Where each idea ended up, including the ones that were rejected.
This build came out of an audit that numbered its proposals. Some became whole page families, some became a single page, and several were rejected for reasons worth writing down. This is the register.
The ideas that became something.
Thirteen ideas, each with a page and each marked not built, because this is a demonstration build and none of them exists as a running system.
Two of the thirteen — the rights manager and the geographic rights field — were separate ideas that turned out to be one thing. That is the commonest outcome of an audit and it is worth recording rather than tidying away.
The ones that were rejected, and why.
| Idea | Rejected because |
|---|---|
| Loot boxes in the game | Unsettled regulation, a Children’s Code exposure of £17.5m or four per cent of global turnover, and a newspaper story that writes itself |
| A cash prize on the player vote | It would create a prize of value and take the whole mechanic inside the Gambling Act 2005 |
| A zero per cent branded drink in the game | CAP 18.18 to 18.24, added in May 2024, apply the same twenty-five per cent audience threshold to products at or below 0.5 per cent ABV |
| Equity crowdfunding for the plots | A cash return on a harvest somebody else managed is an unauthorised collective investment scheme under section 235 of FSMA 2000 |
| A player-priced in-game market | It produces a real-money trading grey market within a month, whatever the terms say, and no small operator can police it |
| A global leaderboard | In a game with a paid time-skip, a global table ranks spending and nothing else |
| A daily login streak | A nudge technique with a counter on it, in a service likely to be accessed by children |
| Sharing a full user record across the integration layer | Two systems that can share everything eventually do, one convenient field at a time |
Why publish the rejections at all.
Because a list of good ideas is a brochure and a list of rejected ones is a design document. The interesting information in any plan is what was considered and turned down, and the reason.
It is also the only way to make the refusals stick. A decision not to sell loot boxes that lives in somebody’s head lasts until that person leaves. A decision written down with its reasoning, on a public page, is considerably harder to quietly reverse in eighteen months when the revenue chart flattens.
And several of the eight are genuinely arguable. A player-priced market would work for a large publisher with a trust and safety team. A global leaderboard would work in a game with no paid time-skip. The refusals are specific to this estate rather than universal, and saying so is more useful than pretending they are principles.
The register, in four lines.
Thirteen adopted
Each with a page, each marked not built.
Eight rejected
On a stated risk, not on taste.
Two turned out to be one
Which is the commonest audit outcome.
Written down to stick
A refusal in somebody’s head lasts until they leave.
The ideas, questioned.
None of them. This is an unsolicited demonstration build. Every row of the register is marked not built and every one of them means it.
An audit that numbered its proposals. The numbers are kept here so that a reader following the audit can find where each one landed.
Several of them are arguable, and the pages say which. The point of writing down the reasoning is that reconsidering it requires answering the reason rather than simply forgetting it.
The four media businesses.
Licensing, an imprint, a magazine and an international format.
Get told before everyone else
One email a fortnight about what is actually happening in the fields, the brewery and the pub — including the bits that went wrong.
