Few games succeed in reaching their full markets without the help of publishers. Even successful companies that started with shareware (such as id and Epic) ultimately moved to the publishing model. Publishers take much of the risk, but they also fund, market, distribute, and handle manufacturing for most games. Some successful companies have been their own publishers, marketers, and distributors, but it is difficult at best to fulfill all these roles. The chances are you will be working with publishers on your next game.

Getting your game published is ultimately your goal, and one all-important aspect of getting the green light from a publisher is the game pitch. Most publishers want answers to a number of questions. Also, they are busy and have concerns you may or may not be aware of. Here are a few facts to consider when you decide it’s time to pitch your project:

Having a great idea is only the beginning. To get a publisher to develop your idea, you have to bring a lot to the table. All publishers are working with companies and teams they know well. You have to convince them not only that your idea stands out from the crowd, but that you have done your homework and you can bring a strong team to the table. This section looks at what you can do to help ensure that you will be taken seriously.

The team should have:

Often you may base a game on some specific idea from a book, movie, or other existing source. On rare occasions you’ll expect to stay pretty true to the source material, but most often doing so will result in a game that is far less fun than it could be. So what do you do? You embellish. You exaggerate. You change the story, the characters, and their abilities to make the game more fun. In short, you exercise artistic license. For instance, if your main character was a really strong guy who carried a big sword, make the sword huge. Give it a magical glow and maybe even let it fire energy beams or burn red-hot. Or suppose you read a newspaper story about a drug cartel and you were inspired by the story to create a game set in a drug culture. You can create something close to the truth, which might concern a local small-time operation, or you could create Scarface and make it a really big international adventure complete with the seamy underworld bottom dwellers and the glitzy crime bosses, plenty of victims, and plenty of opportunities to go overboard in gameplay.

Or suppose you are creating a gunfight. Even though the guns your characters are using probably wouldn’t have much muzzle flash, you add lots of muzzle flash anyway. Why? Because it looks cool and it makes the scene more dramatic. Because it’s about better entertainment. Truthfulness is important in setting up a world, but the one thing that overrides truthfulness is fun. Fun comes first.

Artistic license gives you the ability to explore alternatives and new directions and to make a good concept much better, or even to take a boring concept and make it great. However, there’s no way to guarantee good taste or success when you attempt to change a property or concept. Using artistic license offers possibilities, but only a good understanding of what is fun and what is feasible can lead to consistently good results.

How do you present a game design that will generate interest, and who do you present it to? What are they looking for? What will kill it stone dead? How can you get it onto the desk of the people who can make decisions?

To answer who:

To answer where/when:

Imagine you happened to be on the elevator with just the person you want to talk to about your game. You’re on the way to the 10th floor. You have just 45 seconds (maybe only 30) to get him interested. What will you say? How can you sum up your game so that he’ll say, “I really want to know more?”

The fact is, you often have very little time to get someone’s attention. When you are pitching a new game, you are competing with possibly hundreds of other game designers who passionately want their games to be produced. The publishing executives in charge of new acquisitions are often busy and have little time for a lengthy discussion. However, they are always looking for the next “killer app” or mega-hit game project. Therefore, one of the most important aspects of pitching your game can be your ability to condense the key elements of your game—the elements that make it unique and marketable—into a very short statement. This is your chance to make your game sound irresistible. At the same time, it’s a challenge to boil down possibly months of work and hundreds of pages of documentation full of fantastic details you would die to see in your game to something truly succinct and exciting. This is how you express the “nugget” of your game. In Hollywood terms, it is known as the 45-second elevator pitch.

There are different ways to present a game concept to publishers. Here’s a list of elements your pitch must contain if it is to compete in the current world of 3D games.

Note

Please note that exceptions may exist, such as arcade and puzzle games, which may not require all these criteria to be met.

My number-one warning sign when people pitch me is when they don’t have one idea—they have a whole boatload of ideas, and they don’t have a clue which is the best one.

It’s a bit like me saying, “Here taste this,” and you going, “Yuck!” Then I say, “Yeah, I thought so, but maybe you’ll like this.” After we go through this five times, would you call me a good chef? If I’m any good, I should know what tastes good, and if I don’t, why would you want to buy food from me?

The point is that you want rejection to come as a real shock, meaning you’ve put forward your best idea ever, honed it to perfection, and now you get a “yuck!” It should completely shock you because you really believed in what you were pitching.

I’ve been in professional pitches where Hollywood executives have pitched me a game idea. When I’ve said it won’t make a good game, they’ve said, “Yeah, we thought so.” Then they just reach farther into their drawer for another idea. “How about a mummy game?” “A young boy goes to his first wedding?” “A used-car salesman becomes president?” It’s random, it’s painful to sit through, and I have to give professional responses (gag!).

I call this the buckshot technique. They hope that something will strike the target—anything—and they don’t really care what.

So that’s what not to do. Instead, come in with something you care passionately about, that you know inside out would make a great game. Also, make sure you know who you are pitching to, and that they are interested in that kind of game. You might not pitch a 2D arcade game to John Carmack, and you probably wouldn’t pitch a First-Person Shooter to Will Wright—although, who knows? You wouldn’t pitch me a game about a used-car salesman becoming president—or if you do, it had better blow my socks off!

There are tools in this book, such as the Hook Evaluator, to make sure you are on to something that will be interesting. My advice is to be your own filter, taste your own food...test your ideas on people who are not your friends and family. Get clear about where your focus needs to go and really pour your effort into it. Be realistic, too. Don’t assume your idea is great; be sure other people do, too—people who understand games, presumably not the waitress at the local bar and grill. Reread this chapter and be sure you’ve got everything you need, then go and present your idea.

And if the first person you pitch it to rejects it, don’t give up. Ask why he rejected it and learn from the response. Perhaps the idea is great but doesn’t fit his plan. Perhaps there’s something you’re missing but it can be fixed, and he might be nice enough to set you straight. Don’t be angry or dejected by rejection—be curious.

A good game design submission should come with enough material to give the potential publisher a chance to say yes. You want to give them enough material to impress them and make them want more. But how much is enough, and how much is too much? It’s best to have a very strong but easily digested initial pitch with supporting materials, but have something in reserve. If you can get them hooked and they want to see more, then it’s good to have more to offer. However, what you bring initially should be well presented and organized, easy to read and view, and a very good representation of what makes your game special and unique. If you have any part of the game in a playable or demo stage, it will help immensely.

Every submission, particularly one that is not part of an in-person pitch, should ideally have:

Design Challenge

1. Take one or more games you like and consider how you would pitch each of them.

   1. Write a 45-second elevator speech and a brief summary for each one, emphasizing those qualities that make the games you like successful. For instance, imagine you were pitching Diablo II, or The Sims, or Grand Theft Auto III, or EverQuest.... You get the point.

   2. Write a summary page. How could you summarize the games you like? Be succinct. Remember, you need to grab the publisher’s attention and keep it. The longer your pitch goes, the more risk you’ll lose them, unless they are the ones prolonging it.

   3. If you want, pick one game and actually develop a complete pitch for it.

2. Now pick a game you would like to pitch. Check your concept/design against the lists in this chapter. If you want, go through the other chapters in this book for more ideas and ways to expand, refine, or improve your game. Depending on the type of game you want to create, almost any of the chapters in this book might have useful information.

   1. Create a summary of your game. Be sure to make the summary very succinct, focusing on the most compelling and original aspects of your game. Be sure to include at least one hook, and be sure to identify the game well enough so that someone reading the summary a) can identify what you’re proposing to do, and b) will want to know more.

   2. Create a 45-second elevator speech for the game. The summary can help.

   3. Create a whole game submission, including the summary, a full treatment of the game, and so on.

   4. After you have created a submission for your game, look it over. Is there anything else you can do to improve it? Can you shorten it? Does it cover all the elements of the game and the project that it needs to?

   5. Imagine a publisher asking you tough, realistic questions about the game. Be prepared with answers about the following subjects:

      • The market/demographic for the game

      • The budget

      • The team

      • The schedule and milestones

      • The technology

      • Sequels

      • Online and multiplayer aspects

      • Why this game will stand out from the crowd

      • What kind of deal you’re looking for

   6. Have someone pretend to be the publisher and go through the pitch with them. Practice your presentation so that it is clear, concise, and informative. It should be confident without being too cocky, though this may depend on who you pitch to. Not every style of presentation will work the same for every publisher.

3. If you can, obtain some game submissions from other designers and look at how other people have approached their game pitches. And if you can, look at some that have resulted in successful games.

As some of you know, I’ve spent a lot of time helping people get jobs in the game industry. I even created a massive project—Project: Top Secret—that allowed a community of game players to design their own game. This book is about game design, so I’m not going to go into detail on how to get a job in the industry, but I can offer a little advice.

First, check out the DP Challenge and other articles on www.dpfiles.com. Also (and here’s my little tip), did you realize that it’s a lot harder to get to a Hollywood executive producer, such as Joel Silver, than it is to get to just about any executive in the game industry? So far, most of them don’t have executive assistants to run interference, so you can just pick up the phone and call them, find them on a social network, or get their email from the company website.

So feel free to send your job application to HR. But if you want to jump the line, choose the executive producer, game director, or creative director who is working on the team you want to work on. Don’t send him a job application, send him a flattering letter and casually mention what you do, then have a website (which should be slick and professional) and have your resume right there. If it’s a cool letter, then he is likely to go check out your site and see who you are. So you are streets ahead of being in the HR pile, which, of course, you can be anyway.

Also, when you apply these days, tidy up your MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and blog. If someone goes looking for you and you look like a freak or obviously party like a freak, they’re likely to just close their browser and go back to work.

Here’s a simple example of a letter that might get someone’s attention: