Find Funding During CoVID Times with Pontus Mahler | Game Dev Unchained Episode 237

hey everybody before i start this week's episode i just want to talk to you about elias software [Music] live software is providing high quality tools and services bridging the gaps between game developers sound designers and music composers with the modern and fast workflow and deep game engine integration elias audio tools enable unprecedent creative control if you're looking for real-time audio feedback for music and sound effects for your game you want to check eliassoftware.com and get on with what's hot right now [Music] [Music]

what's up everybody welcome to another episode of the number one podcast about game development and the lifestyle thereof i am your host brandon pham and with me a special guest pontus mauler how you doing doing great thank you very much uh yeah i'm excited to be on the podcast and talk about random things in the gaming industry and uh yeah i'll do a quick intro myself so uh basically my name is pontus slapmaller and uh for the last 12 years or so i've been in the gaming industry i started off as a volunteer for a game development company in the us called s2 games for a game called heroes of new york and shortly after that i was actually a professional gamer as well as a video game consultant for game design and that's the initial part of my career i've been doing twitch travel all over the world youtube

podcasts such as yourself and other things of the sort for about eight years full-time i did professional gaming until i retired about three four years ago and ultimately took my game design and game development consulting business into uh esports and everything around it and about two to three years ago i joined this lovely company gtr and i'm currently the director of business development for global top round aka gtr and game round aka g-round one of the companies gtr is an investment slash accelerator and the second company is a software platform where we offer services for game developers so yeah i'm looking forward to chatting with you about yeah whatever topics we got today well i'm going to recycle the same jokes so one from one podcaster to another no worries and to talk to someone and not have to have a dull moment which is one of the you know podcast nightmares right so uh it's great man it sounds like you have a long career um especially with communities and building up communities um and and now you're working with uh

gtr and can you mention one more time what gtr stands for and uh go a little bit more in depth of what you guys usually do and how long you guys been around sure thing i'll do an elevator pitch so basically our name is global top round we are a global investment accelerator company uh initially founded in korea then expanding globally and to date we have invested in over 40 game development companies all over the world in 27 countries actually so we really do stretch kind of everywhere we've built up a model that no other accelerator has which we're very excited about and we would you know qualify ourselves as one of the top accelerators in the world for sure and the way that we gather projects is that every single year we invest in 10 game studios it has to be video games you need to have a playable build pitch deck and everything of course um but we do not do actually let me backtrace so we get

about two to three hundred applicants per year uh from 48 countries last year 50 to the year before that i think and basically you do everything through our website globaltopround.com and it's actually live right now so if you are in indie studio looking for investment it's a great way to to get into the the business and having someone on your side um but yeah we attend podcasts we attend offline events digital events of course we do a lot of speaker sessions because we want people to get to know us not just a you know the company itself we want for you to understand who the people that you're going to be working with are so we try to you know show ourselves as much as we can and we work a lot with governments and at usually october november each year-ish that's when we close our applications and we then do our so-called gtr annual conference so the gtr annual conference is basically the finalization of our scouting throughout the year so during you know the well eight to

nine months of the year we're scouting we're meeting a lot of awesome developers uh some of you might listen to this and you know some of uh some of them we can find randomly on reddit some of them reach out like a bunch of different funnels and we picked the top 20. so once we have the top 20 companies that we find to be you know the best games that we can find we pay for your flight we pay for your hotel and we ship you off to our conference which is in a different location every year for example two years ago we were in malaysia last year in korea and this year we're going to be in malta actually normally we would have closed our program by now and announced our investments probably in four weeks from now but due to kovid of course and being an investor it's important for us to meet you but not only that for you to meet us because you know we're going to be involved with you we're going to be doing business together and we want you to you know appreciate our company if you don't like me and i don't like you let's not do business together right and uh once you arrive to to malta in this particular year we have a two day event where the first day you have the 20 studios of course then you have our team and then you have

30 to 60 publishers and investors i say 30 to 60 because normally we have about 30 partners we have over 50 signed actually but 30 is usually the amount that we get to the conference but last year we were 60. so there were every single aaa company you can think of that is on our partner list were there which was absolutely awesome this year of course dude kovid i'm not so sure but we're hoping to bring 20 to 30 or the partner stair the goal is you know that number one we're going to pick our investments but also if you don't get picked by us then at least you got like one-on-one face-to-face with these publishers and investors and you might make make a deal without us and that's actually happened four times now or five times so sometimes you know we pick we pick the wrong studio it happens and you know one of our partners picked them up so first day pitching day second day demo day everyone who attends gets to play the games gets to vote so you can get your vote for who you think we should invest in and at the end of the second day we announce the top 10. now after the top 10 we fly out to all

of your studios we want to meet you in person where one day is kind of like a catch up get to know each other no business talk one of our french studios last year took us a wine cruise one of our bulgarian studio took us to the beach you know it doesn't really matter the point is that we just want to talk like this you know being on a like a podcast format where we're just talking back and forth and you know nothing's really going on and everything's going on at the same time we kind of like that style and the second day is all business going over your company documents your business plan everything and if it all checks out you know uh three to four weeks later you'll have the first cash in your bank but what we actually do and what differentiates us from other accelerators is that number one everything is done digitally and number two you have access to us 24 7 through discord so we manage all of our investments through there and you can actually talk to all of our investments too so it's not just that us and you having a private channel all current 47 of you and soon to be 57 will be able to speak to each other at any point in time help each other out give each other advice etc and then of course you have access to us

and what we do is that we help you with fundraising we do not have a finder's fee to be very clear right away uh we help you with either you know of course our own money but also our angel network as well as our micro vcs and larger vcs and then we also help you with publishing deals that means doing the pitches for you doing the negotiations doing the contracts and the amendments today i was on three calls with aaa publishers for example negotiating with some of our other studios so all of that process is done for you so that all you have to do is focus on your game so we fit perfectly with companies between the size of two people to 20 30ish and we basically take your company to the next level we help you grow while you can do what you do best which is being creative and creating content and to be clear here you have all the rights you own the signature we do not have a power of attorney we cannot make decisions for you we can only recommend what we think you shouldn't do um we are minority shareholders so equity investors that never takes more than 11 in your studio so we're not looking to acquire you either we are the precede

