Games pitching war stories

[Music] [Music] threats they would be talk about creativity we were talking about you know that of challenges and failure and success so at some point you're gonna have to pitch your game to people and normally you're gonna be pitching them to give you large amounts of money to be able to fulfill your dreams in this case these guys here are going to pitch for your votes you are going to provide us with a feedback loop if you like for understanding how they help us understand pitching they're not actually gonna pitch your own ideas nor but maybe that actually that's a wider subject what we're gonna do is we're gonna get them to pitch to us the pitches they've

experienced and that might be the funniest pitch it'll be the worst pitch and the best pitch because we want some good examples out of this too hopefully so we're gonna do is slight change to the original format we're gonna actually give each of the speakers a chance to stand up and have about ten minutes to talk through their three pitches the funniest the worst and the best and when that's done we're going to take votes on what we who we think had the best overall so because mic unfortunate has to jump on a plane very soon I'm gonna let Mike go first Mike do you want to kick off I would love to kick off think I very much Oscar and I'd like to start off the afternoon on a good note with what is absolutely one of the best pictures I've ever gotten it was at a conference much like this in Amsterdam and gentleman came up and started pitching his it was a tower defense I love tower defense games it was a tower

defense game to me and the pitch started off with here start playing and he handed me the tablet oh my gosh I could just start playing there was no he held on to it there was no he showed me how to play the game there was just here start playing and the game really was that good I could just start playing and immediately be productive and start having fun then he explains some really amazingly relevant things to me he said I've got one level finished but it's completely finished it's got the sound it's got the art it's got the mechanic it's got there was a moveable hero that you could zoom around so it's got the the joystick mechanic done and it's complete I know about this bug this bug and this bug so if I ran into them I'd know he knew about them he said this is how much time it's going to get me to get the rest of these levels done here's how much money

I'm looking for - the following things it's like that's everything I've wanted in a pitch right there all I was just sitting there playing the game it was succinct it was to the point it was eating it what it was it was beautiful the way haiku is beautiful but was the game any good it was a zombie based tower defense game and tell me I forget the name of it but it but it was really really it was it was a great pitch which kind of goes along with the worst pitch actually one of one of the roles that I play at Amazon is I get to read a lot of the requests for features that games get when they when they send the mail to Amazon I actually get to read some of those and these are almost all with the all the entire population of worst pitches ever quite a lot of them start out with well I deserve a feature because ok well actually we'd really

prefer that you earned one as opposed that why we've worked harder than anybody else we deserve it more this one absolutely has to take the cake it was a fellow who had a match 3 game I I'm gonna pick her and match few games a lot so this is not unique and his reasons for featuring were the following this is a fun game people who don't think it's fun are stupid hopefully Amazon customers are smarter than Google Play customers if you see if you're not stupid you'll feature my game okay I'm really hoping that English was a second language because that did not go over well with the featured team how to win friends and influence people well so so choosing not to actually send back the direct quotes from the feature team on that one

they actually nominated me to author and send feedback for why your game is not being featured and this actually leads me into the kind of the third the the funniest part of the reviews because I can't tell you how many match three games I play every year and every year every other match three pitch is the same I mean it's so actually what I've started doing Oscar as I've started gathering data on all of the different match three pitches that I've gotten and different ones you're saying well all of the different all the pitches are slightly different the games you may not be able to tell the difference but I mean there's a public service here right so I've gathered this data from all the match three games and I've used that data to put together a build-your-own match three pitch and it goes something

like this start your pitch with dear Amazon please promote our best match three game ever look you can match three items in a row and create a set the set disappears now this is this is a list and you have to pick at least three out of the following five you can match in any direction you can match multiple gems to create more powerful gems matches help you play a meta game and the color is blue okay so my response to you is going to be pray tell what makes your match three game different all of the other match three games if you're a pitcher please select at least two from the following list mine is fun to play I actually hear that one a lot my gems are blue I'm not kidding this is

an actual example so the the pitch was I mean most of the gems like multiple different colors or multiple different shapes this guy's field was entirely a shade of ice blue and the gems were midnight blue dark blue baby blue and periwinkle blue and you know other than some Smurf vomiting all over your screen you don't see that very often Odie yeah well you know that regional color arrangement I've actually seen in a long time so my gems are blue is certainly one of your choices oh oh yes my matches ad fill in the blank to the metagame fill in the blank because so many match three games now are multi-dimensional match three games you make the matches in the bottom and your dragon kills something your soldier kills something your Explorer does something so making

matches adds fill-in-the-blank to your meta game and the last option you have is actually my board has different shapes yeah Wow every match the board is a rectangle some people have octagons one person even had a triangle I mean oh yeah differing with them so if you take all of these ingredients you too could probably make four or five different iterations of your own match three game and get three separate pitches out of it consider this my public service to the match 3 game community this afternoon Oscar thank you any any match 3 game developers other [Music] you don't pitch like that though I know you're intrigued okay okay he's got notice so I'm gonna sit making sure I've got the notes right just make sure I've captured you correctly your funniest is the color is blue the worst is the

stupid match three and the best one was the tower defense that just worked okay any last things you want to add in terms of piece of advice that you would ask you know every developer pitches and we do this a lot with a beginning pitch what's the cost of one thing they should do to help you the piece of advice I overwhelmingly give to the most number of pitches I receive is what makes your game different than every other game in its genre what makes your game more compelling to play than every other game like and I'm gonna see in the app store if you can't answer that come back when you can yeah why are you making it only oh yeah actually in some ways your first your best pitch kind of sums it up because he didn't even have to tell you he just showed you and I wonder if show not tell is kind of a more an interesting way of

looking at it I actually even though he had a super ton of fun playing the game I did end up asking him what makes his different and he had an interesting mechanic of keeping skills and abilities you've actually imbued to your towers which weren't showers they were really soldiers but same difference how you keep your your leveled up soldiers moving from level to level in the game and then you can put them in different formations and that was actually pretty unique to a tower defense game also probably the best most unique match three pitch I've heard recently was the ability to take the game board and rotate it 90 degrees mid play and have all of the tiles cascade down differently according to gravity that was kind of a cool twist and pun intended sounds good although we're gonna thank Mike he's gonna head out safe travels home but we will be voting on him later so I will let him know never

okay so we're not gonna lose all of our panelists like that you'll be glad to know we're actually gonna move now straight to Jana and we you kind of understand the idea so your funniest your worst your best pitch over to you thank you so first I was thinking I would say what kind of pitches I have seen in my life I run Stu gun which is a program for a game developers from all over the world they come to Sweden and they spend the summer there so in order to apply to that you need to send us a video pitch so the majority of pitches that I've seen our actual video pitches and there we have a restriction of having 90 90 second long video pitch where we want to see both the team and the game but I also work with a business incubator in Stockholm and I joined that a few years ago to start games incubator so there I also hear a lot of pitches people who want to join the incubator and those are very different pitches so I was thinking

I would like I would talk about my worst best and funniest pitches but also tied to my advice kind of would what I think works and what I think doesn't work so I think the first thing important thing is to think about who you pitch to who is the audience who is the target if it's if it's an investor if it's a publisher or if it's if it's somebody likes to gun or the incubator and then adjust the pitch because insta gun we were we're very interested in your game while in the incubator we're not as interested in your game or while we're more interested in the in your third game or like what your vision of your company is like so that's I think a big big difference there there's also different lengths of pitches sometimes you are very restricted like with the 90 second long video where you have to talk both about the team and the game and and you have to squeeze that in the 90 second you

have to think about being original to stand out because people like we and everybody else we see a lot of pitches so to the first category funniest pitch there's also I in my mind I kind of split it in two because being funny could be very good and could be very bad so is it funny in a good way or is it like laughable so I've seen good share of both of these and to be funny I think it's very good and I would encourage that a lot because do anything that kind of makes you stand out in the series of pitches that people see it's always good and especially if it if it works and if it's if it's actually funny and I've seen many good funny pitches when we watched the stool gun videos there is many videos people are very creative and we would encourage that to be creative and be drafting costumes or do some funny funny things and one of them and

one thing is for me I'm not a good good storyteller so it's very hard to convey the joke so I apologize for that but one of the funniest pitches that I've seen this year for this year's two again is by a team were actually here they're showing their game the enchanted world I don't know if they're in the room but they're in their video they they were talking about the game and then they were saying like why they should be picked for still gun and they were saying that they they look Swedish because they have blonde hair they like to be in the forest because sugan is in the forest and they were showing they were filming themselves being in the forest walking around and and they like climbing rocks they like other people sometimes and they just make it in a very funny way which is very hard for me obviously to tell you guys but we were laughing laughing a lot but to the can I have to with the funnier we can try try different I don't really

like like I don't really like talking badly about them because I really appreciate their effort but one that was really standing out and being and that could also go for the worst I guess but it was a bunch of guys and they were they were three guys actually and they were really really young so that makes me feel even worse to talk about that but they were saying like I'm the CEO and then the second when there's an under co-ceo and then when I'm the third co-ceo which was not and the game there was not even a very good game but but yeah to the best pitch I think what is important when when you pitch is that you make yourself understandable you you make clear like often the when you hear pitch often you're like you don't really understand the the game or you don't understand what they want like what is the what is the goal and for four games it works

