• Digital distribution sites, like Steam
• Platform managers
• Aggregators, like Miniclip
• Community and media websites
• Ad networks
• SEO-savvy “gateway” portals (MMO lists, etc)

Channels like these have grown greatly in influence, and the conditions of working with the most prominent ones are becoming increasingly expensive (some of the biggest aggregators now ask for either lots of cash, or equity).

Since bringing a user in can end up taking quite a large part of that user’s LTV in your service, it’s not really surprising to see game developers/operators trying to cut these costs by becoming or investing in media themselves, as Dofus’ developer Ankama is currently doing — they just announced that they’ve bought a minority stake in French website Gameblog (link in French) after investing in print media company HP/MP, web TV outlet Nolife and their own games magazine, IG Magazine.

Meanwhile, many websites that command a lot of traffic are moving further down the value chain. Some are getting into affiliation, which is the raison d’etre of portals such as MMOLife‘s. Others are entering into channeling deals: sevengames (an arm of media group ProSieben in Germany) has gone this route, as has Bigpoint, offering client-based games by GOA and Gamigo, and more recently, Free Realms. Portals Buffed and MMOABC are getting into game publishing, while German site Gamona and Romanian portal Computergames.ro are becoming distribution channels for payment codes and mobile payments.

As time passes, it will be interesting to see the barriers between the different steps in the chain begin to blur. Some links will move up while others move down. How long before properties commanding huge amounts of traffic start buying developers, or the other way round? How far will the integration go? Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments.

Don’ts :

1. Don’t be overly secretive

I’m not saying “don’t sign a NDA”. NDAs are extremely useful, usually the sign that you’re dealing with a serious company, and as the provider of the content you’re the one who’s going to be protected the most. Just that, once you have the NDA in place, it’s OK to tell the publisher about your project. If you don’t, how will you convince them about the greatness of it? As a publisher, we tended to assume sometimes that “this is top secret information” equaled “we have no idea how to do that and we hope you won’t notice”.

Usually, sharing ideas tend to make them better through gathering multiple feedbacks from different points of view, and once again, what the publisher wants is your team building the game. Ideas are easy, executing them is what makes a good or bad development team and this is where the value lies. Also, keep in mind that a lot of ideas, very often, happen at the same time to different people (great minds think alike). This is particularly true in the games industry where lots of people with similar backgrounds are exposed to similar influences at the same time. Don’t be too disappointed if the publisher doesn’t fall off their chair in amazement when you unveil the Big Idea, it doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea, but maybe that it’s the 3rd time this week that they hear about a similar concept. What they are interested in, and  where you can make the difference, is : what are you going to do with this idea?

2. Don’t be clueless about your audience

In traditional roles breakdown, the publisher is the one supposed to be market-savvy. Developers can go ahead and focus on the game, which they prefer to do anyway, because as we all know, marketing is a wacky subject  practiced by evil people in suits. Once the game is ready, the publisher markets it to customers with their Magic Marketing Wand. I suspect that has already changed a lot for offline games, but in online games, you just can’t separate development and audience. Ideally, your service is running on a live environment as soon as you can and you iterate on it listening to your community’s feedback. But even as you start designing from day 1, you need to have your audience in mind, guess what they like and dislike, while building something flexible enough so that you can constantly adapt it. Again, this is a service, so there is no way to develop it in a vacuum.

At pitch stage, you need to show that you understand your future customers, so be prepared and research beforehand, and show how flexible you will be in accomodating audience feedback.

3. Don’t spend on expensive leaflet, T-shirts, etc
That might be very subjective, but every time we received a glossy brochure or a promotional item for something that was still at paper stage, we thought that the studio should have used the money in game design, research, prototyping, and the like. Maybe some publishers care, but we really didn’t. Especially if the brochure doesn’t tell us anything about gameplay. Pitching is not like marketing to consumers : as a player I (way too much) like  merchandising about the games I care for, but as a publisher, all we wanted was info allowing us to understand the project and assess the risk so we can allocate our development budget and build our portfolio efficiently. If you’re a small studio giving expensive gifts, the publisher might draw conclusions about your budget keeping abilities.
It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay attention to details – your documents should have a graphical policy, with your  company logo, fonts, etc – don’t just hand over a plain Word document either, it doesn’t make your company look professional.

4. Don’t focus the pitch on the storyline, universe, art, etc.
This is very online games  focused. The publisher wants to know why people will keep playing your game for thousands of hours, which is not necessarily what storylines are good at. It’s nice to know you have a background story and a coherent world and awesome signature characters, it will surely have its importance in marketing the game, designing community events, but really at pitch stage the gameplay and  meta-gameplay matter the most.
Also, story based content tends to be linear, not very reusable nor systemic and thus expensive to produce, so if you promise too much of it without a good explanation on the systems allowing you to do it efficiently, that might raise an alarm bell in the publisher’s head.
In the same way, publishers want to know about your art direction, your animations, your music, want to make sure it’s fit for the game, appropriate for the audience etc, but moreover want to know your systems and your gameplay (hence the importance of prototyping).

Raph Koster has a nice metaphor in his book “A Theory of Fun” about the “salad” (gameplay, systems) and the “dressing” (art, music, story, generally content). The dressing is important, it’s what gives your game flavour, and make people come and play it. It has to be good. The salad is different, it’s just plainly essential (and you can’t put a good dressing on an awful salad). It’s already true in offline games, but they are much more forgiving in terms of putting a lot of shiny sauce on a average salad and still sell boxes. It never works in online games, because they’re a service, meant to be played for years and what can be okay for a 20 hours experience doesn’t work for a 2,000 hours one, at which point you won’t even notice the dressing anymore.

5. Don’t take “maybe” for an answer
Unfortunately publishers are not necessarily good at saying “no” upfront to projects, usually through fear of missing something, which is bad because they will waste time, theirs and yours, and if you are on tight deadline/budget you can’t afford to lose time. Check if they actually can afford your project (it they are publicly listed, look at their financials). Ask them questions about their decision process. Check if they ask you enough questions on their side, it shows interest if they’re picking on details. Don’t hesitate to give them a deadline for answering fitting with what they tell you about the decision process.

If they do say “yes” for real and are offering you a deal that you generally find fair and agree with, have your legal counsel check it by all means, negotiate important points, but don’t spend a lot of time arguing over details , as the cost to you is also high if they change their minds in between (especially if you have turned down  other offers in the meantime).
If they say “no”,  it is an opportunity to ask for feedback on the project. Be careful though, you don’t want to appear to contest their decision, just explain that the feedback is useful to you to help you improve your pitch process for a later project or another publisher.

Please don’t hesitate to share your own pitch experience, wether it is pitching or being pitched! We are interested in knowing what other industry actors think of the pitching game.

What has most struck us working for a big publisher evaluating projects, is that being good at pitching can be very different from being a good developer. Good publisher-side Biz dev people should be the ones able to recognize the awesome product that is very badly pitched. However, if you are the pitcher, it’s probably safer to assume that you are developing a good product and that you want to pitch it well.

Disclaimer : this might be quite subjective: if you are a publisher and reading this, we are very interested to get your opinion about it!

Also, this is very much focused to paper-stage, fund-requiring pitching: of course you’re in a very different situation if you are pitching a game that is almost ready to be launched, or looking for a licensing deal.

Finally, this is advice for pitching stage only : We are planning to write pieces about key terms negotiations and  contracts at a later time.

Do :

1. Be prepared

It might seem obvious to say, but don’t start pitching until you have a very good grasp of the game you want to build (early gameplay, middle term, endgame), a principle agreement from your team leaders who will be on the project, a good idea of the time it will take to build, the size of the team, the budget, the  tech you will use, your business model, financial projections for operating the game. It doesn’t mean you can’t be flexible and adapt to the publisher’s change requests : it just show you thought it through and believe in it.

