Game thinking from Adam Clare

Tag: pitch

Know How To Pitch Your 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

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.

Pitch Deck for Indie Game Developers

One issue that a lot of aspiring game developers run into is how to talk about their “super-awesome-game-changing-paradigm-shifting-genre-smashing” game to other people. It can be quite a challenge to pick which parts of the game are relevant and what the audience will know and what is unfamiliar to them.

Essentially talking about your game is hard.

Lucky for all you aspiring indie developers Bubble Gum Interactive has put together a good pitch deck template for you to use!

We’ve put together a presentation template that provides a good structure for any games business seeking funding. We’re putting this out into the public domain and welcome you to use it! Of course you’ll need to do a fair bit of work to pull together the content and plan your messaging. You may also want to spice it up with some great artwork – something that shouldn’t be too hard for creative games developers.

The presentation deck is ten slides. This is intentional. Investors don’t want to sit through long-winded overly detailed presentations. Another rule for you – keep each slide to a maximum of a few points and make sure you use a reasonable sized font. You can insert tables and charts to show information. Remember, when presenting, your slide deck should be a concise summary of information, not a huge document full of text. You do the talking – the slide emphasizes the key points and is really something to “talk to.”

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén