Don't Make My Job Easy: Effectively Pitching to Publishers

[Music] hello uh thank you for coming to my talk uh don't make my job easy effectively pitching to publishers uh as mentioned in my intro my name is august brown and i want to chat a little bit today about pitching uh so first things first a little bit about me i have been in the industry for about 12 years but the vast vast vast majority of that has been working in indie publishing and most of that work has been in production but through my very start in publishing up to today i've been heavily involved in sourcing and evaluating games and chatting with devs and through that work uh i have personally reviewed thousands and thousands of pitches and chatted with hundreds and hundreds of devs about

mobile games pc games basically any kind of game out there and my hope is that uh using all that knowledge and knowing uh most importantly like what gets me jazz and what gets me excited about pitches uh can be useful information for you all and in this talk i want to kind of re-contextualize a little bit how we talk about pitching and that is in most uh blog posts and gdc talks and for uh twitter threads and whatever there's always this focus on content uh on you gotta have your pitch deck you gotta have your budget you gotta have your et cetera et cetera and all that stuff is super important those pitching materials you won't get your game signed without them but i do think you will get your game rejected a lot of the time before those even come into play before anyone opens your budget they'll made a decision that they don't want to sign your game so i want to focus a little bit more on how

we present information rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of what information to include in a pitch and to do this i want to look at the pitch kind of as a whole as a sales funnel and if you don't know what that means that's super cool we're going to chat about that in a couple minutes and finally i want to share some real life examples i want to pull back the curtain a little bit uh show you a couple of games i got picture armor game studios that we ended up signing uh kind of how they laid out information and uh most importantly i think it's like what it looks like on the other side when a publisher gets excited about a game and how we react to good pitches so kind of taking a little step back i want to talk about that conventional wisdom i mentioned a little bit ago and that is all the posts and everything about pitching for the most part comes from publishers and i know i'm super guilty of working for a publisher too but i think it's super important to realize that there are kind

of inherent biases that come from that point of view when we talk about pitches because the very natural thing for us to do is to give uh advice that makes our job easier we have uh business intelligence suites or spreadsheets or something where when we get your pitch we're gonna plug in the budget we're gonna plug in uh where you're from for tax purposes and we're gonna plug in uh when you're gonna launch and all these things go into some spreadsheet or something and so a lot of the information that people get from publishers tends to be like what can you do to make my job as efficient as possible but plugging all this information in and uh other informat or other advice can be stuff like that's really annoying to me when people do this i'm going to advise them not to and i want to steer a little bit away from that because while that is a very fair approach to giving information and if you just kind of paint by numbers you put together a fair like objective pitch uh you shouldn't be fair there are

thousands of deaths pitching games and it's super competitive and anything you can do to get your pitch kind of resonating with a few more people uh you should try to do it so to talk about this i want to conceptualize it through this lens of a sales funnel and to get everyone up to speed on what maybe a sales funnel is or isn't i want to play a little mind game for just a second and just pretend you no longer work in games instead you own a pet shop and your goal in this pet shop is to sell puppies and in order to sell puppies uh there are a few steps you need everyone to go through first first someone needs to know your shop if they don't know your pet shop exists they can't buy anything from you they need to enter your shop physically they need to find a pet they want and finally they need to purchase it and if you look at this list there are a couple really important things about it one is every step is dependent on the steps above it no one can purchase a pet

if they never walk in the front door no one can find a pet that they really want if they don't know your shop exists and at every step there are going to be a few people who like notice your shop and keep walking or someone who are like oh i really want this dog and then they see the price tag like oh i actually don't want this dog and this is where we get to the sales funnel so this is just kind of a visual representation of this phenomena where at every step some number of people check out and there isn't anyone else coming in outside of this like at step three they have to go through all the steps and so to kind of conceptualize different ways that sales funnel might interact uh with different approaches let's look at scenario a where we're have our pet shop and our approach is we're putting the biggest sign we can out there that says we're selling puppies for seven thousand five hundred dollars and scenario b where we have the same pet shop and say we put the biggest window out we can with the cutest puppy