best if you can actually see something so if you can see the gameplay if you can even if it's just screenshot but most show some video or if you can't really give the game to somebody because that's the that speaks for 400 words so that's the that's the best thing you can do and be clear be just be crisp I always say like dry if you want to write if you want to build a slide deck make a lot of droid a lot of things and then go from that and try to say like oh this is not important like this is not important and just cut it to the to the to the most important part and the best picture I've seen what I really like and that still I see in my head very clearly was in student 1 and that was one individual guy and he was pitching his game and they have the 90 second limit and many people they send us videos that are three minutes and they think it's fun

but it's really not we really want a 90 second and he managed in under a minute and he just introduced himself and he said hi my name is Lala and this is my game and he showed his face and then he showed the footage of the game and then while he was showing the footage of the game he was explaining the concept of the game how it works how you how you interact with it how what's the purpose was the meaning and it was a very cool puzzle puzzle game and he conveyed it perfectly in that like less than 60 seconds so that would be my best page and my worst which I already kind of said that but I I when I was first reading your instruction that was the first piece that popped into my head and there was also still gun pitch it was a video and like I always think it's very important what you to think about what you look like when you pitch like how

you be confident don't but don't don't like when you pitch your game don't say like it's probably not gonna be like a good games like it's gonna be the best game ever like be confident and choose choose your words wisely and one thing that I consider divorced which ever was it was a guy and he sent us a video and he was in the video he was sitting on the sofa and he was literally in his underwear and the camera was on a coffee table in front of him and he was sitting on the sofa with his legs wide open and I swear he was chewing a chewing gum and he was just saying I go yeah this is my game and I'm this cool guy and yeah you should select me because I'm really lovely and I like hanging out with people and that did not work very well it's funny yeah so like we've got like we are like Swedish people because we've got blonde hair is you're kind of funniest with with the co-ceo third CEO

thing going in there too but we've also got Captain Underpants as your worst I think it's that good way to put him Captain Underpants the guy sitting on the safe with yes and then the best being done in 60 seconds as I've summarized that here so yeah we've got a three tell your watch any final bits of advice you want to pass on world once you have jumps um really what I said I think in the beginning think about who is your intended audience for the pitch that's the most important thing too if you want to pitch the game or if you want to pitch the company I think people often make a mistake there yeah and I think knowing like you say knowing who you're pitching to and what your objective is is kind of key they're yummy you're your chance to to shy in telling school you're three yeah Thank You Oscar great pictures by the way from the previous to maybe just a little bit of background as well currently a future play games a CEO and co-founder obviously been pitching the

company as well and previously being in bigger companies hearing a lot of pitches from other companies and game teams for publishing and co-development me once which was something yeah yeah I've been bitching to you back in 2004 I thought and then something like that as well I'm being pitching through platforms and whatnot but I was thinking about the category so starting from the funniest I mean I started thinking more in the laughable sense as well because it's very hard to actually be truly funny in a pitch because it's a serious business in many ways so it's it's a really fine art so I went for the laughable section and actually I don't know how many works in games here in the room raise your hand if I don't know institution did you escape from you know I don't know if this happens to you but in elevators on facebook messenger in the bar in the toilet at my aunts funeral people pitch their games to me all the time and it's it's a it's an art and a science not to laugh usually I

mean nothing against with that knees are usually always people who don't work in games and they're always like hey haven't this great idea for games it's about this salmon going upstream and then you need to control the salmon and you know he starts in the Atlantic Ocean he goes all the way through the Baltic and then he goes up to to the Lapland and and then you catch him in the end okay you were the salmon but then he catch the summary okay and yeah okay what do I say to this person about the game and the market and whatnot then weirdly enough most of them are fishing games actually that I get pitched but I think that's like a whole category of pitches because pitching is hard and a lot of people come at least to talk to me you know random people who are noting games pitching games say hey I like games I have a great game idea or I never play games but I have this great idea for a game so I kind of get a million dollars if you if you build this game that type of pitches and most of them are are laughable I mean in that way funny but you have to rebe nice and polite and respectful if you had a McCool Brothers song Sammy

the salmon in the way you play it I would be awesome yeah some people even send like game design documents and stuff like that being thinking about this and and and I write that but those are laughable and it's it's hard sometimes not to laugh but then to kind of respectfully say that yeah we don't actually do that type of games but it's a nice idea great thank you and it might be hard to do but thank you very much then on the on the worst part on the worst pitch actually I'm gonna not necessarily the worst pitch but it's actually a pitch that I've given myself pitching the company at sloshing in 2014 I think and the pitch went all right I didn't have a team you know fully in place yet and everything figured out but I had this idea of a company that's focusing on ads and you know building games that leverage ads and ads business is huge it's a hundred billion dollar market in a few years etc and we're

gonna launch games and show ads and make money with those ads and launch more games and show more ads and become successful and kind of five minutes into the pitch of like thirty minutes meeting the investor says this is a Ponzi scheme it's a pyramid scheme it will never work and that's like pulling the rug underneath your feet moment like okay yeah it's not a Ponzi scheme listen to me no no work it's a Ponzi scheme and then kind of you know just leaning back and you don't have the numbers yet and you don't have anything and you're like okay how do I convince this guy it's not a Ponzi scheme you develop games you publish games you make money with those games then you you know develop more games and publish games and make money with those games and that's what you do but at that point the key thing with that was that they thought that you can make enough money with those games to advertise your own games to buy more installs to keep the game going so he thought that we need to launch like 365

games a year and he will never scale unless we find stupid new games from somewhere like in a pyramid scheme to make it work but he wasn't very talkative and explained why he went there and just kind of shut down etc so that didn't go too well and didn't get the funding or anything like that so that's the worst pitch as in terms like a pitching experience personally pitching when the rug is pulled underneath your feet then you got no way to really kind of recuperate from there to make it a home run don't recommend it so pitching early is even more daunting than pitching late when you actually know more so that's my worst pitch personally as a pitching experience the funnily enough the best pitch is actually the same pitch and the same investor just a year later and I'm using this as an example that you know what is important about pitching and at that time I didn't know all the facts and I didn't know how the model would work but a year later we had a team we had already raised money from somewhere else we had launched a game we had the

KPIs and we had the UAAP ice to prove that it actually works at scales it's actually profitable and at that point it was a very easy pitch 15 seconds in yeah we're in a type of a situation with the same investor etc I didn't mention the previous year's pitch to the same investor but I have actually like a year later at a private event hey do you remember the first time I pitched you know you told me that yummy disappearing scheme it will never huh my god did I actually and he didn't remember that that's it ah but and we're good friends now and all of that but my point here is that sometimes it doesn't matter how well you pitch and the pitch can be exactly the same sometimes what matters more is what we actually have and what you can actually kind of believe about the pitch so it's not just about being funny or being flashy or having beautiful slides it's about belief and sometimes for that belief you need more proof and to have proof sometimes you have to do it

yourself in many cases it is the game in in games industry you know we prototype everything you can you know invest you know time and effort and risk things on just based on a speech or a document etc a game is worth more than anything in our industry and the in this case was the same it was a very easy decision once you know it kind of have the early signs that you can actually make it work of course you could say that that's just hindsight and being lazy and not being able to see it and and all that but in in many ways you know you need some proof and you need to have some traction there's something that is more than just a pitch for the pitch to be successful is my point that pitch is just one tool to communicate it but you need the stuff outside the pitch that you're talking about already working up to a point in many cases this is kind of the thing that's accomplished of dogs like any creative industry anyway isn't it because like you say until you've actually got something to show no one can so when we hear these

kind of mythical powerful and presentations that raise millions of dollars which I'm sure does happen yeah we assume that oh of course that's the norm isn't it it's not no I don't think it's the norm because in many ways if it's a company that you're pitching or a team or or an idea or a concept or a product or a service when you pitch it to five people there's gonna be six different ideas or so versions of that idea people view it differently they work somebody thinks about the operation somebody thinks about the opportunity somebody thinks about the risks somebody thinks about the time somebody thinks about what did I have for lunch and everybody has a different idea of what you just pitched and depending on you know where they're coming from and how long they slept last night they're gonna have a different feeling about it then that's where the belief part comes in if you have something more tangible that they can hang on to then it's not just words they're actually wanting to listen to the Y and the story and how and what then they then they're interested and then they're also interested in okay how

much and when and that that stuff that comes in the end and that clarity of you know what you're trying to achieve and Danny yeah have some chance yeah so let me see if I got this right I'm gonna I'm gonna call your funniest Sammy the salmon that's fine the the worst games with ads the Ponzi scheme and then the best view to play it's but the same of investor I like the from Ponzi scheme to view to play perfect so I think we've got our kind of categories down what we want to do is to get your votes we want to get you you know and but we also want to know you get your feedback so if you've got any thoughts you want to add we'll gather that later what we're gonna try to do now is just try and gauge who has convinced you they've got the best worst and funniest pitches so I'm going to ask people for mic if you want to put your hands up if you think he provides you with the best range of pitches please with your hand up now let's do hands they're about 12

