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Look, I get a lot of game ideas and game pitches from you guys, our audience. And unfortunately, while there are some really good ones, there are a lot of bad game ideas that you guys come up with as well. And why do I call
BiteMe Games discusses common flaws in game ideas and offers practical advice to improve and realistically scope your game projects.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Keep your game idea scope manageable, especially as a solo or beginner developer.
- Clearly define your game's core mechanics, perspective, and goals early on.
- Use tools like a Steam page description to validate and communicate your idea.
- Avoid vague or overly derivative concepts that lack clear differentiation.
- Realistic planning and discipline are essential for completing and marketing your game.
What the video covers
- Many game ideas from aspiring developers have major flaws that hinder success.
- Starting with a bad core game idea is like building on sand, risking failure regardless of effort.
- One common issue is overly ambitious game scope, especially for solo developers with limited time.
- Small scoped games with shorter development cycles allow faster feedback and marketing opportunities.
- Vague game ideas lacking clear vision and defined gameplay mechanics cause confusion and stalled development.
- Writing a short Steam page description early helps clarify and validate your game idea.
- Avoid copying niche or overdone concepts without meaningful innovation to stand out in the market.
- Games targeting only a small personal audience may not justify wide release on platforms like Steam.
- Discipline and realistic expectations are crucial for long-term game development success.
- The video encourages refining ideas rather than scrapping them, with tips to improve clarity and scope.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Common Issues with Game Ideas
- 01:06Problem 1: Overly Ambitious Game Scope
- 02:01Challenges of Long Development and Feedback Delays
- 04:13Importance of Realistic Planning and Discipline
- 05:27Problem 2: Vague and Unclear Game Concepts
- 06:39Using Steam Descriptions to Clarify Your Idea
- 07:43Avoiding Derivative and Overdone Game Ideas
- 10:04Target Audience and Market Considerations
- 13:23Conclusion and Further Resources
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
them bad game ideas? Because it's very easy. I'm not just messing on your dream. I actually just think that there are some very big flaws with them. So, in this video, I want to talk about five of the
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most common issues, I guess, I see when people come to me with their game idea. And the good thing is it doesn't usually mean that you have to scrap your entire game idea. You just need to make
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a few small changes and you can keep working on it. But a game idea is such a vital and important thing because it's literally the core of your game that if you start with a bad game idea,
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you're building your game on a sand foundation, basically. And it doesn't matter how much time and love and effort you put into it. If the core game idea is bad, it's not going to sell. People aren't going to want to play this, which
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generally isn't great because you're not only making games for yourself, no matter how much cope you have, and you say that that's the only thing you care about. So, I want to talk about those five things and tell you what exactly to
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do with that. Also, stick around until the end of the video because I have something pretty cool for you if you do like game ideas. Now, the first problem that I see with game developers is that, okay, they have a game idea, but it's
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just too big. They come to me with these giant open-world MMO style ideas and then they're like, "Yeah, I'm a solo developer. I just got like another kit.
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I already have three kits or whatever. I have like 5 hours a week. What do you think about my game idea?" And it's like, it's maybe cool, but there is no way in hell you're ever going to be
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making it because yeah, sure, maybe you are comfortable with taking seven years of your life working on one single game.
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But even then, are you really though? We preach a lot of small games on this channel. And small games, I'm talking about development cycles of 4 to 8 months. And that generally already inflates like over a year plus at a
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certain point. There's only so much time and discipline that you're going to have to work on a game at the end of the day.
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And there are a few people like your Eric Barones and whatever who do manage to work for seven years on that one single game before releasing it. But you need to be kind of built different for that. I think where an idea can sound
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really good on paper and you can be like very, very hype right now and like 2 months from now you're maybe even still going to be very hype but you're going to run into issues that just make
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it too slow and at a certain point your game is not going to be made if the scope is too big, if the game idea is too big because you're not going to be able to actually implement all of it and make
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all of this because there are some other problems as well, not just oh you can't make this. Also generally, these giant scoped games take a very long time until you can get feedback. That's the benefit of small scoped games. You can
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spend like 2 weeks or whatever and get like that shitty first gameplay loop out already. So, you can share it on Reddit or share it with your friends or share it in our Discord server just to be like, "Hey, this is my vision for the
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game. What do you guys think of it?" Whereas, if you are making those giant super complex and in-depth games, for example, we're suddenly going from like two weeks to that first little core of the game to two years sometimes, which
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makes it extremely hard to get feedback on your game as well, to show it to the rest of the world and see if what I'm doing is actually something that should be done, basically. And that extends as well into marketing. Once again, there's like
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a difference still between getting that first very, very shitty version out that you can share to people and then, you know, getting that Steam page up as well. There was a game I recently looked at on like, "Oh, can you review
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my Steam page?" And it looked like a city builder kind of because it was just like some aerial shots of a really pretty landscape and that's it. And I asked them like, "Hey, what is this game actually?" And they're like, "Yeah, this
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isn't actually going to be an RPG." And I'm like, "But there's no gameplay yet.
