Wow, those points are really stupid.
Your game design is simply a starting point
A game starts out with 1% game design and end up 100% production and polish.
Exactly, and as an indie, someone else might have significantly better resources for production and polish than me. Thus their implementation of my idea would overshadow mine.
It's not just the possibly-expensive production values, but all the little bits of design work that go into transforming a one-sentence idea into a fully fledged game. I might have a great idea for a skill system in an RPG, but on its own that isn't a game - what the skills actually are, what they do in the context of the other activities the player is doing, is what will make it work. Fleshing out this whole thing is the difference between being a game designer and just being an "idea man", and it's still somewhere an indie developer can shine.
Unique mechanics are almost never copied
At this point, many people claim that their design possesses a unique ‘hook’ in terms of the game mechanic. Take for example the Sims. This game had a great game design with some very unique and innovative mechanics. Holy crap, if only “I could have thought of it first” I could have made millions. Wouldn’t you love to go back in time, create a copy of the Sims and sell it before the Sims brand was established?
...and since I haven't made the game(s) yet and established said brand, someone else could do that before I even get the chance to try.
A game takes a fair bit of work to make. Someone's only going to bother putting in all that work if they really believe in the game. If you tell us your favourite idea that is most dear to your heart, we won't rip it off because we don't care enough about it to put in that work - only you do. Once you've done it, we might wish we had stolen the idea because of how awesome it turned out to be, but not until you've already demonstrated that it was a successful idea.
In the Sims example, if you went back in time and told everyone all about it, still nobody would care because it hasn't been proven to be successful yet. Until it actually succeeds people will just write it off as just another idea in a vast sea of decent ideas, and they'll be more interested in pursuing their own ideas that they love because they made them.
Personally, I'd love it if someone took some of my ideas and made them into games, because that would save me the effort. I have more ideas than I'll ever get around to making, as do most people here I'd expect.
Okay! Game ideas that haven't been done before.
- A strategy game on a hyperbolic tiling. Usually everyone making these games uses a square grid or a hexagonal grid - why? There are all these other grids they could use if they went non-Euclidean, and using one of the disc models they'd be easy to represent in a video game.
- A game where you cast spells by drawing magic runes and chaining them together into 'circuits', where the lines drawn are persistent and so could be modified later on by adding lines, cancelled by blotting them out, etc.
- A turn based strategy game where all players set up your turns by giving orders, and then they play out for maybe thirty seconds in real-time with no input as you watch (and scream as your carefully laid plans turn to custard).
- A space battle game where a couple of rooms are set up like a battleship control room in a movie; screens around the place showing sensor data, logistics, communications, engineering and so on. Some chairs for gunners, with goggles and joysticks. So you have a team of people taking on different roles, working together to control the ship, and as the battle goes on you could have equipment malfunction as the ship gets hit; screens go out, things shake, flashes, concealed smoke machines activate.. Totally epic. I'll definitely do this if I'm ever rich.
- An fps with different character classes, some players are hackers and can access computers at various locations to do things like open doors, steal data, disable security systems. The soldiers have to protect the hackers. Have lots of detail in the world and lots of modular computerised equipment so you can do things like camp in a conference room of some office building you've broken into, reroute the security cameras in the corridor outside to the projector so that your team can watch out for anyone approaching on the big screen while the hacker is busy trying to hack something.
It's disappointing that most of my ideas are like "a game in genre X except with Y". Genres should be descriptive only; applied after a game is made in an attempt to classify it, not something you start out trying to make.
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