How to get money from a publisher (with just a DEMO)

This question is about what advice can be given on approaching publishers for the first time with your indie game. Hey guys, how's it going? My name is Thomas Brush. I make indie games for a living. Today we're going to jump into my subreddit and we're going to answer one of the top voted questions. This is posted by David Amanov. Hopefully David, you don't mind me saying your name, but it's public, so I'm not thinking here. So, let's read this question here and get an idea of what David's main concern is here. Hey, I saw your post on Instagram about asking questions here, so I thought I'd shoot away. My studio is currently developing a horror game and we are soon approaching a publisher. I've noticed there are a few articles and videos here and there discussing the topic, but it's a topic that rarely gets discussed or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. We've actually pitched to an investor 6 weeks ago. Unfortunately, while he stated the pitch was great, he wanted a more furtherdeveloped completed project. We took some of his advice and made the game feel more polished and introduced some game mechanics. In a few months, my team and I will be pitching to publishers and I got to say, it's both exciting and a little nerve-wracking. Ha ha. Thank you in advance for the comments. Okay, so let's address the

first part of your question. You pitched to your investor and they thought the pitch was great, but he really wanted a further developed completed project. So we took some of his advice and we made the game feel more polished and introduced some game mechanics. First, I want to address that the further along you are in your career, the less a publisher is going to be like, well, is it almost completed? Because really, it's about faith and it's a risk, right? So, and by the way, I'm in a situation where if I wanted to, I could go publish some projects as well. I could take some money, maybe like $40,000. I could put it into a project if I really wanted to. It's basically an investment. Publishers, they kind of like people who hang out in the stock market, too, or buy Bitcoin or buy games by GameStop. They're putting cash somewhere and they basically want to be hands off to a degree. It really depends on if you're a publisher versus an investor, but a lot of publishers act as investors. So, they're putting their money somewhere and they want to see it pay off. So, if they don't know you, if you don't have any credibility, then yeah, they're going to want a bigger demo. they're going to want like a 30-minute demo or a 1-hour demo. But if you're somebody who has established some sort of online

credibility, then it's going to be a lot less of a risk for them. So, one of the ways you can solve this problem is not only have a polished demo and maybe make it a little bit longer, but have a great website, a social media following around 1,000 followers or more, a Steam page, a trailer, have everything ready to go, that following and that online presence, so that it looks like you're professional. Let me admit something to you guys. I'm not particularly professional myself, but I look professional, okay? And I know that that might sound manipulative or whatever or opportunistic, but that's just the way that my brain works. I know I'm not particularly smart. I know I'm kind of a buffoon in my normal life. Like, if you guys met me personally, is my shirt on inside out? It is. If you met me personally, you'd go, "Oh my goodness, Thomas is a buffoon. He's wearing his shirt inside out. He's so stupid." But I know when the when the time is right, when it's like really really that moment to get some money to make 50 grand or $100,000 from a publisher, you've got to have the presence of somebody professional. It's the reason why in the past or maybe even now people wear suits. They want to say, "Hey, you can trust me with your money."

That's ultimately your main goal here. Get your publisher to trust you with their money. And again, that means have a really solid online presence. Here are some things. Again, a press kit. That's just the Squarespace website with your trailer, with your logo, with the game art, with screenshots, with description, the plan for launch, the schedule, the budget, the team, all of that stuff, beautifully laid out with great grammar, no typos, and you want that on a a website that you can send to your publisher in in a small email. See, it's not necessarily about the game being polished and done. It's about trusting in you and you being polished. At least, that's my experience. All right. So, in a few months, my team and I will be pitching to publishers. And I got to say, it's both exciting and nerve-wracking. So, basically, you're saying, "I'm ready to start approaching publishers again." So, here are just some general rules that I use for approaching publishers. I would say that your demo, like you mentioned, is super duper important. So, you want it to be a really polished demo. You want to provide a Steam key. I would

highly recommend a Steam key, not HIO. The barrier of entry into Steam is a little bit higher. It's it's just a little bit more difficult to get your Steam page perfectly up and running and also you got to pay for it, right? So, it's 100 bucks. So, what that does is that says to your publisher right away when you send them a Steam demo key that you put the effort in and you also put some money in, you got some skin in the game and you know what it takes to be a game developer. So, sending them that Steam key in the email along with your press kit is huge. And you want that Steam key to be for a very polished demo. Honestly, it could be 15 minutes to 30 minutes or maybe an hour if you want. But the thing is is these publishers, they get these emails all the time. And so if you think that they're going to spend an hour playing your game, you're probably mistaken. People like me, publishers out there who have been in the industry for a while and they have some cash to throw around, they're going to want to see a demo and it needs to click right away for them. They need to go, "Okay, this guy knows what he's doing or this gal knows what they're doing." Okay, so I would just recommend making sure your demo is super duper polished. Let's say you have an hourlong demo. Does that mean that the entire thing needs to be polished? No, not necessarily. So you could do 15 minutes of super duper polished demo and