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There's no characters yet. There's no nothing yet. Why are you marketing this already? It's impossible to do early marketing for a game that is so big that like 90% of the game isn't really implemented yet. So because of that, I
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always suggest you to tone down your ideas to make something that you can realistically make in like a few years tops, but ideally if you plan for like half a year to a year, that's going to balloon to two times that time probably and
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still it's going to be a long time period. I think that's also something just to keep hammering on it. If these are the first games you make and it's like your dream game. Yeah, but you've never made a game before. How do
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you know that you can do seven years of this? Like what have you done in your life for 7 years non-stop that you weren't forced to by society like going to school or going to work? Chances are not that much. Do you really believe you
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have the discipline to work on games for that long or are you going to start like, you know, going to watch guitar learning next month and then completely forget about games and switch to the next hobby? Who knows? And then this next
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problem is one that you definitely see with the more artsy kinds of games where it's just too vague. It's like whenever someone comes up to me and they're like, I have this game idea. It's kind of like Return to the Opera Den but with more
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meaningful choices or whatever. You're immediately like taking a relatively obscure, not like obscure, but hard to explain game and then you're going to make more stuff based upon that. And the problem here is, okay, it's a very vague
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idea. What does this actually mean? Because I think this is something that a lot of developers, even though it's something very easy to do, forget. It's like, okay, describe to me. What is the perspective? What's the viewpoint going to be? What's going to be the main
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actions the character's going to be doing? What is the final end goal in all of that? Because if you just tell me, oh, it's a game about making meaningful choices, what game is it? That's the big problem here. And the reason that this
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is a problem is once again marketing. If you can't explain to me what the game is going to be about, then forget about putting your Steam short description or whatever that explains what the game is about. But also, do you even know the
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game that you're making? Because you can always have this problem where, you know, your game ends up in this limbo of every 3 months if you don't have a clear enough vision of what is the game you want to make, you basically start making
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a new game, but you just stay in that same big Unity project or whatever, and you just like decide to pivot. So, you have a bunch of unfinished mechanics from a previous game idea and then you're like, "No, I'm going to
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switch. I'm going to iterate upon this," but half of them are unfinished and you're going to end up with this Lovecraftian mess of a game that honestly is so unclear about its reason of being and its purpose that you don't
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even know what you originally set out for and what you want to go for in the end. And this is where things like game design documents can come in. But I think the easiest way, and I'll probably mention this multiple times throughout
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the video, my number one piece of advice always if you want to validate if your game idea is kind of clear and interesting, is to write a short Steam page description for that game. Even if it's just day one of getting that game
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idea. So on Steam, you have like the Steam capsule and
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If you can do that, you're probably on the right track. But I noticed that a lot of game developers already struggle with this. When I ask them, what's your game about? They start going on this long-randed like almost brain dump of ah
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it's kind of like this, but then mostly like this and then I don't know exactly like you do this and this and it's like I don't know what you're talking about.
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You should be able to tell me this in 300 characters or less as your kind of elevator pitch to a certain degree. So this is something that you can do always. you should do with all of these steps. What would you explain to your
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game in 300 characters or less, which is like two sentences or whatever? Have a lot of verbs in there of what are the actions the player will be doing? What's the main goal? What's the environment?