slash first investors maybe first three that come in and then we stay with you for you know as long as we're partners together and even though our website says six to nine months uh program it's not really true we work a lot longer than that so our studio is from 2017 and 2016 we still work with them on a day-to-day basis we recently signed a deal with one of them uh for example and i'm sorry that took a long time maybe that wasn't an elevator pitch but yeah that's the long story short of what we do i guess that's not that like part of the story but one of the biggest things with uh with kovid and even with uh even before covet like funding is one of those mystery things that uh developers worldwide still don't know where to go uh like i feel like uh i've done hundreds of these interviews and a lot of them had to do with uh interviews that has to do with funding and i'm still not quite 100 sure from a to z what to do when i have a game idea and uh it's one of those things that we need that constant reminder especially

now there's so many questions that i have related to this uh so i'll start spitting them out all right so um obviously we're going through a pandemic like no other before right at least in our lifetime or at least my lifetime um this is really new right we're talking about the last one being 1920s right uh where where the world was basically shut down and scared um so my question to you is like how has that affected um you mentioned a bit about it uh with with gtr with funding in general uh i kind of joked around in the last few podcasts that like it's impossible to ask for millions in a phone call like this because i don't trust you you're just like on a webcam has that changed the dynamic at all was there an adjustment on behalf of the company uh or just the general uh opinion of what's going on right there uh does it prevent people from from funding yeah i'm gonna answer the question in two ways one is a rant and one is more

uh an actual answer to your questions so today's i'm like yeah i'm not going to go super into like my entire history and what i've been doing but i basically come from i was actually going to be a psychiatrist i come from a psychology background before i magically ended up in gaming and esports and i i kind of understand how humans work and one thing that and it's like rant first one thing that i that has changed is that developers have gotten really lazy and i think it's uh two reasons for that number one is that because it's digital developers think that you know it's gonna be so much easier you know there are tons of events and i can attend all of them they're mostly free they don't cost that much money so i'm just going to go to all of them and just find every contact that i have and then mass email that's like kind of how it feels like for from most of the developers and secondly because of that whole mentality the pitches have gotten so much worse i i attended what like 22 offline events

last year i think i was in 15 different countries over the over the course of the year being at all the major events and some smaller ones and even invited by the governments in some countries and i loved it you know and when you sign up to these offline events they're quite expensive for example i'm actually swedish i'm living in thailand right now uh but i attend nordic game in my whole home country and nordic game is a event that i believe if i recall correctly i paid 600 euros for it right uh for the actual ticket and then you know add in the flight cost and the hotel costs and everything it wrapped up to maybe 1500 to 2000 euros for that entire trip and obviously because i'm spending so much money i'm i'm hoping to get a lot of stuff out of it and it kind of goes into the developers too because even though the developers tickets are cheaper they're still spending hotels some of them have to fly in some of them you know get discounts and whatever but at the very least you're gonna get to a 200 to 300 euro loss if you don't

get anything out of the event so people know that because this is an event that a lot of money has been spent on they spend so much time on perfecting their profiles so i would go into the meet to match system and i would run through the list everyone has a completed profile everyone has a pitch deck in their profile a trailer and i can basically just look at it and be like yep schedule meeting or decline meeting accept meeting and it was awesome and i would go to these events overworking myself like crazy because i love the video game industry and i would do like 15 meetings in a day in brazil i had 60 meetings in three days which was never doing that again but it was so giving you know and in our top 40 last year we had nine brazilian studios that's 25 of you know our top 40. and ultimately in the top 20 i think we ended up with three and that for me is an amazing event for us right and yeah i was super happy and then to continue the actual rant part is that since these digital events started i was thinking like awesome more events

more games more studios so much for me to do and then i started going through the meet to match and half the profiles don't have any info so i have to google the company name or have to google the game name or have to google the person or go to him on linkedin and you know i can tell you that 99 per world 90 of our partners won't do that our vc partners our publishing partners they won't do that and you know i talk to them all the time they're basically like all right you're not putting the time i'm not going to give a kiss like give a [ __ ] basically so i'm not sure if i can curse in this podcast but oh you can [ __ ] yeah yeah so it's like i was like so surprised i'm like why are you putting less effort just because it's free so pg connects was my first event i was super disappointed and the the pictures were just really bad over time it got better but another thing that people are forgetting is that you know there are events every week and you know now that we can't travel i am working until like 2 a.m you know i'm sitting up

until 2 a.m to have a call with you in your time zone in america or in europe and you can't even bother to give me the full information before the meeting and then an even worse thing happened is that i'm not kidding at one of the events three weeks ago i scheduled 12 meetings after you know googling all their profiles and everything the games looked really good and when the call started they didn't have a pitch deck they didn't have anything and that's from people who you know even requested a meeting with me where it clearly says you know minimum playable game build uh you know need a pitch deck etc it sets that on our profile and even in some other rare cases uh they would send the wrong name they would you know request a meeting with me and it's a copy pasta where they didn't even bother to change my name geez and that's been going on for the last couple of months so now the rant is over the long story it has changed a lot the i think the general amount of you know effort the studios put into this is very low so what i would like to recommend to all

of you is that if it is because you know you're i believe it's a psychological thing where when something is free you know you just don't spend enough more time on it you don't consider it as something where you know this is a loss right exactly but if i if you're paying for the ticket even 50 you know even just 50 bucks subconsciously you're gonna put in more effort so i've already given this feedback to every event i've been to i'm like i will pay for this digital event a hundred percent charge me fifty dollars a hundred dollars two hundred dollars just charge the developers as well you know like 25 bucks 50 bucks it doesn't matter it's just like i can't keep having these meetings which is just a complete waste of both of our time um but on the flip side you know with the pandemic uh there is actually a lot of potential for funding i i would say that i don't know who your previous guests have been and you know that they've said that it's harder to find money and it's actually not true the only thing that has changed is that it's um it's a longer process so actually i

would say that it's actually easier to get money now because we're all stuck in our rooms we're all most of our partners are working more than before you know because they're in their chairs anyway they're in their house anywhere anyways they'll take calls you know they'll be more casual but the due diligence process has almost doubled so that is very true especially for million dollar checks so some of our partners white write million dollar checks right and they've increased their due diligence time from three to six months and some of them have increased from one month to three so it's definitely taken a longer time and for us personally our angel networks um you know uh have also been like less less fast i guess so you talked about fundraising right i personally raised 600k euros in angel fund in the last two months uh which took me both races took me less than three weeks um so it was like super fast it was super fast but even though it was super fast um it was a different process than before

you know before you know when we when we hand out games to our angel network it goes very quickly we'll have fast decisions but now with kovid you know their own businesses are being affected so they're taking a little bit more time actually doing you know due diligence and getting involved in the projects um but for us nothing's honestly really changed i'm still talking to our publishers on a daily basis our investors on a daily basis it's just the due diligence yeah sorry i talk too much i think you've learned that no i love it man like i said from one fellow podcaster next nothing is better than the guest talks the whole time people have this that bad impression of me that i like talking but no man i like listening uh way more than talking so like there's so much so many layers to this so i'm glad because what you're saying is kind of ringing true for me because my fear is kind of like the game developer fear is like oh there's no more money there's never money i have a game idea but i don't know where to start but like uh even if you follow the stock market like casually like people are investing right now out there and they are

trying to find a place to park their money and and not just you know and grow from from it right obviously and the game sector of anything is really blossoming in a huge way uh the game industry hasn't been really it's pandemic proof-ish right uh where i i friends that are out there still doing what they were doing before but at home and so uh i haven't heard any this is the longest stretch and i joke around with my friends all the time that i haven't heard a layoff uh from major companies which was a thing right uh being in the game industry it's such a thing every two months but like for some reason pandemic no one gets laid off it's like all right what the hell is this uh so uh yeah it's one of those side effects of course where it's good collateral you know epidemics obviously pretty awful but like for the game industry it's been okay like we've been better than most uh industries yeah i mean we've i mentioned the two 600k races because they were angel rounds but actually this

year we've almost reached five million total uh usd uh so we've had a very good year with all of our projects that's you know obviously publishers and investors combined but yeah we're hoping to get another three to four million by in the next three months because we're close to closing some deals so for us again nothing's changed the process did take a lot longer and there is one studio that we have been negotiating now for about nine months and it would not have been nine months without kovitz so i'm not here to say that nothing nothing's changed but generally though companies have a lot of money and we are unaffected and something that i'm not sure you know which which countries your audience is from but at least our own studios have gotten tons of benefits from the government and like you said game developers haven't actually been affected game sales have actually you know gone up so for our companies we've been benefiting out of this right in terms of grants in terms of uh getting like government support but then of course there is the other aspect

which is you know if you have children which some of our studio heads do that's been a huge strain of course being able to work while you have kids next to you all the time that you need to take care of so that has delayed some of our games which is totally understandable um we have of course also have the actual psychological effect like some people are getting you know very down and and depressed and myself included uh i'm a very extrovert person so sitting in my room is awful but i'm lucky that you know i'm in thailand and we haven't had any cases in three months and the life has been normal and life has been normal for six so we were out of our office for two months between march and may and then we went back to office in june and we've been there ever since and uh yeah i mean all restaurants bars for public transport everything's open so i i'm i'm okay now but the first those two months was probably one of the hardest periods in my life yeah man i i feel like that was um the consensus was that that limit

was was definitely there uh because at first we were like oh well i'll just catch up i'll tell all to the uh steam games that i i've been buying but haven't played but like that two month mark was pretty much where i was where i was like all right i need to go outside and do something else because this is just too much um yeah and uh it's it's it's tough it's definitely tough because uh i don't know i live in california and we just recently had those fires so we there was even like a hardcore two weeks on top of that where i couldn't go outside and breathe normal hair so like this year definitely is a strain uh even though our industry's gotten better um there's still like a lot of coping to do to figure this out right it's not like all smooth and a lot of that has to do with uh you know being away from the computer for a little time yeah

but uh of course we had the unfortunate you know uh misbehavior in the industry at the beginning of the year as well so i mean i think we've had a rocky year for sure um but i think it can only go up from here i mean most of the people that were involved in all the drama have been you know laid off or been moved out and i think you know we should all really work towards making the industry a generally better place and you know of course we uh on our side as well attending all these events like and to anyone else who does you know you know uh just make sure that you you know put a stop to it if you see something happening especially now digitally as well there's a lot of uh misbehavior going on you know messages going around everywhere so and that's the only thing i think that has been you know unfortunate over the last few months in terms of our own industry and our own networking that's going on but again i think we can only go up from here and once everyone gets back and can see each other's faces again you know that would be and talk games i think will be better than ever

but most importantly is that every studio out there like there is money there's a lot of money out there and you know people like us we are of course pre-seed and smaller funding ourselves but through our network as i mentioned we've raised almost five mil this year and i mean other our partners have acquired studios they've invested in studios um nothing's changed guys it's just have a little bit more patience and most importantly put more effort into your pitches i don't there's no point in attending every event every week i stopped doing so five months ago just take your pick and then put in double the effort in that particular event instead of draining yourself otherwise you're gonna you know just burn out from being at events every week that's that's pretty cool well let's let's dive into that the process right so i have a gate a great game idea well i as in the listeners and views right there uh let's talk about the next steps because i feel like this the step two step three is the hardest for people to