out in front and this is where we get to uh the fact that not every sales funnel looks the same some approaches you're going to have just as many people knowing that your uh business exists but then it's just going to shrink the hell up because yeah i don't want to spend seven thousand dollars on a puppy conversely you're gonna have just as many people at the top know that your shop exists but they're like oh that's a cute dog i'm gonna go see what that dog's business is all about and they walk in your door and your bundle's a lot bigger and this will come back in a little bit uh and all this is important because uh pitching like everything in this capitalist hellscape we're in is some form of marketing that's just a very very specific form of marketing which is you are marketing yourselves and your potential game to publishers for funding and uh in doing that it kind of follows these same steps where the publisher will receive your pitch to play your demo to distribute the game to the team for evaluation they might take a few meetings internally or with you as the

dev to kind of seal your businesses and ask them questions they might run some projections on the game and finally they might send you a publishing offer but it's actually incredibly more granular than that even if you look at just that first step of receiving the pitch and in this example i'm talking about uh email pages where you might email a pitch deck to a publisher uh just for simplicity uh all the examples will be assuming that but this applies to a meeting you might take or sending out a meeting invite or anything in between all of this logic still applies so in receiving the pitch deck the first thing they're going to do is look at the email subject and make some snap decision of what they think about that game's description in that subject and then they're gonna scan the email for visual elements and then they might if they like what they see click on a video and then scan to a random spot in that video and watch for a few seconds see if they like what they see and they might

look at some email text and then finally they might open your pitch deck and scan that to see if anything jumps out at them and then if you go through a thousand more of these little micro steps someday you might get a publishing offer and so if this looks familiar it's because it is it is the exact same thing as the pet shop this is a sales funnel and all the same rules apply you can't get someone to open your pitch deck if they archive the email at looking at your gifts which sucks it happens i think a lot of publishers try to give every game their fair shake but uh and even if they don't archive your email they might have made this internal decision like ugh this game's not for me and they might go on to open your pitch deck but essentially the game is already rejected at that point and there's no one who's gonna jump in at step five they have to get through all first five steps before they get on to the later ones and i think uh it's important to take one little step back at this point and just

talk about some unfortunate truths on just the fact of the matter of what happens with publishers and how we evaluate games and that is we get so many pigeons we get thousands and thousands and thousands of pitches and we can't afford to spend hours and hours looking at every single pitch and what that means and this stinks uh most demos don't get downloaded let alone played decision will be made before we even look at the demo like oh this game isn't for us we can pass on it and even uh beyond that a lot of decisions will be made whether or not we look at your pitch deck later uh even before we open that pitch deck we'll either be excited about your game or like uh this is probably a pass and we might look through the pitch deck to see if there's anything in there that might change our minds but a lot of decisions have been made by that point and even if someone does watch a video if you send a like 20 minute gameplay video uh i guarantee you almost no one is watching that if you send a five hour

game play video which we totally receive i guarantee you zero percent of publishers watch those five hours and so you get 10 to 30 seconds of whatever you send that the publisher is going to realistically watch and those will be a random 10 to 30 seconds wherever they happen to scrub through in the timeline of that video and this all just sucks it takes so much work to put together a pitch deck it takes so much work to put together a demo that's ready to show to people it takes so much time to capture video and edit it and you don't get fairly rewarded with people's time for doing all that work and that just sucks but if we were to watch every five hour gameplay video or even every five minute gameplay video sent to us that is literally all we would be doing and we couldn't effectively run a publishing business so while i admit this really sucks and it's not fair it is just how things are and so i think we can go into this with that knowledge in mind and kind of make some smart decisions on how we structure

pitches and to do that i think we have to talk about how decisions get made and this isn't talking about like how groups come together to form consensus this is just on a personal level like do i get excited about something do i think something's a good idea or a bad idea because at the end of the day computers at least for now don't process pitches humans process pitches and humans have feelings and can be manipulated and i think that's super important to think about when we structure our pitches and to put context of this i like to think about our thinky brains and our feely brains kind of these two different modes you might be in when you're making decisions and uh it's important to know that in kind of this context only one of these kinds of sides of your brain is really in the steering wheel at a given time if you are in a full like analytical logical mode thinking about like the numbers and like impacts on stuff you

