How To Sell Your Demo To Publishers For 6-Figures

uh so definitely make sure that if you're able to include a build especially if it's a game that is mechanics driven definitely include a build or else you know you can talk you can sit down and talk about celeste all day until you play the game you don't really know what that game is okay so so couple questions about the build um and then also i have a question about these three things so the first question i have is does the build does length matter uh no okay well okay sorry let me let me let me redact that because because it heavily depends on what game you're making right like if you're making a 4x strategy game that's similar to civilization uh yeah like that's gonna matter i can't play a five minute demo of sieve and and you know what i got myself into i probably like took two turns and moved some units around and that was it uh so that wouldn't tell me anything about civ um so it really heavily depends on what um what you're selling okay the i think the the there are two ways to approach the build if you're if you're looking at your game

you can either approach it as a vertical slice or really kind of a perfect picture is what we call it so vertical slice is technically something that's a little bit more lengthy um but uh but has has like the the kind of the main features but you're able to kind of dive into it for a longer period of time so like maybe spend an hour playing something and checking out the mechanics maybe the graphics aren't super polished maybe the story isn't fully written uh the execution isn't perfect but you know you can play for like an hour and and generally feel get a feel for the mechanics that would be a vertical slice and it's generally a better fit for something like a action based game a mechanics driven game something that's like celeste for example so the other one the perfect picture one this is more of the really the horizontal slice which is uh you have a perfect picture of what the game looks like but it's very very short it is basically an entirely finished five minutes of your game so this is probably a better fit for something a little bit

more narrative like if you're pitching something like either finch or you know like tacoma or something like that you're able to walk around talk to people hear the voice acting really get a sense of just the gorgeous surroundings and the music and feel like you want to be a part of this world and then now it's over and you want to you want to explore more that's that's like another really good pitch so generally you want to go for one of those two okay that's that's super helpful so guys you don't have to make a full game you don't even have to make it halfway done um and what i'm doing i can tell my audience what what my plan is so for father um firstly my my my the goal with father is find probably find just first person horror publishers people who love horror or first person and then i'm going to pitch to those um those publishers a 10-minute hyper-polished demo um with all the voice actors all the story elements that really hook the audience great ambience great feel

and then include that also in the trailer so instead of me and my team focusing on a 20-minute demo to really get them to hooked on the mechanics it's really trying to hook them on the inspiration like giving them the heartbeat of the game and also what you were saying z letting them know what the final product will look like so that's that's sort of my approach now my next question about the three things that you mentioned is what's the order in which they see these things my assumption is like okay some publishers who maybe in times of i don't know covid when things were really stressful they immediately look at the budget um or some people look at the trailer first but i highly doubt that they're going to open up the demo first so can you give us sort of the order and maybe even go to like the the the more granular stuff like the subject line all that if you could sort of break down the order and the hierarchy of the pitch and what's most important

right so so on the topic of subject line i'll just quickly comment on this subject line as long as you don't say something really pointless or stupid be like hey check out my game that would be the same thing you know it's weird as i answer those emails those are the ones i click on yeah because i never get them yeah like unless if you say something really dumb yeah you're gonna get wrecked um because i mean like i said we get we get a lot of pictures we get a pitch every couple hours so but we still i mean that's if if someone's job at our company is to take pitches for games that we publish that's their job they're not going to miss any emails in fact if they missed any email at all that's that's bad that's like them doing their job poorly so any competent publisher will essentially read every single pitch um that that comes through and we certainly do i in fact read every single game that's pitch this ready for it myself um so so the subject line i don't know if

it really matters um as long as you just do a do a good one um i do okay so that sounded weird but but like do like generally describe your game in a sense honestly dude that surprises me so much yeah um because i thought subject line was like everything because they're not going to read every every pick yeah you i mean you get a lot of pitches we don't get that many pitches right like it's kind of like again there's dedicated staff and you know professionals sitting on the other side of the computer just sitting there waiting for pitches so so the subject like there's for for us is more like there's always like we're always going to check out a pitch regardless of what the subject line is um we might not take very long at it i'll get into that in a second but but that is um you know regardless that's the email will get opened so um with that said really the most important thing is the visual uh if it's a screenshot or a trailer that's always going to be the go-to just because it's the easiest thing to look at humans are very visual creatures you know like we judge things by visuals

more strongly than anything else so um if you open an email and then there's an image right there that shows the most beautiful shot of your game um or explains what your game is about that's it you know that's that's the attention grabber that's the that's the only thing that really matters i'm so glad you said that because i thought that images would sometimes they i don't know why but like i was in in email marketing from my previous job and we actually stayed away from sending images at the time it was about 10 years ago so it's probably changed but i was always worried it wouldn't get delivered it would get sent to their spam or like their promotions folder um but what you're saying is a good rule of thumb is just your best looking image maybe a screenshot with your logo and maybe they click on that and it takes them to the pitch in a website that could work or you could just have the pitch as a text underneath or you could attach the pdf of the pitch on the thing or maybe there's a google google uh sheets or not sheets uh slides um there's a lot of different

ways you can do it but that image at the top it really matters and and to answer your concern thomas uh you you're right in an email marketing capacity because the person who is on the other side of the computer didn't want your email so you're kind of forcing them to read your marketing message right meanwhile you have to realize publishers are hungry for games we're always looking for games to to take on as a as a company so we're when emails come in we're excited like oh wow i can't wait to read this right and we have dedicated channels right like ours is publishing at serenityforge.com and we make sure that no email is ever blocked on that on that channel just so that we get those images into the emails and then lastly you know like we uh we overall just like prioritize these emails in our own systems we make sure that it's all categorized correctly so that you know when the time comes to check to see all of the pitches that got got in today or got in this week we're just able to go through it right you know right there so all of that system you know in a

professional uh publishers you know back end it's all already taken care of you don't have to worry about ending it into the spam folder or whatever like that and by the way guys i wanted to let you know that my brand new course easy 3d is totally free right now click below to enroll for free and you'll immediately be taken to the program where you're going to learn how to make your very first 3d game and here's the best part you're going to do it fast you really don't need to know anything about unity or code or 3d modeling it's really kind of easy and it's totally free click below to make your very first 3d game i can't wait to see you succeed