Because ideas on their own count for so little, publishers want games, not ideas. Ideas are cheap, a dime a dozen; everyone in the game industry has ideas. Recognize that your "great idea" is probably not that great, not that original, and not that interesting to others. Virtually everyone thinks their game ideas are extraordinarily good, and everyone is wrong almost all the time.

This is hard for beginners to accept, partly because it’s easy to come up with a few ideas, so it’s nice to think that you only need to come up with a great idea to make a lot of money. No, there’s a lot of work in making a successful game, beginning with generating LOTS of ideas. The more ideas you have, the more likely you’ll have a few really good ones that can become really good games.

There’s a “pyramid” of game design (see illustration) that goes like this:
• Lots of people get ideas
• Fewer successfully go from general idea to a specific game idea
• Fewer yet produce a prototype
• Fewer yet produce a decently playable prototype
• Very few produce a completely designed game
• And very, very few produce a really good complete game

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