Read this: http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/08/why-you-should-share-your-game-designs.html

Unless you have a working prototype proving your game design/idea is actually fun, engaging and/or addictive, then it's just a text document (if you have one) describing a dream, an abstract thought which is indistinguishable from every other abstract though that every other person in the world has. And nobody (who isn't your close friend and has a passion for that same idea) is going to help you make it unless they get paid a variable amount of money, depending on what you're asking them to do and how much time you're asking them to do it in.

Don't worry about ideas and designs. Nobody is going to steal them. And even if they do and actually make a game from it, it's not going to be the same thing you envisioned. Unless that other person is your clone, but i'm fairly certain we don't have the technology for full grown clones yet. :)

How I will know the programmer or the graphics artist won't just steal my design document and create the game on their own?

If they had the capability to create their own game, then why are they working for you instead of running their own team? If they want to replace you, they'll need all of your money, not your ideas

Read this: http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/08/why-you-should-share-your-game-designs.html

Don't worry about ideas and designs. Nobody is going to steal them.

Why do people say this? Remember facebook?

Facebook wasn't founded on original ideas. It started out as a "hot or not" clone, and grew into a clone of every other social network at the time.
Minecraft is another amazing example -- it's an unashamed clone, that happened to sell better than the original.


People say it, because if you give the same idea to 100 teams, you'll have 100 completely different implementations and 100 marketin strategies.
Only a small number will be successful, despite them all growing out I the same idea.

Being able to sell something is the most important.
Being able to make something is next in importance.
Beig able to imagine things turns out to be the least...

Personally, we'd rather imagine that the opposite is true, but that's not how the world works.

Everyone has ideas for games. That's millions upon millions of ideas. Some are probably ever pretty great... But they're worthless unless you can bring them to life.
It turns out that value only lies inside implementations, and even then, only in the sale of implementations.
There's so many original ideas out there that most implementors already have a backlog of ideas they'd like to make, so they don't need to steal your ideas. What they need, is to steal your money so that they can implement their own ideas!
Think about it - say a game takes 50 people a year and $10M to make. During that time if everyone on the team came up with just one game idea, you've now got 50 years worth of ideas sitting there -- which is 2,500 man-years worth of potential work, or half a billion dollars worth of costs. Obviously most of these ideas have to be thrown away (or published on the net), even if they're amazing.

@Hodgman

+1

You need to have more than a simple idea to get the ball rolling on a project. You need to figure out:

* Game "story line" if applicable ( some companies hire famous authors )

* Type of game ( RPG, FPS, building, adventure, a combination of many, e.t.c. )

* Target audience ( you can't please everyone )

* Target platforms ( Phones, PC, PS4, Commodore 64, e.t.c. )

* Budget

( Unfortunately, throwing money at a room full of people who are given poor direction, will not yield good results. )

After all that is figured out, you need to prototype the game to see if it actually "works" ( is a good idea ) and if you can get others interested .

Don't worry about ideas and designs. Nobody is going to steal them.

[/quote]

Why do people say this? Remember facebook?

People don't steal ideas. Most ideas are worthless by themselves.

It is when you've executed an idea that it becomes vulnerable, as someone can take your execution and either clone it directly or create an improved version of it. Execution itself is the hard bit, no interesting idea ever becomes fact without significant discoveries and changes in the process. The gap between the idea and the implementation can be narrowed by experience, but is never small.

In any case, the solution would be to get a lawyer to write a contract that prevents the situation you're worried about. Developing any game, even a small one, is expensive. You're going to want to protect that significant investment legally at some point, it might as well be from the beginning.