then just throw together some kind of junk and have like on the screen when they're playing the game, this is a work in progress or this is only blocked out. I haven't textured anything. But that first 15 minutes of the demo need to be really really nice. Like the best thing you've ever created. And honestly, if you look at a lot of games out there, a lot of indie games, especially mine, the first two levels are awesome, but the game sort of I don't know, it's not perfect towards the end. And that's because I focused so strongly on that beginning, that first 15 minutes of your demo. The second thing I would recommend with a publisher, once you've got a demo and once you've got a press kit, what I do is I search for 100 to 200 personal email addresses of individuals that work at publishers. And basically, you're just loading up that shotgun, aka an email blast, and just shooting it off to hundreds of publishers. What do you include in your email? Again, a link to your press kit, which is your website, basically, and then a short email introducing who you are and why your game fits in their portfolio. And again, most importantly, why you should be trusted. any awards you've gotten, any interviews you've had with magazines or

press outlets, any coverage from popular YouTubers like Jack Septic Guy or PewDiePie or Markiplier or Mattpad or anyone smaller than that. And then obviously a Steam key and you have that email. And what I like to do is I don't trust Mailchimp. Basically any any service like Mailchimp is going to is going to shoot an email blast. And the problem is is when you shoot an email blast, especially when it's programmed, especially when there's images in that email blast, it's like an HTML email, it often gets sent to the promotions folder in Gmail. So you want to be careful about that. So what I do is I use Merge Mail. And basically it allows you to fire off individual emails and I usually personalize the name in the email, but the rest of it is pretty much sort of a stock canned email. Now a lot of people uh in the audience right now are probably thinking, Thomas, how do you get email addresses for your publishers? It's just grunt work. Getting down just being willing to be bored out of your mind for weeks straight scouring the internet personal email addresses. I teach a lot about this in my online course, but there are ways on Twitter that you can find people's email addresses. Usually, their email address is in their Twitter bio. So, it's a lot

easier to find somebody's email address in their Twitter bio than it is on their website, which is actually really interesting to me. I don't know why that's the case. Now, does it necessarily have to be jeremycurvedigital.com? No. It could be jeremyjeremy.com. you know, you could actually find their personal personal email address and say, "I'm sorry to bug you here, but I was looking for your email address and I wanted to share with you this game that I felt would really fit in with the portfolio of games at your studio." So, that's how you reach out to publishers. Once you get maybe three, four responses out of the 100 to 200 emails you sent, then you can actually engage in a conversation with them. You're going to be nervous, but what I like to do is I like to just practice my conversation with my family, with my wife, or with my parents, friends. And then what I do is after I have that call, they send over some sort of contract. They're going to be giving you an advance and then they're also going to be giving you some kind of terms with the agreement which is going to include a revshare for them. Guys, they're not evil. They're giving you money, right? So they're giving you like 60 grand. So they should be getting a rev share in return once you launch the game. So what they're going to do is

they're going to look for a couple things. The first thing they're going to look for is a recoup on the money that they spent. Okay? And I know that sucks, but what's going to happen is they're going to give you $60,000 or maybe $200,000 and they're going to say, "Here's some wonderful money." And they'll give it to you upfront or in quarterly installments. Once you consume all that cash to go full-time and finish your game, what you're going to do is you're going to launch your game and what they're going to do is take all of the revenue from Steam or from Switch or Xbox, PS4 or iOS or Android. Um, and they're going to take all of that money and you're not going to get any of it. Okay? Not until you hit the recoup, which is the amount of money you took from them at the beginning. It's not a loan because there's no interest. And also, if for some reason the game doesn't make its money back, well, the publisher has to eat it. So, it's not like what you would think of as a loan. So, that's why honestly, I recommend just working with a publisher as opposed to getting a loan to go full-time. Publishers are a lot less risky and also they're going to use their marketing arm and their resources to further push the game on Steam and console. Well, really, they're in control of the revenue,

right? So, it's going to their bank. So once you sort of get that recoup back, what they do is they send you payments probably once a month of whatever percentage you get. So you should be getting the lion's share. All right? So maybe it's 60% to 80% or maybe even 90% of the gross revenue is what you'll be receiving. We'll talk about gross in a second. Now technically it's net revenue. What I mean by technically net revenue is it's whatever Steam takes out, which is like 30%, whatever's left over is what you split up. Now make sure this is defined in the contract, guys. make sure this is defined because if it's not defined, what's going to happen is especially if you're working with a jerk publisher is they're going to go, "No, no, no. We never told you that we couldn't also throw in some random expenses." So, if the studio can associate certain expenses with your game, they can include that in the net revenue. So, they can go, "Well, your your game made $100,000 after Steam took their cut in the first month, but we also spent $30,000 on office parties and flying developers out to trade shows and stuff like that." that. So that was

actually $30,000. So really, we're going to deduct that and then what's left over is the net and then you split it up. This is asinine. And honestly, in my opinion, it's satanic. So I would just be really careful there. Make sure it's defined. I even tried to put I haven't put it exactly as an equation, but something similar to an equation in the contract. Net revenue equals gross revenue minus the steam cut. That is what net revenue is, nothing else. Publishers will often try and recoup marketing budgets as well. I don't actually think this is wrong of them, but I try to avoid this. So, if they spend $20,000 on marketing when they launch your game, you're going to have to eat that, but I'll just say try your best to negotiate your way out of that. So, that's that's sort of my advice about approaching publishers for the first time. David, this was a really good question. It's obvious to me why this was upvoted. Um, it's just a really good question. It was really fun. Guys, please leave a like, please leave a subscribe, or please subscribe and leave a comment, and I'll try and get back to those comments. If you have other questions, head on over to Reddit and ask away. Talk to you later. Bye.