Pitching and Marketing

Pitch Tips 1: The right pitch for your audience. Try to have family or friends play it and then explain the game back to you.

Pitch Tips 2: Do a confident pitch of your best vision. Show the best.

Don’t second guess your creative decisions. A good way is to always make sure that your creative choices are very mush substantiated and have good reasons behind them. For instance, you don’t want to eliminate rocket jumping from your fast-paced shooter because it wouldn’t work in the real world in the same way that you don’t want to include rocket jumping in a military simulation game. Make sure you why you design the game a certain way when people ask you

Pitch Tips 3: Focus on what really matters.

This is two-parter as it applies to both how you talk about your game and how you are going to show it off. With regards to the game design, your pitch is not about your lore, it’s not even about your standard features so forget about guzzlefleber from the intro or that inventory system. It’s not what makes that game stand out and if that’s the case it shouldn’t be part of the pitch. Actually Brian Upton gave some excellent advice on this in a GDC talk.

  • If you want to set up your game and you really need to do so, take the star wars approach, just a few words on screen and bam we’re shooting people with lasers.
  • General, just don’t get to the details that apply to every game in the genre. Get to where your game really stands out.
  • HOOK: An easily communicated feature that makes your game unique. Because in the end, it’s always about convincing someone that your game is really worth their time and their money whether it’s a customer or a publisher.
  • Why people would want to play it

  • Make sure that it’s very clear what is final and what is not final

    [GDC] So You’re Ready to Pitch to a Publisher? You’re Not https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP-nmrMb9FQ

Pitching Tips 4: Be ready to discuss business

  • Make sure to have plan of the costs to develop your game, What are the resources, What are the people, The amount of time needed
  • If people not ready: hiring plan
  • Have a timeline for production and everything comes with that, so you know when you can have your vertical slice/milestone ready.
  • Get license prior to the pitch
  • Estimate for when you are preparing the ship on which platforms you are going to ship, and who your reporting partners are going to be
  • Know really well who your audience is going to be and know how similar games in the genre did and actually, speaking of sales projections, don’t go for the biggest names in the business. Most indie games don’t sell more than 5000 copies. Ideally you want to shoot for a well-developed fun-to-play indie title to get in the 30000 range with good marketing. Billions sales require a very convincing pitch or a lot of credentials and a very experienced team in place to make anyone in the industry believe that your game is the next one that does that.

Don’t be a dick

Be nice person, don’t trash other companies, people or don’t come across as as douche.

Be nice, Be enthusiastic, Be honest, Be respectful of people that you’re pitching to.

Another four tips regarding marketing:

Marketing Tip 1: Your marketing starts on day 1

30% of time on Marketing

Marketing Tip 2: All about building community

Create the community around the game so that the time of launch, you can start sending out messages to your network, journalist connections, social media, and mailing lists so that your community will start talking about it. It helps with Algorithms these days. Get to the front page and get everyone talk about it.

[GDC] No Time, No Budget, No Problem: Finishing The First Tree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5f7yixtQPc

Marketing Tip 3: Research game marketing consistently as it changes a lot.

The platforms and the channels on which we create community tend to change a lot. Even worse, each platform has its own little best practices and rules and marketing your game is different depending on where you’re doing it. For example, Twitter does not work the same way as reddit does. Do research on what works and what doesn’t

Timing

Marketing Tip 4: Learn to communicate your game effectively

Not just posting a screenshot, hashtag, screenshot Saturday or even a gif or a video. There is a lot of theory to how you want to design your key marketing assets.

Typically, it comes down to having attractive imagery that can face why your game is worth playing in three five something like that. In just a few seconds, Tell who you will be as a player, what actions you can perform in the game, what the atmosphere will be like and so on. So with that in mind, the trailer for Hollow Knight is a good example. Brukel Instagram example

Discussion Topics:

  • Share a game trailer that you really liked, and let us know why
  • What are the items that should go on your launch plan?
  • What pitching mistakes did Bob make in he opening skit?