Too late for edit: That highlights the problem with ‘idea men’ - what he wanted to do wasn’t actually practical with the technology at the time, but he didn’t know enough to know that implementing his idea at that time wouldn’t be practical. And streaming movies is not an original idea, I recently read an ‘ideas of the future’ article from the 1970s that postulated streaming movies at home, though it didn’t postulate the internet. So while it’s easy to say ‘ohh, you missed out on the bright idea that could have been Netflix’, the fact is the idea was far from new, and it wouldn’t have been profitable at the time.
I posted a rant some years back pitting people approaching me with “I need you to make me a website to make me a millionaire.” Then when I ask what their idea is they have no idea, but Google and Amazon did it so how hard can it be?
You must be a riot at parties.
Aren’t there relatively cheap tools out there that allow you to make your own video game? I’m pretty sure I came across such things.
Yeah, but they never actually want to invest the dozens and dozens of hours required to learn them, never mind the hundreds it would take to know enough about game development and optimization to make something that’s shippable.
Well I happen to have an idea that could make us a fortune. How about you create an app that allows people to have a virtual meeting using their own computing device. Let me know when you are finished and we can test it by having a virtual meeting. Then I will sell it and makes us billions. You can have 20% of the billions.
and hard to follow unless very well documented…
There are things like RPGMaker, which is inexpensive or free depending on the version. I fooled around with it for a while. It had a pretty steep learning curve just to use the bare-bones program. It’s based off Ruby programming language so if you know Ruby you can make it do amazing stuff. If you DON’T know Ruby, like me, you’re kind of stuck with the defaults unless you can find tips or add-ons online.
That doesn’t even take into account putting together a decent story, creating characters with every aspect from their name to the difficulty curve for leveling up up to you, artwork, music, maps that don’t suck (i.e. a forest with trees lined up in precise rows like an orchard, with the exact same clump of flowers between them) puzzles, etc etc etc.
The RPGMaker forums I read had a lot of what the OP’s talking about: some newbie signing up with “ohai I have this great idea for a game that (is basically a ripoff of whatever’s the most popular game franchise of the time full of features the game engine just can’t handle). Who wants to make it for me? I’ll let you put your name on it somewhere!”
And when you got married that was the Altar statement? 
The thing is, it’s not inconceivable that one of my friends could be successful.
Not because they have a good idea – I haven’t heard a good idea yet – but because sometimes a good idea emerges organically from trying to do something stupid first.
Or, in the current climate, it’s enough to have an idea that’s attractive to investors. That investment money can be the springboard on to better things, even while the original idea dies horribly.
So in some ways it’s like a lottery. The problem is, a single ticket costs perhaps years of my life, salary-free, working for someone who I think is an idiot, on an unworkable and unoriginal idea.
Actually I used to have game ideas, and would get as far as 20-30% done before hitting some difficult technical or design challenge and moving on to the next big idea.
Perhaps next time someone tries to pitch an idea to me, I bring my laptop and show them 1. How bad I am at actually finishing shit and 2. How much work it took even to implement this ugly bag of unfinished features.
Well, for all we know, the Netflix people started developing the streaming video on demand after wolfman’s friend pulled himself together and pitched the idea to them.
Four years from concept to rollout doesn’t strike me as an implausible timeframe on a project as ambitious as that.
ETA:
DISCLAIMER: I do not claim to have a sufficient frame of reference to know if my impression of what is and is not implausible has any real-world validity.
And that’s too high a price. I did work for wild, fun optimists who had This Awwwwwwesome Idea! but even after I produced a lot of artwork for them, they ran headfirst into This Awwwwwwesome Thing Called Reality! … which included the realization that they didn’t have enough to pay their bills.
It was worth losing a few hundred to never have to deal with them again, and it’s worth never being rich/admired/famous to never hear another pie-in-the-sky promise again.
You know, this thread is giving me an awesome idea… I just need help with a few technical details, and we’ll all be rich!
Why on earth would they need Wolfman’s friend to pitch the idea to them? Like I said, the basic idea ‘lets stream movies to people and charge them for it’ is an idea that’s been published and available to the public since at least the 1970s. The first time I streamed a short, low-quality video in the 90s I thought ‘one day with much more bandwidth, you could do a whole movie this way’, and I wasn’t the only one. Cable and phone companies had been working on ‘video on demand’ since the early 1990s, in 2001 Enron and Blockbuster (such dated names now) tried to do video on demand over the fiber network that Enron had bought, though it flopped.
There was simply no value in ‘let’s do video on demand’, it’s an obvious idea that a lot of people had, were working on, and were spending billions of dollars on before Wolfman’s friend thought he came up with it. The useful part isn’t the blatantly obvious idea, it is figuring out how to handle video rights and the network infrastructure (hard and expensive problem).
Not exactly the same thing, but here’s David Thorne writing on working with a clueless, manipulative salesman.
It’s like Twitter. Except we charge people to use it. Please design a logo for me. With piecharts. For free.
THANK YOU! I’d been thinking of “Pie charts for Simon” since I saw this thread, but didn’t know the site, or David’s last name.
It does relate, as David adds into his estimate the price of inventing a time machine to go back to before anyone’d thought of Twitter…
It was years ago, but I still recall (and love) “Missing Missy” (David being asked to design a Lost Cat poster), and his trying to pay a bill by drawing a 7-legged spider… doesn’t he fax it to his utility company? And then ask them to fax it back, as he’d faxed his only copy of his drawing… and they do?
Just so everyone’s aware, Thorne’s stuff is generally fiction with minimal (if any) basis in reality.
It’s funny, but not necessarily true.
It was email, but yes.
Thanks. Read it back when it was posted (a decade or so?)… “Email this back to me” was actually something someone here once dealt with from a 60+ computer-newbie parent.
By the way, I occasionally google the guy who stiffed me for design/graphics for his Awwwwesome Idea!… he’s since gone into the “nuisance lawsuit” business. Like searching newspaper articles on furniture design, then looking up a painting in the background of a photo of a unique dining room table. Annnd… suing the newspaper for “ripping off” the artist who painted the piece (which was often barely visible). He’s been ejected from the courtroom four times, as have his cases. Oh, then he refuses to pay legal/court costs.
I guess that’s his next awwwwwesome idea… at least there’s no character design/animation involved this time.
Bottom line:
**Too many people think an ‘Idea’ is the valuable part of any process.
Nope, ideas are free. The work is the valuable part.**