wrap their head around but when when discussing with people like you it seems very obvious right to to kind of like seek out funding and interests and um you mention events and kind of like focusing on a particular event is that the move usually go to the event be public facing and then just put yourself out there for potential funders or investors yeah yes and no so what what i say we're currently of course finalizing our programs i've been a lot of uh speaker sessions and podcasts and stuff and i've talked about this in in various others but uh one of the things i always say is building up an early community uh it's you know like taking advantage of your friends and family as well as people on reddit twitter facebook groups you know we like to see a studio that have either pre-concept or during concept or at mvp stage start spreading like gifs and uh and trailers and small posts on twitter you know do using the appropriate hashtags and and building up like a feedback base of 100 to 500 people that is like a really

good start and then you can aggregate all of this into a funnel of your choice i personally prefer discord and then you just communicate with these people all the time in in a way to help improve your game and when you come to the pitching stage and you feel like you're ready to start looking for funding you can show the feedback from your testers because because i'm preceded again i'm not 100 certain uh of like how large of studios that watch your podcast are but from the research i did on you it seems to be you know the sizes that i'm looking for so if you are in our sizes then definitely you need to have some sort of proof of concept it can be players testing it it can be you painting up a great idea of who you're going to be targeting so to dig into that more is that what i always say is number one you need a pitch deck of 10 to 15 slides i think that's enough a lot of you send me 35 50 pages not gonna read that and because you need to kind of you know get me interested first

then i'm going to ask you for 30 to 60 slides or more documents so 10 to 15 that basically covers you know the the background of you and your company and your team members and that includes regardless if you have triple a experience or you know you worked for blizzard or you just came out of college it doesn't matter i wanna we wanna know more about you because we invest in people not obviously us being the first money or the precede we're the so-called dumb money right we come in before anyone else so for us it's super important that we understand who you are as a person so that is your you know your education or your pet peeves or projects you've done before outsourcing anything that is relevant to you your team members and the company second of all is of course the game the game itself like why is your game unique and not and here comes the kicker that i've been adding to all of my uh speaker sessions uh recently is stop putting a slide that says global market is worth x

x billion dollars or i'm targeting pc gamers 18 to 35 mail global and i'm gonna catch five percent of the total market i'm sorry but that slide is a complete waste of space and just shows me that you do not understand your game or your business and that's okay that's something we can work on so it's not an instant note from us but just as a gentle reminder us larger publishers larger vcs it's a stupid slide rather what we want to see is who did you create your project for like what is your intended base and you you can be completely wrong in this that's totally okay i just want to see like okay you came up with let's say a metroidvania with a 2d art style and you're using influx from let's say thai culture i'm using tai because i'm here and you know that this type of culture fits southeast asia really well and you also know that it's like trending between the ages of 18 to 35 male and female so now your slide can input all of those details were you know that your game is going to succeed or you know you project that

it's going to succeed in southeast asia because you have a unique metroidvania with 2d graphics with an influx of this type of culture so that you're now targeting a much smaller player base and i can see that you know you planned for this early you knew that this particular type of audience would like it awesome let's work around that and figure out how we can go more global either after the southeast asian launch or before launch you know we can figure out how to launch more globally together but that is a good pitch you know because i understand why you created the project who you created the project for and why it's going to succeed in that particular market because the thing is that you know your gaming company is a business you need to make money to survive and you need to make money for people like me to want to invest in your company so if you don't have a proper business plan you know how can we give you cash to actually develop it right and no one can hit the global market and we're not expecting a indie or a double a studio to spend five million dollars in marketing you might

only have 50 to 100 to 150k which means it's even more important to understand who you're targeting rather than this is the market research right now this can be done in another way too where you compare yourself and benchmark yourself to other projects and their success right that's a very standard slide where you show the usps of your game versus your competitors that works too i just personally prefer the target market thing and i do believe that some of our partners are moving more into that as well because i think people have started to realize that look at free fire if you don't know that game well that's fine because naeu doesn't but in brazil it's the biggest game by far and in latin america it's about to become the biggest game in the entire region and they had three million live viewers during the national brazilian tournament i think six months ago that is crazy that is bigger than counter-strike league of legends and all of these companies in one single country and free fire is also massive in southeast asia but again no one knows the game in any eu right and that just goes to show that you only need to hit

like one piece not the global piece i'm interested in what pieces are you trying to you know fit together and then we can help you on the business side with actually assigning these pieces or these pizza slices we can call them two different partners so for example we don't expect you to be able to publish globally either with a publisher or yourself so we can you know help you delegate a japanese partner a korean partner or whatever depending on where you want to target so that's something that we do for our studios too but other than the market research and the competitor stuff of course um most of the time you guys forget you know to put in how much money you need and what you're gonna spend it on so financial slides can be one to two it's a like you know 500k euro race great but what does that tell me uh please you know includes how much money you're raising uh why you're raising it and obviously which type of funding because if you give me a deck for a publisher man again you're i'm just like you didn't even bother reading what i do and that's happened a lot of times too so uh

why are you raising the money are you okay with both project funding and equity great that can be one deck then one slide so uh just make sure that you include how much you're raising why you're raising it how you're intending to do it equity project funding whatever and how are you gonna distribute and spend it and i also really appreciate an extra slide there of you know what's the expansion plan of your team if you're going to be hiring a lot of people like what roles are they and how are you going to be building it out so i would say normally that the the game pitch could be between four and six lights uh six is okay you know usps what the game is link to the build if you have one trailer stuff like that uh i think you get generally most pitches i read about the game are actually pretty good it's the part about the company the future the fundraising that a lot of developers lack so i think you know you know what to do most of you know what to do on the game slides you just need to put a little bit of extra effort on the company in the future um and yeah finally what is the future of your company do you want to be a three-man studio for the next 20 years or do you want to grow into 20 people do you want to use the same ip for the

next five to 10 years or are you going to be doing other games you know tell us more so to finish off the my long story again uh is i usually say have three pitch decks have one general one you use to send out an email i use it as a teaser or whatever like when you do cold emails and uh secondly have one for publishers and have a third one for investors and then you can spread these depending on the party now the final kicker of any pitch deck is the extra two slides in the appendix of why i should invest in you what i mean by that is like okay you reached out to me to schedule a meeting why is global talk run a good partner for you or why is raw fury a good partner for you or why is tencent a good partner for you those two slides not a lot of not a lot of companies do but trust me they will make us want to ask for your 40 deck like your 40 page deck so if you can add in you know especially on cold emails on linkedin all of those add in a slide as to why

this particular publishing partner will be a perfect fit for you for example with raw fury you've you've released games like this before you know how to market it uh i i've seen you do x y and b you know those two slides are super cool not a necessity but you know if you can tell any investor or publisher why they should work with you it's it's awesome and i just realized i kind of completely didn't really answer your question on the whole event side but no no no no i think you you kind of did um yeah i can continue if you want all right no no let's go ahead and continue yeah like um okay so i'm asking from the ignorance of uh of the viewers out there i know this stuff right i know this stuff but like i'm asking on behalf of the listeners out there like because the first the first usually response when they have a game idea is that they would go to events and just randomly try to pick up some interest right but what you're saying is you can start

building an audience day one uh to kind of help kind of tailor your game idea into something that is something that people want to buy right and this helps with you guys on the other side to see that there is some traction some or at least some uh some some potential for traction uh just from this small group of people and it helps with the business side of things because i i think you could completely correct with game developers focusing on the games and yeah and if anything it should be 50 50 with business development uh to because it is a business it's a piece of entertainment that eventually you want to sell it's not just a garage game that you just want to put out in the world and just pray for the which is what what most business plans are for game developers to just pray uh pretty much spray and pray um with their games um but yeah with with events you were mentioning you were kind of like downsizing that uh can you kind of talk about its

relevance nowadays especially with digital events are like how effective are they uh how much of your time percentage wise should you dedicate to planning it doing it and following up on it versus to the whole development and getting funding process right so especially in like early projects which most of the developers are in because they haven't raised the full funding to scale up production yet right i i usually again like recommend the three types of decks and you should be updating them on a two to three month basis so it's not a weekly thing and you also do not need to finalize your entire budget breakdown your entire like uh tech road map forever like in that first pitch because a lot of you also add like all of this into the deck and trust me it will change especially when you get a partner on board so usually what i say especially if you're early again start with that 10 to 15 page pitch you know focus on building up that initial community and start attending yes events so what i

normally say is that actually twitter is one of the best b2b platforms for game the gaming industry people think it's linkedin and while that is true twitter is actually better because every publisher every investor a lot of these random like pichia game from liam i don't know his last name but liam something does a great twitter contest called pitch a game once a month which is really cool and you know you can reach out and tag us on twitter you know like just be like oh hey i got this cool pitch this is a two-minute trailer do you want to talk some more we read our twitter all the time we check our timelines because all of the publishers and investors we we follow each other we all have each other on twitter we read our each other's timelines so tagging us in these timelines is totally fine you know like just toss in a gif or tossed in a toss in a trailer that's a great way to grab our attention and just like randomly get a dm from me a little bit later and that's something that people forget because twitter is actually really good secondly is linkedin so linkedin is usually something i follow up with

of course after the the events so to scale go back in the process uh when you attend an offline or a digital event and i'll go into the pros and cons right after but uh once you've completed the you know your pitch and you know you've given uh the speaker speech to me whatever regardless of how you think the the pitch went you know try to add us on linkedin it's a great way to have a secondary uh aspect uh for for you to contact us on because we are all humans and we get so many pitches all the time and sometimes we will miss emails even if we have systems in place and spreadsheets and and different types of trackers we will sometimes forget and i don't mind getting pinged on linkedin saying like hey did you read my email 10 days ago or seven days ago that's okay and if you if i don't accept you then you know no harm no foul right it doesn't take you that long to send a connection request with a note that hey you know it's nice speaking to you here's my game pitch and trailer again as well you know to have that secondary

uh contact and also this will allow you to also see what we're doing in linkedin when we're sharing new things like you know we're looking for this type of genre or the global top run applications are open so that you can keep an eye on there as well now social media channels aside uh actually i have one more i forgot about this one the fourth one is discord game communities there are a lot of game communities right now like the yuki which is for uk companies the uk uki game development community where all the companies are helping each other and where the administrators will gen regularly post stuff that we're doing and other publishers and investors so getting in there and getting your name shown posting some trailers some clips is a great way for you to get connected as well and there are tons of these everywhere and they're free to join there is also a meet to match one where i'm in and all of our partners are in as well where you can just post a screenshot or a trailer super good way of doing like social media pushing now for events themselves uh how much time you should spend on it i would say depending on the studio size of course

i would say that at least two days per week if you are the ceo or the founder you should and when i say two days per week i don't mean like monday tuesday nothing wednesday friday i mean hourly hour hour-wise you should be spending almost 40 to 50 of your time actually reaching out to partners actively looking for funding keeping us updated on what what's going on because just because we passed the game doesn't mean that we can't re-look at it again later on where so for uh offline events pick you know take your picks uh i would say maybe five per year because for smaller companies because again they're expensive they cost flights they cost hotel they cost tickets uh try to speak to your local governments because a lot of the governments out there have awesome awesome ways to support you like quebec uh covers i think 70 of your travel costs or something not every government is that awesome but it's a great example um so that you can fly to these events and the reason i say five is because it doesn't attending 20 of them doesn't really help you um the point of attending these offline events is for you to pitch in front of

me and regard disregarding if i actually um pick you or not right now you know you have my business card you have my contact we have spoken i will remember your face so that if you come back to me six or twelve months later with an improved build with an improved pitch deck and breakdown you know i'm like oh yeah we met six months ago so i think five is kind of like a good number because it's like once a quarter-ish so you get to re you know arrive to the parties once a quarter catch up with us once a quarter in person and then for the digital event side a year ago i would have had different feedback but right now i would say one event every two weeks um attending them every week it's going to burn you out you're only going to get more demotivated because if you haven't signed a deal after attending six months of pitches you know something's wrong with your pitch you know if no one's getting back to you either your game's not good enough for your pitch not good and your pitch is not good enough so then you need to go back to the drawing board instead of going over and over and over until you finally hit something

so once every two weeks you know taking your picks doing your research which publishers are here which investors are here and again guys not the two slides for why we should partner with you it's not only for us it's for you too like really think about who you want to work with it's not just about signing any publisher that gives you the money or any investor that gives you the money that makes us less interested so research the events and you know make a list for yourself so what i do myself is because i do the business development for all of our own investments right i take care of the publisher and investor relations instead i make a list of tier one two and three so tier one being these are the partners that are the best for this game these are the partners that i know will be good and these are the partners we're okay to partner with anything below tier three you should just delete getting money from random people is never going to help you in the long term like once you've taken someone's money you're in debt to them you know you need to pay them back by succeeding when your company and you know if you just take money from anyone

and you know they don't understand you they can't add any strategic value or help you with the company what do you like how is that going to make you successful long term right yeah so yeah once every two weeks and you know spend more effort and don't update your deck every day like once maximum once a month you should be updating your deck obviously something cool happens you know throw it in there but i i mean i'm using this as an example because one of our own studios and he will know who i'm talking about without mentioning his name gives me a new deck every goddamn week and it's so long like i'm like dude stop it sounds like it's like yes yes i'm like stop man like just you know make a pitch stick with it if it doesn't work we can rearrange it yeah yeah well the one thing the one person that talks more than podcasters the designer so i totally get it they over pitch uh but this kind of leads me into like a something that um i was thinking about like obviously you've seen

a million pictures right uh good and bad yeah um so just to dissect that a bit what were the best impression ones generally specifically you don't have to name any names and the worst right what what didn't work what was so horrible about it and um lastly you know what can people learn from that oh that's a good question i'm going to go back into my own studios and call them out here let me finally um let's burn them yes i'll take this team as an example because i think it's a really good actual success story of what i just spoke about for the last 15 minutes is clever quick entertainment's one of our uh investments well sorry they haven't gotten our money yet they're getting our money in the next two two weeks but it's a finnish studio that we invited like they became top 20 last year and we ended up passing on them and i i don't think they'll mind me saying this but if not i'm sorry when they came to us with the pitch the

pitch was short which is perfect but the information wasn't that relevant and also because of my background and my in my experience especially in their genre which is rts i saw their pitch and i'm like and i think they were asking for like 150 000 if i remember or euros in their first pitch i literally walked up to them right after the pitch at our event and i said that this uh if i made this game the exact way uh that you want to make it i would make this with a million euros and that's what it's going to be required to make this a success your budget's stupid it doesn't make sense and this is not your project that's pretty much what i told them right there and then and there i said that it can be doable we wait less money of course i was talking you know double a-ish um and that i that i recommend them to go back and look at the total road map look at their uh their project and you know really dig into the numbers and on top of that when we actually played the game it wasn't that great like the the actual pitch the uniqueness of the game and everything was

amazing like i loved it and i told my team i'm like i don't want to sign them right now but i kind of want to sign them on the idea alone like it's it's such a smart game and it doesn't exist and majesty is their only close competitor and most people won't even know that game so yeah we ended up passing on them but because they had such an amazing idea and i could really tell that the team was super passionate and they're a really talented bunch and i liked them as people you know but the game just wasn't there i reached out to them in january again this year and i basically said that um yeah hey you know what's up guys uh again i hope you know what how are things going do you guys have a new build for me and they sent it over and just the the biggest issue back in their pitch at our event was the ai the ai was not high enough quality um because it's a symbol it's an rts rpg simulator it sounds complicated um and then in january they sent it to me and i was like wow the game has improved so much in three months but the ai is still really bad so i told

them that you guys fixed this ai i will sign you right away they came back another two or three months later we signed them and now we're going to invest in them so it's a great example of you know me because i love the uniqueness of their pitch even though it wasn't the most concrete pitch ever the game wasn't complete they knew exactly what they were doing x obviously not the budget part but they knew what they what they were creating they weren't super familiar you know on the whole business aspect of how much the products would cost because they believed that they could make it with that small budget and they could but i saw the potential of making it bigger so now the project is 400 000 euros instead of 150 and that's what we're currently you know helping them negotiate with some of our partners and i love the game out of all of our games i've actually played this one the most and this is a game this is a game that i openly told them that it's a bad pitch you know we passed on the game and now you know we're working with them it's it's a so yeah i would say that is one of the worst and best pitches i've ever gotten because uh you know

the budget was wrong you know the game wasn't great but the idea was so good the team members themselves were really good and that's really what matters for us it's about finding those really talented you know team members that can create an awesome project and that is clever quick entertainment and that's why you know we're recommending them to our partners because it's an amazing team and you know with us at their side we'll make sure to help them on the business side um another one to give you like another bad example uh i guess i should make a good example too but a bad example is uh and that's because of language barrier only we have a company that has a game called uh chronosword and i actually found them randomly at an in korea in a random venue i just saw them on the floor and i just looked down and my colleague came to me and she's like pontius i think he'll like this game and i walked over and it was just striking awesome like it's a 2d like dark souls type of title and i looked at it and i'm like okay we need this and then i started talking to the developers you know and they sent over the material and the

presentation was not great you know i would rated that probably at the bottom but the gameplay spoke for itself so the game you know really sealed the deal and then the team itself when we met them despite the language barrier absolutely love them and we're super excited to work with them so you know sometimes your game itself can win me over even though that pitch though if i read the pitch first i'd be like eh but i you know i saw the game i played it amazing and then that's an actual good pitch then i'll take big moxie games so it's one of our investments from last year as well i use three recent examples because they're the most relevant uh they're an american brazilian hybrid studio and the game honestly wasn't that good uh you know when we played the game and uh last year at the event you know we were uh i can't go into full detail but we were thinking to pretty much like skip on the project but the founder damon is amazing like he's probably one of the best founders we have he knows how to present himself he understands business he wrote

up the business plan really good it was a long deck but it was fine because he hooked me in the first 10 slides he brought out all the usps who he's targeting and why you know everything i mentioned earlier in what i like in a pitch was in the first 10 slides after that he kept expanding on the project on the roadmap what he needed different budgets even you know like i can make the game with this budget despite it in that budget but this is the money that you know this is my vision you know so that we could actually like understand that he knows how to make a game and he broke everything down in individual stages based on ip based on future ip based on sequels what happens if the game doesn't work out you know like if the game fails what does he do that was also there so he had one of the best pitches that well today he still has one of the best pitch decks i've ever seen and he presents himself in a perfect fashion um so i would say that he carried it by his persona and by his intelligence as well as his pitch deck because the

game was not ready to get us signed back then now it's freaking amazing and you know it's developed a lot and it's going to be one of our biggest studios for sure so that that actually leads me to my one of my last questions here about budgeting right budgeting is one of those scary slides where uh where i feel like you're either like undershooting it from hearing from your story it sounds like less common than overshooting it uh am i is my instincts correct on this because we're not so constantly unaware with that yeah what would i say uh but this is a really honestly bad advice like because you only have one one chance to impress us with your first pitch i mean what people say is that you only have one chance yes and no you have one chance to really impress us right away because if you don't you know yeah i'll read your email you know i'll come back to you but you'll be in the backlog right but i personally kind of like when they explain what they can do with different

types of the budget so like i said on him you know he had three tiers and you know we can help him set that up ourselves later on we can come in with our expertise and be like this is what it should be which we have now and now we have a perfect plan but he could basically say that you know i want to create this project that should be your 10 to 15 pitch you don't need to include more than one budget so what i normally say in the 10 to 15 pitch what is the vision for your project how much money do you actually need how much expansion plan do you actually need and that should be your one and only number and then later on when we get on a call you can explain or even during the pitch during the event you can explain you can also make the game medium size or smaller size because that's good it lets me understand you know okay that you're you're able to deliver you know the project at a good quality a great quality and an amazing quality and we are expecting you to understand like what kind of budget you need to finish your game in the way you envisioned it

i'm not expecting you to know that oh if we sign i don't know sega and you get double the budget you don't need to know that in our first meeting right and you know there is a high chance that when we come on board or when another partner come on board we'll change the budget and we'll sit down with you and we'll build up a plan based on our experience that makes more sense but in that initial pitch the only number that you should be showing us is the vision of your game if the vision of your game is half a million dollars then you're gonna show us half a million dollars you can explain to us what 250k looks like in the call you can explain to us what 750k looks like in the call of course the higher amount you're asking for the more we're going to dig into the background of you and your team so that is the flip side right like if you're coming to us with two million dollar requests then there has to be a big explanation as to why previous projects you have released or something for us to be able to sign off such a big ticket size right away to give you an insider tip is that anything above half a million dollars you'll get a lot of scrutiny on you and

your team so what that means is that if you're asking for more than half a million there's going to be a lot of calls on every single member on your team getting an introduction on you understanding your you know your psych and your and your background education what not other projects below half a million you can pretty much sign without an in-person meeting uh with just your pitch and your game and you know getting on a couple of calls it's not that hard in quotation marks yeah uh and in comparison to a larger budget um so that is the only thing you should think think of that if you do go above half a million expect a lot of questions a lot of due diligence and a lot of you know why do you how can you deliver this type of project if you haven't done it before um that it doesn't really answer your question to be honest but it is it is really a hard question i mean because for me i want to see you know all three stages of the project you can deliver but other vcs might be like oh you should know that your project is exactly one million dollars because of abc right we're a little bit more flexible because

we're pre-seed so i not a single one of the companies that we invested in last year kept their budgeting plan that they pitched us because we came in and we changed it right so so i totally hear you so uh if i have a million dollar project here's a part one in part two game and i'll be able to kind of pitch it but like uh that's another question too when it comes to um initial funding right and this happens a lot obviously unless you're a good planner unless you've been experienced enough and even if you are experienced right it's very difficult to kind of um not go over budget right in cases like that what do you say to teams where you're finally funding them and they're like hey we actually need six more months i mean what kind of warning shots do you appreciate as a publisher the man with the money uh to to kind of uh what what are the warning signs that you want people to to avoid uh to prevent ask for money later yeah

so the warning the warning sign is always the budget slide and it is one of the most important slides in the entire deck it's like that's why i mentioned the three different ones because if you're able to break it down to me while you're spending a b and c these three different uh project sizes you know we can tell that you understand like how much a project will cost and like what you can deliver with different budgets so for example one of the reasons why that big mac's games pitch increased was because we added a level editor uh potentially we haven't even put that into the plan but we might do a level editor and that would require additional budget right um so we i we want to see that you at least understand basic finance like how much are your new roles going to be costing how much are your new extra features like a level editor or a friend system or a new multiplayer system or an anti-cheat whatever it may be you should be pre-budgeting for all of that also software hardware all of these things that sound kind of basic when i

say it but from reading you know a thousand pitches it's not as basic as you think and most importantly is that i always negotiate for a six month buffer so if you tell me that the game is going to be released in january i'll prepare a pitch for you towards our publishing and investment partners with an extra six months because yes game development always has delays number one but number two is that you need to plan out you know post launch because if your game uh fails or doesn't recoup fast enough you're gonna sit there with no salaries for you and your team members so you should always be budgeting three to six months extra i try for six months gets like a couple of you know frowned eyes upon but three months is the minimum always add that in and that is uh for two reasons for yourself uh number one but also for me to feel a little bit more safe that you know that if there's potential delays or if the game doesn't launch perfectly the first month you know you have a little bit of extra cash to make it through so that's

usually what we recommend so yeah i want to see at least in the initial meeting and in the initial pitches you know the budget slides should can be very easily broken down into pie charts of you know development cost office costs uh hardware etc and then when you send us the full budget breakdown which can be later you know what are the new positions going to be what is the average salary you're expecting from all of them and you know how long do you need them on board are they going to be outsourced or in-house and again three to six months of an extra buffer um and you obviously that's what you're going to tell the publishers and investors as well this is not something you lie about you tell them that you know we were requesting three months extra to you know for you to be able to recoup first most of the time and for us to have that extra money for the first couple of months and you know that shows the publisher and the investor too that you know you're you care about your employees you care about your company and you're not expecting an instant success because look at how many games fail out there right or for example among us

the game that is so popular now everywhere it failed its first two years right and now it sold a ridiculous amount of copies so just try to budget on a way where you know your company and your employees are safe that's a thing that doesn't need to be part of your pitch deck it's something that we'll talk to you about is that you know all investors and all publishers at least the good ones care about you as a company they want your employees to be happy they want them to be well taken care of and i'll use a very quick example where we were pitching one of our uk publishing partners in january this year i think and when we were in the due diligence meeting you know uh i don't remember i don't think i can say but it's a seven digit number okay and when we were going over the budget slide the publisher was like you know all of this makes sense but you know does he ask the ceo don't you need like an extra one or two people you know like it looks like you're going to be ceo you're going to be game designer you're going to be wearing all these different

hats and we're scared that you're going to burn out you know we'd much rather see you add in an extra person or two make the company atmosphere better you know build out your business because the publishers will work with you again you make a good successful project with them they'll come back so it's in their best interest for your company to be really really good and strong just as it is for you and that's something that you might sometimes forget is that you know we invested in people investors invest in the people publishers invest in the people too even though they're paying for your game and they're expecting the game to succeed if your employees aren't happy and they aren't feeling safe your game's not going to be as good so i'd even say on the budget slide i'm okay with an extra whatever 50k a year if that helps your company and it helps your team and trust me so does the publishers and the investors the only thing you need to explain is like why the extra 50k and if you tell it in a story that i just did or like that my team did it's a great example yeah i think

sustainability beats one-hit wonders all the time uh yes i think business-wise we always want like developers to be building games healthily because nothing's worse than having a great game and then never seeing that person ever again because they quit the industry become like you know uh working somewhere else in which we hear a lot like people get burned out all the time so uh we are at the hour mark i want to congratulate you for making it to an hour with me uh and uh this is the time where i hand over the mic to you to kind of give a shout out give attention to how do people who have a great idea right now get in good contact with you and be on behalf of your company all right yeah first of all thank you for inviting me i didn't realize it's been an hour already again i talked too much sorry viewers and i probably could have kept talking for you know several more hours but this is the first b2b podcast in a long time so

again i appreciate you allowing me to talk about gtr and gaming industry so yeah uh you're looking to find a business partner someone to help grow your team if you're whether you're two people or 20 we're really good at that it's what we've been doing for the last five years there are tons of success cases you can read about and a lot of interviews going out right now you can also reach out to me at any point in time we're a super transparent company we can ask and ask any question we always say there are no dumb questions not for us because you know there might be some things that you're scared about you don't understand just reach out and you know we don't of course work for free but if you want you have a quick question ping me you know send me a twitter dm tag me on twitter or whatever or or on linkedin we want to help the industry it's what we've been doing for five years we started the accelerator to help small companies scale so if you are a developer right now you're looking for funding if you're in pre-seed seed stage like before series a you can go to globaltopround.com you can send in your pitch deck your trailer as well as your as your

game build we require a minimum playable build because again we're here to scale you not to help you make your prototype so we're here to as an example our brazilian studio we invested when they were two they're 35 now that's what we want to do we're not looking for a company who wants to stay three people for the next 10 years we want to help you become a sustainable business so head on over to global top round and you know send in your company if this is something that sounds interesting to you you need business development help you need someone like me to help you do a lot of the heavy lifting with publishing partners and investment partners we might be a great fit for you if you think you got all of that coverage yourself uh to be honest our own funding is not that much we invest a maximum of 100k of our own cash and 400k inclusive of our angel round but it goes in stages you cannot get access to our angel funding before you use ours and that is meant as a due diligence vetting process as well because when we see you improve the game we're willing to give you more and more money over time before we then present

you for the big checks for example part of that 5 million we talked about this year so yeah i'm looking forward to hopefully getting a couple of really cool pitches and uh if you want to check out you know the other company that we're working on i'm not going to plug it fully but gameround.co it's a way to get your game tested and analyzed and find that market inside data i talked about you can check it out as a user it's completely free there's no cost or anything you just sign up test a couple of the games it's a great way to get your game analyzed and yeah sorry again going over time here but uh with a great great being on the podcast yeah man dude all great info it's one of the biggest questions especially during coven that i'm trying to get the info out there for the listeners because there's a lot of people obviously with time in their hands and and money and i'm just trying to find a way to connect it to because it seems like it's always a dark road until i have someone like you on to explain like it's not that bad and it kind of motivates people to wait alright maybe i need to

get out of my house while virtually uh to start pitching but i want to thank you for your time another great episode uh i wanna you know welcome you back anytime that you want and that's pretty much it man i'll see you guys all next week [Music] you