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What's the genre? What's this perspective? And all of that, cramm it into there. And I think if you can do that, you have a pretty good idea about the game you're going to be making. Then we get one that honestly I don't really
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mind that much. It's just you need a little bit of guidance for I would say and that is when you're making games that are basically too derivative which means oh I'm going to be making Among Us but everyone's a pirate or everyone's on
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a spaceship or whatever like Among Us is already on a spaceship whatever where you're not really adding anything new except reskinning the game and the problem here is that clones like true clones very rarely stand out. There's a
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difference between being clone and being inspired by definitely. But I think that is something that you need to keep in mind. Are you going to be making another Overcooked? Okay, that's a good idea maybe. But what are you going to be
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doing to actually make it better to improve upon the thing that already exists? And I think that is a harder one where it's very easy to copy a game that that already has success or a game that's already been made basically, but
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simply doing a copy is not going to make it interesting to other people because why would they want to go and like eat like expired like you know cake from the grocery store so to say when they already have like an infinite supply of
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like this S tier cake that they can eat whenever they want which is for example something that we ran into as well when we made our own automation game where our main inspirations were factor Torio and Timberborn. It's like, but why would
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anyone want to play our scrappy little game compared to those games? And those are hard questions you have to ask yourself. The benefit is this is an relatively easy one to fix where if you do notice that, okay, my games is way
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too derivative, way too similar. How do I solve this? You need to add something.
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You need to change something. Because another problem is just standing out. And I saw this especially with content creator outreach. So recently, this is something near and dear to my heart. I feel like there has been an uptick in
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unicycle pizza time likes, as in games streamer bait rage games centered around a unicycle mechanic. There's not like a giant explosion, but it's still something that I did notice. And I think to a certain degree if you send an email
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to a content creator who covered unicycle pizza time before which is a pretty decent amount of people who did that and you're now hey we have another unicycle like one to four player co-op where you have to like not fall over.
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It's going to always be harder for that content creator to be interested in it basically because the novelty has fallen off already. that exact same pitch has been sent to them before and they potentially have covered like created
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content about it before which now also has set a precedent. If those videos performed meh or like not super amazingly, well, why would they cover it again? Because the incentive for them in terms of just raw view numbers often
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isn't there at all because someone has already made that thing before. So, you need to figure out what is going to make this more interesting, more unique in all of that compared to just reskinning it. You can't just be like, "Hey, I'm
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going to make another game and it's kind of like Vampire Survivors but in hell when other games like Heretics Fork and whatever already exist as well, for example. It gets a lot harder then to stand out with your game idea." And
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whilst technically, you know, this could be a game that you can make, it's not going to be a game that probably people are going to be interested in. And speaking of games that people probably aren't going to be interested in, I
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think that's kind of another not like trap, but it's a problem where you aren't being honest with yourself. I feel where people come to me and it's like, "How do I market my game?" But they're making a game that's way too
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personal to them. Like the game idea has like a subset of four people who are interested in it and like one of them is going to be you and then another one is going to be your friend cuz you grew up
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in like the same medium or whatever where it always suck because these people you cannot have a discussion with them because they will instantly deflect every piece of like asking questions about their game of like yeah I'm making
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this game for me. It's like okay cool brother but why do you put it on Steam then? Why do you want to go through the motions of marketing or are you just going to add to the slop? I think some
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some examples of this like old school games where someone's like, "Yeah, I grew up in the 80s or whatever playing on like arcade games or whatever and I want to make a bullet hell style like shooter game genre that's not really
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popular anymore." And I'm not really going to do anything except go and bring back my love for this game or like Toho games kind of. I know Tohjo has like a fan base, but you get what I mean.
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You're making games that have this very weird subset of also like setting and genre and all of that that makes it so that honestly nobody almost is interested in these games. Like you're not really talking to anyone else except
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you. And the problem then or it's not really a problem. I'm not going to say don't make those games, but I am going to say don't flood Steam with those games because there's no point in it.
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You're going to hate your life as well with marketing or whatever. you're not going to learn from that because once again, you're making a game that only four people are interested in. So, content creators probably don't want to
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play this game. I think something else you see is like those, you know, um classic RPGs like text based where it's just pure text and it's like, okay, this is a game that you probably like and maybe it's inspired by like your D&D
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campaign or whatever, which is what I've heard as well of like I'm going to make a game based on my Dungeons and Dragons campaign and what we did. And it's like, okay, that's maybe cool, but it's what you experienced. you have a bias for
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liking this game. That can kind of give you some blind spots in taking things a bit more serious. At the end of the day, you're watching Bite Me Games. We are not here only about the artistic side.