are in thinking brain mode and feely brain is sitting in the passenger seat waiting their turn uh and feely brain conversely is a more emotional state that we might be in when we're making decisions so to kind of talk about these different states uh let's first talk about thinking brain uh if i am in thinking brain mode and i receive a pitch and i am going through and evaluating it my thinking brain is going to be thinking about what is the potential audience size for this game does this game team have the experience needed to execute on it what are the marketing challenges like does the art look really like it would skew to younger audiences but the game itself has some really heavy themes is that going to make a marketing hard does the game fit within our budget and does it fit within our launch calendar and are there other games launching in the same time period uh that might uh pose kind of external risk to this game and if you uh uh think about it as i go through this these are all very like logical

uh approaches to thinking about like what is the risk versus reward on these things uh conversely feely brain feely brain just wants to have a good time feel your brain is only out there to get jazzed about stuff or repulse but we're mostly going to be talking about being jazzed about stuff and really just doesn't care about anything else other than like hell yeah this game rules so thinking about the pet shop example earlier if your thinky brain is in the driver's seat typically speaking that funnel is just going to be a lot more narrow because our thinking brain is going to be able to like ah that budget's a little high i don't think it's fit oh man there are like two other games that are kind of similar and i don't think this one's a good match it's very easy for thinking brain to disqualify a game conversely feely brain just gets excited and it's easy for fuely brain kind of at that point to let

uh kind of your heart lead the decision-making process and like oh man budget's a little high doesn't matter this game rules i want to work on it so from those examples you see like i feel very strongly that everything in your pitch should be optimized so that feely bring can just do its thing and get jazzed about your game and this starts from the very beginning of having an evocative email subject we get so many pitches that just are like a pitch for armor game studios or new game for pitching and uh it's accurate but like that's not gonna get me jazzed and an email subject will never like be the end of it you will never get your game effectively signed from the subject but what it does do is it puts my brain into kind of this curious mode if there's like ooh i don't know what that means i want to know more it kind of primes the pump for my feely brain to take over uh right from the get go putting the

absolute best gifts you can right at the top of this email or your uh [Music] presentation if you're giving it live or whatever just like hit him hard out of the gate there is no merit in bearing the lead the best looking thing you can do and put out there put it right at the top and very short descriptions that get right at your unique selling point what makes your game unique in one or two sentences a very important thing to know about feeling brain is it doesn't like to read and so if you throw too many words out of it it's gonna check out and thinky brain is gonna take over and this applies to kind of burying links to important things because feely brain still wants to check out your demo it still wants to check out your video but it needs to be able to find it so if you have those links just like buried in a paragraph it's going to be kind of easy to check out but if you just have it like super clear-cut like this is where the video is feely brain can keep doing its thing and that's really it there are

like obviously a ton of little bits of nuance to this but at the end of the day just put the radishes at top and everything else will kind of go from there and so kind of as i mentioned before the really important way or reason why i think we need to think about it this way is that while your feely brain is at the wheel your deck and your demo and all your other materials don't have to do as much heavy lifting if think you brain were at the wheel they would have to do all the lifting of like yep this budget makes monetary sense and this is a reasonable timeline for this game to be executed on uh but there's just a little more grace when your feeling brain is driving and finally and i think this is so important is your pitch the goal shouldn't be to get your game signed because that that doesn't happen no one just like sees a pitch and like sends you a check what happens is uh we need to go through like different negotiations and different whatever and

like it's way down the line what your pitch should do is get one person at the publisher super jazzed about your game and want to champion it and be excited about it and so as i mentioned at the top to kind of look over how this happens uh we're going to look at a couple case studies of real games that armor game studio signed how they organize their pitches and a little bit of reactions from our private slack so the first game i want to chat about is the tartar ski it's a super rag game coming out later this summer uh jumping right out of the gates its email subject uh was nothing that is going to set the world on fire admittedly but it did it wasn't this is a pitchformer game studios and there was evocative i don't know what a horror mystery game really means that sounds kind of interesting ps1 style i've seen some games that kind of do that but that sounds kind of neat i'll check this out it puts me in that uh curious mode and

then uh the body has this really short and sweet little description about the game and then they just hit us with this gif which is this room that's beautifully rendered in this ps1 style with all these demonic runes everywhere and blood splattered on the walls and floor and the main character talking about how up it is and uh we'll chat about this in a second but it just came out of the gates like this is the game's identity and this is what we're about and secondly just as i mentioned uh previously it just really clearly laid out like hey you want to check out the video or you want to check out the vertical slice here's a couple links so you don't have to worry about too much reading so at 11 37 a.m the day we received this email uh we got the email in within the same minute i pop into slack in our eval channel and say hey this game looks kind of interesting but it's not really my jam and i don't think it'll really be our jam but it looks kind of neat and immediately our director of games dora