In the same way, don’t pitch a game that you have no idea how to build just because you like the concept. Don’t pitch a AAA MMO costing 50M$ if you are a team of 3 junior developers in a garage. What the publisher is paying for is your team building a game, not an idea. If you can’t think about how to make it happen, put it in a drawer until you’ve figured it out, unless it’s just one particular point that doesn’t threaten the whole project ( in which case you can get to pick the publisher’s brains and their internal resources on how to do it. For free.)

2. Show passion

Again, it seems obvious, but if you’re not passionate about your game, who will be? This is particularly true if you come pitching several different projects : too many pitches might kill the pitch and you might not seem hot enough about any of them (“we can do a FPS, or a RTS, or a gardening simulation or a bicycle game using the Wii Balance Board…” etc) . Unless you are offering  work for hire, porting a game, outsourcing services or something similar (in which case it’s better to ask nicely before starting the discussion and check if the publisher is actively interested in that – if they expect an original concept, they might be disappointed otherwise), focus on a limited number of pitches (ideally one) to present.

For the same reason, we never found it a good sign to hear : “ Are you looking for a particular genre/style/etc at the moment ?” and then receive a pitch quickly put together to fulfill the current corporate strategy . It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care about what the other party wants, just that you have to show passion for what you do, and a minimum of “backbone” which is your vision for the project. Be flexible but don’t completely overturn your pitch at the publisher’s whim.

3. Show prototypes

Fun is difficult to assess : the publisher in front of you, if they’re good, can get quite easily a fair idea of your competence for building the game you are pitching, the skill of your team, your vision, your project management skills… Again, if they’re good, they also know their market well and should have a good insight of the commercial potential of the game you’re pitching (and btw so should you if you want to be able to assess the deal they offer you).

What they can’t guess, and hence where most of the risk lies, is if the gameplay idea you are pitching is fun. Fun is very hard to see on paper, and every little bit of showing that your mechanics are fun help tremendously. One or several “grey box” prototypes put together quickly, if it gives an idea of your gameplay, puts you at the top of the investment opportunity pile. Showing that you are actually playing it every day and improving it makes you levitate above the pile. It doesn’t need to be pretty, just show why it’s fun (provided you have artworks to show the art direction that you intend to take). The time you are going to gain in the discussion process is very much worth the effort.

The prototype isn’t useful just for pitching actually, it’s also essential for you to iterate on and build your game, and the publisher will appreciate that. In fact, one of the best project that was ever pitched to us was a strategy game which the team had started prototyping as a board game and was playing every lunchtime with enthusiasm, even before prototyping it with code.

4. Be honest

If you have risk areas, don’t try to hide them too much, be realistic and if there’s something you are not very confident about, be open about it (except if it means that there’s just no way you can build the game). Every project has its risk zones and for a publisher, realistic developers is an appreciated specy, they will be reassured that you have a good grasp on your strengths and your weaknesses. Don’t underestimate your budget on purpose to get the deal either : publishers will ask for breakdowns and will have a  good idea of middleware and staffing costs, and if you’re caught it will make you look bad. And if they talk to other publishers, it won’t help your reputation in the industry.

5. Talk to everybody at the same time

It can lead to very busy schedules but if your pitch is good you’ll need to shop around and compare the deals you’ll be offered, which is hard to do if you go for only one discussion at a time. Also, publishers are slow to answer but once they do, they expect you to accept or refuse in a very short timeframe. Talking to several potential partners at the same time reduces that risk.

The down side is that you probably will want to tweak your pitch depending on who you’re talking to, and asking everyone at the same time gives you limited margin of manoeuvre to do that, as you will have to respond to feedback very quickly. You might want to start with the ones you are less keen to work with (but you still would consider to work with, otherwise don’t pitch them) and that you would be the less sorry to keep waiting a bit  while you shop around. Generally though it’s best to allow a compact time period to have a good comparison between offers.

To be continued…