How To Land A Deal With A Game Publisher!

i wanted to get your number one secret to landing a deal with a publisher what is that one thing that you feel you have to do right if you're gonna land a deal with a publisher by the way guys landing a deal with a publisher means making money getting in advance uh getting a marketing budget and then you give them a rep share um so that's what i mean by landing a deal so what's that number one tip number one secret that you could think of so i feel like i didn't know this when i first started and it made such a big difference it almost went from me not being able to get close to getting a publisher to and it's not even just for the fact that you get a publisher but just the game itself marketability wise uh this is a huge thing for me and it's that you really need to make sure that your game makes uh a good was the word your game has a good response to a specific niche so in my case that would be paper mario fans and jrpg fans yup and so there are really not that many people mario games out there and so whenever people look up uh you know what's a good

paper mario alternative because nintendo doesn't really make them as they used to yeah mine comes up first one and then the publisher sees that they see wow you know there's not really anything out there that can take uh market share from this and so this would uh make it more attractive in that sense yeah and so for my other game jirabox that one did uh very well in terms of how it was acquired by a mobile publisher and it was because so when i say i was acquired by a mobile publisher they acquired the rights to the mobile game after i got into a publisher so it was a really interesting situation nice and uh basically a lawyer for that yeah and so what happened basically is that i think they saw how the speedrunning community for that game was really interesting and they wanted to you know get in on that yeah and so that's what i'm going to be focusing on with the next iteration of this game and it's making it super speed running focused it's going to be the ultimate speedrunning game with all these sort of features that these kind of people would want right on top of myself if you don't know these niches you probably shouldn't be getting into them because you're not

going to make the best kind of game oh man dude that is so true i've been finding that out myself if you're if you're gonna just because you like a genre doesn't mean you should work within it within its confines because you need to understand it like you really need to understand it so ultimately i think it comes down to um like for me what i'm learning is if you're gonna pitch a game to a publisher make sure you know that genre that niche and work within the confines of it uh so a question to you is should should my audience really know their genre before they pitch it to a publisher should they know exactly what their genre is and limit themselves to that genre i think you almost should in a way like in my case i really love deep jrpg combat bravely default octopath traveler i absolutely love that and i feel like the paper mario audience would really enjoy that if they got exposed to it so i kind of mixed those

two the aesthetic of mario with general uh you know turn-based combat and i combined these two in such a way that um you know they complement each other and i really understand these two aspects well and i feel like that's going to really show the publisher that you understand what you're talking about and that you understand what makes the game uh tick not teach makes note uh yeah i think it shows them that you understand what the niche wants and you know how to make something that is not like oh well paper mario fans expect there to be combat and there's no combat uh you know so i think that could maybe shoot yourself in the fit in a way that's so interesting so this is a question that i've been thinking about a lot why make a game that's similar to another game if you're not going to do it as well you know like yeah i this is no offense to you but i can imagine you're not going to make as good a game as paper mario uh right i mean you're you're one guy with some contract workers part-time contract workers versus nintendo right and paper mario

automatically has that massive built-in audio you've got the nostalgia factor as well you can't compete with it so what is it what's the strategy here and i'm thinking about this for myself what's the strategy here i say i'm gonna mirror a game or do you say i'm going to get inspiration but i'm going to make sure in my marketing material that i'm not saying i'm making paper mario it's rather it's like a twist of paper mario so my game's combat is very obviously not paper mario and so if if you play paper mario you know it's not paper mario and it's almost more pokemon or traditional final fantasy i'm seeing some undertale stuff undertale yeah so that wonders tale stuff as well so it's it's not paper mario but it's very clearly inspired by it and it's almost like giving paper mario fans a different perspective on this genre that they've been interacting with for their whole lives but they haven't seen that other facet of it so they haven't seen the final fantasy aspect of the paper mario rpg or the general

generic rpg combat so it's getting it's the world traversal and the art of paper mario and then it has that paper mario combat but it's twisted in a way that makes it different enough for the paper mario fans to not compare it directly to paper mario it's not paper mario it's something different but it's very fresh for the people that haven't experienced it before that's a great that's a great piece of advice dude like i think that that is so helpful that's helpful to me as well it's it's it's good in this particular season of my career because we are in the process of working through various projects and trying to figure out which ones are marketable which ones are ones that we should pitch to a studio and one of the problems i've come into and maybe guys if you if you feel this way leave a comment below about your experience but it's really hard to find to get so inspired by a project or a game that you loved that you had in your childhood and you say i'm going to make a game like that and then you

find yourself remaking the game and but it's not gonna be as good so you've gotta you've gotta be very strategic this comes back to our first point about the game design document it's really important in the document to say this is inspired by paper mario and then maybe have a chart of here's what it isn't about paper mario here's what it is and be very specific about it because you need to make sure your audience knows this as they're wishlisting your game because you don't want to pitch it as a paper mario game to your audience and then you give them something different because you couldn't afford it i mean i could never afford to make it from mario but that's why i'm not making it yeah yeah yeah and you're really intentional with that correct like you know in in the game design document it's very clear that this is not paper mario for sure yeah cool exactly by the way guys feel free to download my free 2d game kit below it's totally free it's my treat to you i used this exact

2d game kit to make a game for pewdiepie in 14 days and then i got to play it in front of his subscribers which was really awesome um so download that use it however you want it's my treat to you yeah okay