funding Archives - Reality is a Game

For any entertainment property knowing how to pitch it is integral to getting funding, backers, and sales.

A few weeks back, Paradox did an hour long stream on how to pitch to them. If you’re thinking of pitching to Paradox then you really need to watch it – or any other studio for that matter. They go into brand building, familiarity with consumers, and they reveal that game studios propose non-strategy games (90% of all pitches get rejected!). Be sure to know what a publisher actually publishes before pitching them!

Paradox takes board games pitches on based on their intellectual property, and of course the best way to do that is to send them a copy of the game. For more on board game pitches check out the panel we did with Bamboozle Brothers at Board Game Jam.

Never just pitch an idea – show something that reveals it!

You have to be really short and concise with you pitch! Panelists on the Pitching Secrets Revealed session at GDC 2013 all agree that you should use the minimum amount of time you need to describe your game, then use any remaining time to go into more details. For example, if you have a 15 minute pitch session you should use the first 5 to deliver your pitch and the rest of the time to answer questions.

Pitch for a card game

Similarly, at GDC Europe in 2014 Rami Ismail (from Vlambeer) gave a talk about how to sell and why it’s important to be able to do pitch well. Basically, if you don’t know how to talk about your game then you can’t sell it. And if you can’t pitch it then you can’t sell it. If you can keep the summary of your game in one sentence then that’s even better.

You can watch his talk on the GDC Vault, he starts talking about pitching at the 14 minute mark.

For creating a good pitch deck (AKA PowerPoint) see this early post about Bubble Gum Interactive’s template.

Spellirium is an original game from Untold Entertainment who are best known for Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. Ryan Henson Creighton, the one man team behind Untold, is using what he jokingly refers to as “kickending” to fund the end of Spellirium. This approach is similar to Minecraft’s approach of letting people buy the game during alpha to fund it’s completion, but Ryan combines it with perks that so many Kickstarter games have.

More information on the game’s development can be found in this interview with Polygon.

“The budget is elastic,” Creighton explained. “The amount of support that we get really does determine the quality with which we can finish the game.” Funding will also affect how quickly Untold can deliver version 1.0 of Spellirium; Creighton said he’s hoping to raise $50,000, which would allow him and his team of freelance contributors to finish the game in approximately four months.

An early review of the alpha you get from supporting Spellirium has been done by Rock Paper Shotgun:

Overall, Spellirium plays like a point and click adventure. You have an inventory, there are conversations to chose dialogue during, and there are puzzles to be solved. But rather than classic adventure puzzles, here you use this Spellcaster – a seven-by-seven grid of tiled letters – to spell out words for all manner of different reasons. Most times the solution to a puzzle is going to be USE SPELLCASTER ON X.

I just ordered my copy and am looking forward to playing it 🙂