Sure, they probably were not the first ones to come up with the idea of bringing a social farm game to facebook either. However, it is clear that once Zynga and Playfish found this idea they could rapidly turn it around too.

It is a bit scary as a small developer to know that you need to share your idea with publishers, but to also realize that they can turn around and dump so much money on your idea that they could produce something much much faster that you cant even hope to compete with them.

It is just a different climate than web based startups. Console game especially are pretty much not possible without publishers, which is not something a 3 man web startup ever really has to worry about.

If VCs were keeping tech teams in house that could potentially jump an idea i think the startup community might see the value of ideas a bit differently.