it alongside a normal job. Only very, very rarely will there be a blockbuster hit such as Settlers of Catan that established an entire franchise and made its designer, Klaus Teuber, a veritable fortune. The game described by the OP sounds quite simplistic; it will be hard for it to get even a modest amount of attention on the market.
I had a friend that was really into making board games. He really put a lot of work into them, writing rules, making the boards, even making pieces out of clay. Some of them were actually quite fun to play. But he spent more time trying to sell them to a distribution company than he actually spent making and designing them. Only one did they ever express any interest in, and what they were offering was pretty pathetic, like a couple hundred dollars, not as an advance, but to buy the IP for the game entirely.
So, even if it is a good idea, and the OP’s friend puts in the work to develop it, it’s still very unlikely to be a “million dollar idea”.
I’m only updating this thread to point out a potential scam.
So, my friend is paying an app developer $6000 for a prototype. I’ve given up trying to tell him his idea sucks, so I think he’s going to just have to take his licks, and hopefully this will be the end of it.
Anyway, the scam is, apparently one company he pitched to, told him he had a fantastic idea, and they wanted to become business partners. However, they also said that to launch their joint business, would take at least $400,000, and he’d have to stump up half.
Fortunately he wasn’t that stupid to take it up (it helps that he doesn’t have that kind of money anyway). But it’s a kind of scam that I haven’t heard of before. Or were they just making fun of him?
Anyway, it’s something I’ll bear in mind if there’s a day where I try to publish an app idea.
Stupid ideas aren’t always scams. Your friend has an idea, if the other guy has 200 grand to invest then who is scamming who? OTOH, 6 grand for an app is quite reasonable if the lion’s share is not due until the product is finished, and not an exorbitant amount to learn a lesson.