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We do talk about financials. We do talk about marketing and all of that. And if you then come to me and ask me, "What should I do about your game?" And you get this hyper personal thing, then don't get like super defensive like,
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"Oh, I'm just making a game for myself, bro. It's not that serious." Because it's like, "What are you doing here?" There are other channels if you want to focus on that. I think if you watch this, I generally do hope that you want
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to take some moderately decent effort of marketing your game, of making a game that appeases the Steam algorithm for as much as you want to say it, whilst you can still make a game that you enjoy.
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So, I think that is just the thing where you you need to ask yourself these questions of does this game belong on Steam or do I just want to do this to learn GDAU at the end of the day without
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that real goal of finances and whatever because it's not worth spinning up a company paying the hundred bucks to Steam, maybe paying more money on capsule art and whatever for a game that is just for myself. I think that's
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that's my rant is over now. And then the final thing is like, you know, genres that are too late or like game ideas that are too late. I guess this is kind of similar to the two derivative, but
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now we're looking a bit bigger at the overall gaming market in general. I think the most common or obvious example is when people come and pitch me their 2D platform or Metroid Vania talking about emotions and like dealing with
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grief. And it's like, okay, honestly, like you know, if we looked at this on a vacuum, you probably have an interesting story to tell. But Steam isn't a vacuum.
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We need to look at everything else that's there. That's the big thing as well. game idea is the there's like the three circles of the ven diagram. The game you want to make, the game you can make and then the game that like people
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want to play and you need to find that slice in the middle. And in this case, maybe you want to make the game and maybe you can make the game, but maybe you know there is nobody anymore left
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who wants to play this style of game. Who wants to play like honestly a pretty mid like GDO basic beginner project pixel art platformer when Silkong exists, when Hollow Knight exists, when all of these games exist and you're
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going to try to compete with all of those without really adding much new. That's what I mean with it's kind of similar to the two derivative where you do need to be realistic about what makes this game idea special and not just
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another generic 2D platformer or there's other genres as well like you know there's so many we had this problem recently where one of our team members was like they came to us with a pitch of like hey I want to make a Viking
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citybuilder and it's like cool but what are we doing different what are we you know Viking citybuilders have been existing for so long already or like RTS games which either we have to very drastically innovate and like start new
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mechanics or whatever. But you know, Viking combat and ship combat is not something new and innovative or we have to be better in like quality and polish level than other games that are already out which is also not possible really.
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So I think that is a thing realizing when is it too late. I think one other like genre example for this is the desktop idlers where they've been blowing up for basically the past year I would say. But I think that if you go
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into making a desktop idler now, you're just you missed the boat, buddy. And it's going to be way harder because there's already so many desktop idlers.
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And I think especially with desktop idlers, you can only run one at the same time. Basically, you can't have seven desktop iders on at the same time cuz they kind of all compete with the same screen space. And I think this is an
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example very much of it's going to be kind of too late. And that is that that realism. And also going back to that first mistake, if you are working on that 7-year long scoped game, you may miss an entire wave of like people being
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interested in this game. Maybe you'll get lucky, but there's also a big chance that you were working on a Vampire Survivors like for example 3 years before Vampire Survivors came out and you're still working on it to this day.
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Well, that entire wave has come and gone at this point and you're still very far from Lisa. So, those are some of the big problems that I see with game ideas. And I wonder, do you see any of those in
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like your own game idea? Can you give a correct interesting Steam Short pace description, for example? It's something that a lot of people can't do. Now, I told you there is something that if you were interested in game ideas that I
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wanted to give to you, and that is an uh an extra bonus video that's like an hour and 10 minutes long. That's basically a free course that I made because I saw another gamedev YouTuber make a a course
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on game ideas that was paid and I'm like, I can do better than this. I'm going to make it better and free. So, if you want to dive in deeper into game ideas and all the different thoughts and
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like how to design based around emotions and all that, there's a link down below to a free Patreon video. You don't need to pay. You don't need to sign up or anything. Just go and watch that. It's a
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really good video, probably one of the best ones I've made in a long time, and it dives in way deeper into game ideas if that's something that you're interested in. Apart from that, thank you very much for watching. If you're
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new here, we make videos about game development and things that we learned along the way, uploading video every week. So, if that's something that's interesting to you, then be sure to head down below and subscribe. Apart from that, that's all we have to say. So,
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I'll see you guys in the next one.
Topics:game ideasgame developmentindie gamesgame designgame scopemarketing gamesSteam pagesolo developergame feedbackgame pitch
