The following article should not be taken as legal advice. I am not a lawyer. You’re welcome to discuss my opinions with your lawyer, of course. 😉
NDAs, aka “non-disclosure agreements,” are common to every industry, but the video game industry has a special fascination with them. We fear that our ideas will be stolen. We worry about alerting competitors to our plans (and thus giving them time to respond more effectively.) We worry about losing control of the marketing message.
Your idea isn’t as sacred as you think it is
In general, we worry excessively — particularly about the theft of our precious ideas. The overlap between companies who will steal raw ideas and companies who are competent enough to execute upon them is very, very small. And the number of ideas that are genuinely worth stealing is even smaller.
Don’t confuse the theft of ideas with game cloning — the latter is common because execution has already taken place and the market for the idea has been proven. Executing on a design and proving out a market are hard things to do, and only the best companies (Valve, Blizzard, etc) successfully do so on a regular basis.
