just7 said:

@Hodgman

But if you mean “can i sell my idea to a business” or “will someone make my idea for free and then give me some of the profits”… no, that doesn't happen.

Why not?

Because ideas have extremely little value. The ability to execute an idea has a lot of value.
A great execution of a poor idea can be a success. A poor execution of a great idea will be a failure.

Also, ideas are abundant. It can take years to properly execute a single idea, but you can come up with new ideas at a much faster rate than that. Most companies already have way more ideas than they have time to build.

Then there's the practicalities of how you'd go about even selling an idea. I assume you'd want to keep it a secret first, because you're deriving value by it being a kind of trade secret – “If you pay me, I'll give you some information to make you money, which your competitors won't have access to”… So if you just disclose it publicly, it no longer has value to sell?

But… a customer won't know whether they're even interested in buying your information unless you disclose it to them… which is a catch-22. What happens when they say “no”? You've already given them the idea…
So, being the protective seller, you first make them sign a contract before you tell them, making them agree to not touch the idea unless they buy it. That's fine for you. It is not fine for them. If they happen to already be working on an idea that's similar to yours, then after they say “no” to you, maybe you'll sue them for breach of contract because they ended up making a product similar to your idea (even though they started on it earlier)…

So that means that no one in their right mind is going to sign your contract before you tell them – it just creates a massive amount of risk for them, for the possible benefit that they'll have the option of buying an idea (which they already have a surplus of). Also, companies get millions of people who think they have great ideas trying to pull this grift constantly, so they're pretty good at ignoring these kinds of requests.

So, cold selling a “game idea” is a very impractical business model to be in.

Then, when it comes to game ideas – the development process doesn't even work that way. You don't get a paper document with a great idea on it, build it exactly as that paper says, and then put it on a disk and sell it. Game development hardly ever follows a “Waterfall model” development process like that.
Good game designers don't just do a job at the start of the process and then walk away – game designer is a full-time job during the entire project, supervising and guiding the execution of the idea. There's a feedback loop between the idea/design and the actual product/execution. As it's being built, you'll realize that parts of the original idea don't work and need to change.

So that means that buying a game idea up-front doesn't make sense. What companies actually do is hire designers into full time jobs and pay them salaries.

And if that's your goal (get a job doing that kind of work) – then you need to convince the company that you're good at doing that kind of job… and to do that, you'd want to have a portfolio of your designs, which would require you to be able to publicly disclose them. It would also need you to be able to talk about why ideas got changed over time, how they developed, how they were refined or cut back to deal with practical constraints, etc…

So you can't just come up with an idea and sell it. Some things do have value and protection under copyright though – such as a script for a story, or pages of dialogue, or rulebooks, or artwork. Those are all traditional “works” that have standard protections (and also make good portfolio material).

If you want to design games, then just start doing it. And do it in depth – not just “ideas”, but long documents that go into too much detail and practice thinking things through in depth.

You can try to patent any kind of idea that defines a process.

Technically that can extend to game mechanics… famous ones in the past were a patent on the idea of showing a 3D arrow HUD element that players have to follow, or the idea of having a mini-game on a loading screen.
Tetris famously had a “design patent” (slightly different concept to a regular patent) covering the layout of it's GUIs (not the rules of the game!).

These cases are generally seen as a very bad thing, and are widely hated, because frankly it's an immoral thing to claim that you own an idea and go around extorting money from people over it.

If you're ok with being the villain (a “patent troll”) though:
* It's very hard to write a good patent – you need to write and re-write it multiple times. Each time you ‘finish’ writing it, you need to sit down for a week and put yourself in the shoes of someone who wants to circumvent your patent (i.e. use the idea without paying the patent fees). Then once you've found the loopholes or alternative methods / implementation details, you need to re-write the patent to close those loopholes. Repeat until it's watertight. But make sure it's not too broad, or it may be rejected when you try to register it…
* It needs to be written in very precise legal language, so you need an experienced IP-lawyer to write the text for you (based on your own drafts). Ideally that person would also be well versed in your own jargon so they can express it properly in legalese. This makes it very expensive to write (as lawyers charge too damn much).
* It needs to be registered in every country where you want to enforce it. Patent registration is also a long and expensive process.
* Once you've been granted your patent, you also now need to enforce it. If you see someone using your idea and not paying for it, now you need to hire a legal team to launch a lawsuit against them, in a jurisdiction where they are doing business. During this lawsuit, it's possible for them to win and invalidate your patent – e.g. by arguing that your “invention” wasn't actually novel, and is something that anyone could've come up with. In which case you'll likely be paying their legal costs on top of everything else.

Using patents to try to protect game ideas (which again, have extremely little value) is not a normal or common practice. But yeah, technically you could give it a try.

What kind of idea do you have that is worth this hassle? Is it literally just the rules of a game, or a story/lore, or a physical controller, …?