jumps in with yo and capital yos and just the excitement instantly goes from there and uh jump forward 25 minutes she's spamming all caps she's talking about how great the demo is the demo takes 20 minutes to play this happened 25 minutes after i received the email we had already played through the demo and my uh attitude towards the game went from like i'm not so sure about this to be like man i want to get on this train dora's excited now i'm excited and so things that the charters key did really well is uh it knew who it was and they knew they didn't have to hit with anyone they could have just showed like a kind of uh generic hallway in that graphic style and not worried about like all the blood and cursing but like that's what the game is and so they would have seen that eventually if they played the demo anyway so they just hit us with that out of the gate they front loaded all the really good feely brain stuff like the uh gif and everything so that we didn't have to

worry about thinking about budget before we got excited about the game uh and then uh kind of hard getting back to before it just takes big swings it knows what the game's identity is and it knows that somewhere out there will resonate with it which it did uh and secondly we're gonna chat a little bit about a game called islets first off here are a couple quotes i'd like to share with you uh first metroidvanias are always going to be a saturated market it feels like every metroidvania is going to be facing an uphill climb right now and i'm not sure what separates this one from the pack this is a very competent game but i have no idea what would make me excited to sign a metroidvania these are all quotes by me these are all real things i said that are forever enshrined in our uh kind of spreadsheet type stuff of where we chat about games that we're evaluating uh and these are all real opinions i had i was i love metroidvanias i play them all the time on my own time but they're it's kind of a hard market and i didn't

know what would make me excited about it and time after time again i'm like i'll just never fall in love with the metroidvania that's fine and then came islands right from the beginning the email subject again we're not running for a checkbook after seeing this but uh what does surprisingly wholesome mean that's kind of weird i want to know more about that metroidvania okay i get that i'm like what's a puzzle piece map how does a puzzle piece map work into metroidvania again i'm not going to sign the game right now but i am curious as hell and then ignoring text or anything else the game jumps right or sorry the email jumped right out of the gates with just two absolutely gorgeous gifts of this game in this hand-painted kind of studio ghibli style uh with these super cute evocative characters jumping around this bright colorful world and it took me five seconds to open this email and see these gifts and be like yes i love

this i want to love this game and then uh as i mentioned like everything else was just like here's a cute little quote about the game and here's like really straightforward links if you want to know more so for this one at 10 23 we received the email from the developer in the next minute i am chatting a lot about this game and talking about how gorgeous and wonderful it looks one minute later people are trying to change the topic to some other games that we're evaluating and i won't let them because all i want to do is talk about eyelets and 15 minutes later we have the islets emoji in armor game slack and i will spam that emoji to my co-workers consistently over the next week until they all agree to sign this game and so that's what building a champion looks like and i had not uh looked through the pitch deck all that much at that point i already knew i loved this game and i was going to fight for it and so what did

i let's do well uh it has absolutely gorgeous heart sorry and it knew it and it put it right up front in the email it had that really evocative subject line that kind of hinted that little interesting questions that i just wanted to be curious about it had a 60-second trailer and every second of that trailer was magic there was no point where i could jump to i'm like oh this looks a little boring or something no matter where i randomly scroll to in that trailer that game looked rad as hell and it didn't try to do too much it included the uh budget it included uh the demo which ruled and included all these things that are necessary for us to eventually make our decision but it didn't front load those and uh honestly if it didn't include a budget there is no reality where i would have gotten this excited be like oh you didn't include a budget i guess we're not going to sign this one i would have

just emailed the dev immediately and demanded that budget because i wanted to work on this game and uh enthusiasm is infectious and this is why it's all so important is i got so jazzed about this game and it took a very small amount of time for my co-workers to similarly start spamming our eyelids emojis uh whenever we're talking about games and it just spread and then we eventually sign the game and so in conclusion a couple of things i want to wrap up with is um front load your pitch don't try to bury the lead don't try to be cute don't try to be like ah this is the final enemy i don't want to reveal it if that's the coolest thing in your game show it right out of the gates and this doesn't apply just to pitching to publishers this certainly doesn't apply just to email pages this is if you're looking for grants if you're pitching to different funds if you're looking to build a steam page any kind of marketing i think this logic

