Selling A Game Design Spec

tim-cain game-design game-industry intellectual-property pitching indie-dev design-documents

Abstract

Problem: If someone writes a comprehensive game design specification — complete with setting, story, mechanics, lore, and maps — can they sell it to a game studio?

Approach: Tim Cain draws on decades of experience working with external IPs at studios like Interplay, Troika, and Obsidian, plus knowledge of the current (2024) funding landscape, to explain why this almost never works.

Findings: Studios have less than a 1% chance of buying an outside design spec. They have their own IPs, their own internal ideas, legal liability concerns about even reading outside submissions, and strong aversion to the communication overhead and creative control issues that come with external IP owners. Even studios with fully playable game prototypes struggle to find funding in 2024.

Key insight: Instead of trying to sell a spec, instantiate it — turn it into a book or tabletop RPG. This protects the idea through copyright, demonstrates commitment, and if it sells, proves audience demand to potential game studio buyers.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLXzaGyRfNY

The Question

A viewer named Nash asked Tim Cain: if someone had written an entire wiki's worth of game design for something like Fallout: New Vegas — setting, story, systems, mechanics, lore, detailed locations, concept art, hand-drawn maps — and approached a studio, would it mean anything to them? Ideas are cheap, but what is a fully thought-out game universe worth?

Tim acknowledges this is far more than just an idea. Nash has written a complete design specification with all the sections a proper design doc should have, with deep interconnection between elements. Tim gives him the benefit of the doubt — and then delivers the bad news.

Less Than 1% Chance

The odds of finding a buyer are less than 1%. Tim compares it to music — bands get record deals all the time, but the number of people trying is enormous. In the game industry, that number keeps growing because game engines are free and Steam makes distribution easy. Discoverability is harder than ever.

Why Studios Won't Even Look At It

Most studios won't even open an unsolicited design document, for a critical legal reason: if they're working on something similar, or might in the future, reading your spec creates legal liability. You could later claim "I sent them something like this five years ago and here they are doing it." So many studios return submissions unopened or simply don't respond.

Studios Have Their Own IPs and Ideas

Studios already have their own intellectual properties. Tim uses Obsidian as an example — they could make games in the Grounded, Pentiment, The Outer Worlds, or Pillars of Eternity universes without paying anyone for IP rights, with existing audience data and sales expectations. All of that is missing when someone pitches a brand-new unknown IP.

Even beyond owned IPs, virtually everyone at a game studio already has their own ideas for new properties. Tim recalls meetings at Obsidian before The Outer Worlds where they asked for new IP pitches — people came with amazing, original concepts, sometimes with concept art that really sold the vision. Studios would rather generate their own IP than become beholden to an outside owner.

The Pain of External IPs

Tim shares that every single licensed game he's worked on — every game using an IP from outside the company — has caused issues.

Fallout and the GURPS license: The original Fallout was under the GURPS license, which limited what they could do. They eventually dropped it because the things that made Fallout popular (like the over-the-top violence system) would have been impossible to keep under that license.

Temple of Elemental Evil: Made under license with Wizards of the Coast for D&D 3.5e. The licensor would approve things and then unapprove them a year later. They'd demand removal of characters who were quest givers for multiple interconnected quests. The village of Nulb shipped with far fewer quests than designed because pulling those threads caused whole quest chains to collapse, and there was no extra time to rethread them into different characters.

South Park: The Stick of Truth: When Tim joined, the game was supposed to ship in six months. It shipped three years later. The biggest problem: the team would build entire completed levels — voice acted, scripted, quests working, integrated into the main story arc — and then months later, sometimes even a year later, the South Park creators would decide to remove them. "That's not funny. We thought that was funny, now we don't think it's funny." Gone. Tim estimates the game would have been double or triple the size if all finished levels had stayed in. He describes painstakingly debugging boss battles frame-by-frame with animators to fix minute animation timing issues, making them look beautiful and play perfectly — only to have them cut six months later for no technical reason.

Communication Overhead

Even with a great IP owner, there's unavoidable communication overhead. You can't walk down the hall to ask the lead designer a quick question. Instead, you email, send a Slack message, organize a meeting that happens in a few days, and then wait for them to get back to you. What would have been a 10-minute hallway conversation becomes an hour-long meeting that takes two weeks to resolve. This friction slows down the entire development process.

The Current Funding Reality (2024)

Tim knows studios in 2024 that have far more than a design spec — they have working prototypes, vertical slices, even complete alpha builds of entire games — and they're still struggling to find funding. If studios with playable games can't get funded, a design document alone faces even longer odds.

Tim's Recommendation: Instantiate Your Idea

Rather than shopping a spec around, Tim recommends two paths:

Make a demo. Game engines are free, art and scripts and UI templates can be purchased. Tim pushes back on "I can't" — in most cases it's really "I won't." The tools exist to get something working with minimal effort.

Turn it into a book or tabletop RPG. This serves multiple purposes:

  1. It fits different skill sets — if you're a better writer than programmer, lean into that
  2. It creates copyright protection — ideas cannot be copyrighted, but instantiated ideas can. You can't walk into the copyright office with just an idea for a toaster; they want to see technical specs, designs, how it works. A book or tabletop RPG is an instantiation of your idea that copyright law can protect
  3. It proves audience demand — if the book or tabletop RPG sells, you can show a prospective game studio buyer that an audience already exists for this world

The Bottom Line

The era where someone has a great idea, a company snatches it up for millions, and it becomes a hit game — if that era ever existed — is over. The path forward is doing the work: build a demo, write a book, make a tabletop game. Prove your concept has legs before asking someone else to invest in it.

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