13 14 okay all right so good now Jana Jana gave the best combination or pitch it's picking up my hand up now oh that's not looking so good and then yummy so yummy gave the best range of pitches hands up now oh that's a bit tighter I think that's Mike I think the winner is Mike so on that note I'm going to thank Mike later but let's take the opportunity while we have it while we've got these great people here who know this stuff inside out then all about any questions do they want to ask about pitching anyone who scare stories about pitching that they've experienced I actually have a question what is the difference between pitching something else and games like in your opinion well how is it different else in games

you mean in different industries or so games are so I work with the incubator and we have I work with the games part of it and there is also more generic tech part of it and we from the beginning we were talking about what is the difference between a game startup and more generic startup and the biggest difference is that if you are other than games then you are solving a problem there is a clear problem like why are you making this product there is a somebody has a headache you're giving him a painkiller that's a clear thing we don't have such thing in games we don't make games because we're solving a problem we're making games because we're entertaining people so that's another difference like a person who is not making a who has this product they're also making the the company because they want to they want to make money out of that and

almost nobody ever as I heard make a game because they want to make money out of that or started making games in general so I think this problem part is a the page goes very differently because you go from the problem you you go about who are your customers who are your dream customers why is your solution the best solution for them in games you don't do that this is also I think there's another aspect to it she's not everything in other industries is about a pitch sometimes it's about responding to an RFP so a formal structured process so I might be pitching what is effectively a game but it's a synthetic training to the police I'm not gonna go and sit there and you know say hey look at my great my great training idea right I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna have a requirement system being written out by some government body with some consultants somewhere and I'm gonna have to answer specific questions those are very different and much more methodical process so in my experience on it than

in a lot of other industries but we're I think in some ways lucky eyes are always lucky but we have at least got that kind of thing where we can inspire people around the idea as much as the revenue but not without the revenue is that fair yeah and I I think that you know what Jana said that in other industries of course we're generalizing there is more of that problem solution opportunity and you know scaling up market size and that type of thing and in games when you're talking about companies it's more about the team more than anything about the team because you know everything else will change what you're building when you're building it what is it gonna cost when it's gonna launch the market is gonna change underneath you and all of that and and that's different when you're pitching a games company for investment then when you're pitching a game at least what we did for example we didn't pitch a game yes we have lots of ideas well wanna build and how what type of types of games but I don't think you should pitch necessarily a game if you

want to pitch a company yes you need to have a lot of ideas what types of games you want to have want to build and if you're pitching a company you got to have differentiation you got to have a angle to the market something that you know makes you different and also it gives you an edge and that's your why and that's the investors why - then why okay why you out of the hundred that I've token to today but when you're talking about games then it's all about you know getting to play the game if you can't play the game it you need to be able to explain it so vividly that you actually play it in your head otherwise it's hard does anyone else have any questions all better yet a worst or best pitch they want to share with us anyone anyone brave enough to share a pitch okay so anyway guys thank you very much Philippe I hope you got something out of that what's your worst pitch ever okay I'm gonna I'm gonna try and think of the probably the one I can think of is my first ever pitch I worked out recently it was 30 years ago I was pitching to

Firebird as an 18 year old I had my friend who was the coder and my friend who was the artist my very first hour and I we had this actually I still think at the time a brilliant idea we knew how to make you remember they are all sort of D&D type games where you had like a skeleton and a tunnel and you would and you go further down it's basically there's lots of paid planes of so we're gonna do that but there two things going with it first thing we got a combat system where you use the number pads to decide really hit top right top left whatever else and it was really nice the way we drove planned out and we also had a lovely sort of binary tree mechanism so any action you did in the story would change the behavior of all of the factions and this is unbasic lee a tumble of 64 yeah really well the guy is his 500 top court row we were sitting in the office we

were chatting away the fact we got to sit in that room as a bunch of basically no experience at all no proper skill set I still see it was amazing and they went yeah that sounds great come back when you build it of course we hadn't build it and in my defense my my friend Dave he actually is the guy that built Oracle payroll so I still think this is the biggest tragedy of the game industry personally because the guy who is of such technical prowess that he can build Oracle's payroll system that they sell to millions of people didn't get to make games with me so that's my that's my worst pitch I don't know thank you very much guys [Applause] [Music]

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