all applies uh don't go too broad don't say like ah i think this aspect of the game even though it's core to its identity might turn off some people so we're gonna play it safe uh that might be how you get through thinky brain a little further but that's not how you're gonna hook feely brains with people you're gonna build your champions by putting what your game is out there owning it and hoping you find like-minded people and most publishers won't have your champion and that's fine and that's just the reality of it there are hundreds and hundreds of publishers out there uh and chances are if your game actually like uh [Music] you have kind of that heart in it and you put it out there there's a good chance there's someone at some publishers just waiting to be your champion and when you think you have your pitch done go through point by point and say like nope i don't need the sentence to be this long i don't need this thing to be this long feely brain isn't gonna like that and put the stuff up uh higher

like nope this gets a little juicier we're gonna put that up and we're gonna put all these links below and whatever you can do just to make sure that feely brain can take the steering wheel from the get-go and that's it thank you so much [Applause] [Music] hello i really really love this talk um a lot of the things you were mentioning was how important it is to get publishers even like into a state of like fast thinking rather than slow thinking yep is there uh any is there any further reading that one could do to like start you know just learning sales or what anything you'd recommend to just you know be able to get be a better salesman i guess is the main thing about this yeah i think nothing is jumping to mine too much for

me um i don't know i like paradox of choice uh kind of gets into this is talking about like how people make decisions and how people make choices and that's been kind of fundamental in how i think about this stuff but besides that um i think you can just search out like marketing more generally rather than searching out specifically information on pitching just any uh information out there and talks on marketing will apply to pitching directly thank you very much uh hi thanks so much for this talk i think i speak for everyone when i say that it's just amazing to hear the other side of the table uh to understand uh you know how these conversations can happen when you send something out there in the dark um i was curious um i actually have two questions i'll try to make them brief um question one do you think that the way of thinking about this differ just greatly from an indie publisher to a larger publisher and question number two if there's a developer out there looking

for somewhat of a larger budget have you seen more kind of indie publishers carrying a title up to a certain level that then gets taken up by a larger publisher how do you think about that um so for your first question i haven't worked at a triple a publisher so i can't tell you but uh this applies and there have been a lot of really good talks um from other folks uh nick i'm blanking on his last name right now i think from xbox or something gave a talk a few years ago about finding champions and whatnot and so whether you're pitching to like a pub a small publisher or a large publisher or you're pitching to uh nintendo trying to get some co-marketing or xbox or whatever it is uh at the end of the day we're all humans and you're going to get people excited by finding those champions and kind of hitting those emotional points so i think it applies to basically anyone you're pitching anything to uh and for your second question i don't think i totally follow um i think

typically co-publishing in general still is like fairly rare if that's what you're describing yeah yeah uh often there will be like other funds or other things that a publisher might like um be up to working with i know like with uh you know canada media fund and like lots of other uh government funds um but with other publishers it just gets pretty muddy and i don't think it's super common i'll ask you about it on linkedin sometime thanks so much sounds great hi uh thank you very much for the talk it was very informative and you're absolutely right about everything you said that you know time is limited and so on right but have you guys considered actually like this the other side of the coin and well we as in the developers should be better at pitching uh what are your ways of getting better at your job sorry for being tricky but you know uh discarding games just by the fact that

they don't have a screenshot uh you might be missing out on quite a lot um i think there's a chance we're missing out on stuff but honestly i don't think so because like if a game doesn't show well to us how are we going to market that to a larger audience uh because your indie developer doesn't have to be as good as marketing as you are and that's what he's looking for yeah that totally makes sense and i think like we look through at least at armor games i can't speak for everyone we look through every pitch and we look through um we don't like just archive emails instantly and we respond to every single pitch we receive um and i think a lot of publishers are trying to do that so it's not that it's literally uh rejected it's just like you get those 20 seconds or whatever and it's just i think a part of humanity that like either this person is getting excited about your game or they aren't and if they're not getting excited about

their game it's going to be really hard to get signed got you yeah thank you [Music]