Script Agency

[Anonymous]

Hi All

First of all I want to appologise if something similar has been posted already. I did look but could not see anything related so I decided to go ahead and post.

Basically It is an idea I have and want to get the opinion of the gaming community to see of I am wasting my time or not.

My idea is to create a script agency or a site(like this one) that people can go to and publish their gaming ideas.

For example, Companies like say EA are developing the new FIFA game and want to get the opinions of the FIFA fans of what they would like to see in the next game. If any of the ideas are good they will use them.

My idea is similar but on a larger scale. Rather then focus on say one particular game it would be a whole genre. So basically I would pos the general topi on the website/forum " Shooter Games" or "Strategy Games" and ask "what do you want to see in shooter games?"

Different people will have different ideas of what they want and eventually you can take all the different ideas, be it a background story, a mission idea, a concept etc. and make it into one big idea e.g. A full mission, or a full background story.

Where I would go from there I dont know.

What do you think? good idea? or waste of time?

I started to create the site (still in development)

Thats it really, I just want to see if I should stop devloping the site or keep going if people would use it.

Sorry if I waffled on.

regards,

Ciaran

[Anonymous]

Some individual studios host similar forums at the moment, where they encourage feature requests from their fanbase.
In house game testers, and public beta testers also provide a similar function, suggesting ideas and improvements to a game in development.
This is usually for a specific game, rather than a genre, which you are talking about.

Some things to think about… (just the first couple of things that popped into my head).

Content overload:
If the site is to be any way useful or successful, you would need a way of pushing the better content to the top to make it easily viewable.
I’d be fairly sure that if you don’t have some sort of a ranking/rating mechanism, the site would become useless fast, as it fills with detailed rubbish ideas from a minority of the posters, making it impractical as a resource. (Think Youtube or any web2.0 site without a rating system – bad enough with one!)

You might also want to think about putting some thought into imposing a firm structure on user submissions? (Force them to provide a good bit of metadata about their ‘idea’ or piece of content or whatever, rather than just allow it to be in an unstructured post).
If you just go with standard web discussion forums like this one, but filled with game ideas and argument about them, it would probably become useless fast..?

IP:
You would have to decide and enforce a firm policy on intellectual property – presumably that everything posted publicly on the site was public domain or something similar.
If you don’t solve this issue somehow, then no commercial developer will even visit your site for fear of opening themselves to future litigation.

[Anonymous]

Hi Feral

Thank you for you reply.

That is the kind of input & advice im looking for. I agree with everything you said and I think I will need to put some thought into the posting ideas part. I could make an announcment of some sort saying if any ideas that are already on the forum are posted again it will be deleted. Also on th eactualy website I could put a simple list of the ideas to date listed out for everyone to see, so that people do not need to scroll through pages of ideas.

on the ‘everything posted publicly on the site was public domain’ part. The only way so far of a way around this is copyright all ideas (this can be done through Anpost) correct me if I am wrong! and again make a notice to say everything posted in public domain.

Im thinking of the top of my head here. I will need to do a little more research into this.

We already have a full game story and missions writen out. We have copyright for it and I will eventually post on the site and let the public give us their feedback. We also have 2 other general concept game ideas that will post.

regards,

Ciaran

[Anonymous]

on the ‘everything posted publicly on the site was public domain’ part. The only way so far of a way around this is copyright all ideas (this can be done through Anpost) correct me if I am wrong! and again make a notice to say everything posted in public domain. [/quote:6a2b35bab0]

What I was getting at, is that no commercial developer will look at the ideas, unless it’s crystal clear with the IP implications of doing so are.

The copyright of the content posted would rest, by default, with the posters of the content, and so no commercial developer is likely to look at your site, and open themselves to later IP risks, unless you do something to change this. (The thing you mentioned about An Post would be to later prove copyright ownership afaik, but that’s just a mechanism of proof, the copyright legally rests with the author by default anyway).

To talk in terms of your screenplay analogy, if a professional producer or screenwriter is sent a screenplay by a fan they often won’t even read it unless this issue has been dealt with, for fear of opening themselves to future litigation. (Can’t find any references on the internet for this, but I have definitely heard of instances).

So, you’d need to solve this problem somehow.

One way would be by enforcing all submissions to be transferred to the public domain (or some sort of artistic license alike). This means submitters aren’t going to get a cut if their content is used, and might mean you get less quality content – but it’s quite simple to build.

Another way to go, might be to do some sort of an content market type thing, where people receive a (clearly defined) cut if their content is used – this would be hard to enforce etc, and might put developers off looking at it. This would mean you are building a very different type of site, a marketplace, and trying to build an ideas marketplace, whatever about a digital content marketplace, has a lot of challenges.

I say ‘content’ here, and not ideas, because talking about copyright on ideas vs on content is, afaik, entering complicated territory (ianal).

All I’m really pointing out is that you are going to have to think about this issue, and it’s a key issue affecting what sort of site you’ll build.

[Anonymous]

I see what you are getting at. Thanks for making clear. I will really need to think about this and sort it out, somehow.

To give you an Idea of what we are trying to do, the site is http://www.cbargames.com

But i see your point. I really did not think about that side of things at all.

[Author]

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