I just personally find it hard to believe that there is no one out there looking for at the very least, inspiration for a new game title. Or at the least, an element of a game already being worked on in some phase or another.
Or whose to say a film, book, or script? I mean, we have whole studios devoted to copying the big fish out there in the film industry.
Maybe my experiences in college messed me up, but as I get older my trust in others has gone way down.
Trust me, it ain't ever going to happen. Nobody is gonna steal your idea cause an idea alone is worth nothing. Even your art, no matter how good it is, won't magically translate into some amazing game design. No professional is scouring through the internet in search for ideas. It's also highly unlikely, unless you shipped a few games before, that your idea would even translate into a proper experience just like that. Ideas are just the start of a thing. Once you start making an actual prototype around the idea, the idea changes many, many, many times and will have nothing to do with your original thought anymore.
I'm not trying to be disparaging, but I've been doing this for like 15 years now and not a single time when someone told me of their great idea did I ever think: "Holy shit, that guy is onto something, that would totally make for a great game!". It's just not that easy. If you have something in your head that excites you, you'd need to turn that into an actual prototype and see if the idea even makes any sense once you put it to a test - And the truth is that most of your ideas won't even work out at all.
The moment you have a cool prototype or something that does something totally unique, that's where I'd be cautious, cause it might very well be that you show some cool mechanic online and some designer shares that with other designers and they see a solved problem and will solve their problem the same way.
Personally, I don't worry about any of this at all. I show prototypes and ideas to everyone around me, simply because if I make a thing around an idea and another person makes a thing around the same idea, the result will still be something completely different. That's just how things work. I copy a lot of elements from this or that game in my own stuff and it always ends up becoming our own twist on things that turn out to be unique, cause there's a whole process involved.
