How long does it take for a publisher to decide if they will go with your game after submitting your pitch. Also how long to get back to you when you have mailed and asked for a contact to send your pitch. Also is it just me or do some companies take forever to get back to you when you get in contact to try and send a pitch, some are very quick but some take forever, or are impossible to contact, others are just plain hard to talk with, you phone reception get an email address, ask for contact, get nothing back, leave messages on answer machines, delay signing you game to publishers who have already given you an offer while you keep waiting to get a contact from them. Its like talking to the dead and waiting for a response.. Also have you noticed how many publishers have mail addresses on their web site that bounce. What are your experiences with this? Do you find some are hard to contact or get back to you? [Edited by - Abbadon on April 3, 2006 1:19:11 PM]

Dean wrote:

>How long for a publisher to decide on if they will go with your game after submitting your pitch.

It varies.

>Also who long to get back to you when you have mailed and asked for a contact to send your pitch too.

Expect to never get a reply if you use an unreliable method of communication. You must use the telephone.

>Also is it just me or do some companies take forever to get back to you when you get in contact to try and send a pitch, some are very quick but some take forever, or are impossible to contact, good examples of these are Namco, Nova Logic and Vivendi Universal Games, Tecmo, TDK, Atari and Ubi Soft very hard to get a hold of to send a pitch, others are just plain hard to talk with, you phone reception get an email address, ask for contact, get nothing back, leave messages on answer machines, delay signing you game to who have already given you an offer on it, keep waiting to get a contact, for f*c&s sake answer your damn mail or answer machine. Its like talking to the dead and waiting for a response.

Um, OK, are you done venting now? It's not just you. But given the way you kept on venting, it might be you.

>Also have you noticed how many publishers have mail addresses on their web site that bounce.

You have to use the telephone!

>do you find some are hard to contact or get back to you.

Yes, some are. This is the way it is. You're trying to do something that is very difficult, has very high odds of rejection, and is very frustrating. This is why my FAQs 1, 11, and 21 recommend that you find a more productive way to go about things. I don't know how many different products you have to pitch, or how many people you have on your development team, or whether your team has gotten any development work (anything from localization to porting to turnkey development). But when you pitch a product, what you're really pitching is your development services. When someone is interested in you, it's much more likely to be in your development services than in your game idea.

Quote:

Original post by Dean Avanti How long for a publisher to decide on if they will go with your game after submitting your pitch.Also who long to get back to you when you have mailed and asked for a contact to send your pitch too.

I assume there was a question in there somewhere.

If your spelling and grammar in the proposal are similar to the post above, it will be thrown out by the person who opens the mail or email. In that instance, you will not receive a response.

Unsolicited demos are often discarded for legal reasons. If you are not an established studio, they will probably discard your stuff out of policy, especially if you are just emailing it to contacts you find on the web.

You will be much better off finding the name of a contact in the company, finding out what their official submission process is, and then carefully following it. You will generally hear back rather quickly that your game is rejected.

I think this earlier post applies to you:

Quote:

Original post by tsloper succinctly asked: "What if you just send Activision a 100% complete AA game?" Then you can expect a 10% chance that they might decide to publish it. (The odds are 9-to-1 that they will decide not to.) http://www.sloperama.com/advice/lesson11.htm

If you don't hear back from a pitch in 7 days do you think thats a no? how long can publishers take to reach an opinion?

An example of the pitch process I find myself in -
You finally get a contact to send your submission to, they ask a question, you answer in full, or send a film, or more submission details, then you get a mail from someone higher up in the chain, like the acquisitions manager, he asks a question, you mail back and then it goes all silent, again if you don't hear back for like 7-10 days do you think you have lost that one?

I find it very frustrating waiting, its especially difficult as the publishers that have made an offer are kept waiting, the submission process can take a long time to do, well for me it does when I have to establish contacts from scratch, it looks bad when you have to contact publishers to accept offers when you last spoke 8 weeks ago, though what has stretched it out is being in negotiations on another game at the same time. Is it normal to do this? by that I mean keep publishers waiting 8 weeks while you shop your projects around everyone.

When you pitch, it's a business development process.

Business development is not like technical development. Business development is mostly about people, persons, and relations. Whether the guy listening to you pitch is having a terrible headache because of a party last night might be much more important to the outcome of the meeting than whether your game is really the next Far Cry or more like Duke Nukem Forever.

If you had a little more experience, you would have asked these questions of the people who sent you the questions in the first place. I e, as soon as you get the questions, reply, saying something like "I'm working on full answers to your questions; meanwhile, do you think you could describe how your process typcially works. After I answer, who are the decision makers, and how do they make their decisions?" Then, the next day, send the full answers to their questions.

And I would second the recommendation to use the telephone. Typically, you just get people's voice mail, and returning voicemail is even harder than returning email, so that never happens. Keep calling (don't bother leaving a message more than once) until you get an answer. Don't get an answer more than once on the same matter, though -- nobody likes a pest.

If you already have another offer, it's perfectly legit for you to refresh their memory one week after you've sent a previous piece of data, stating that you have a deadline and wondering whether they will be able to meet that deadline with their decision.

Dean wrote:

>If you don't hear back from a pitch in 7 days do you think thats a no?

Not necessarily. But if you never talked to anybody on the telephone, then here's an idea. Call them on the telephone and ask them when you ought to follow up and see how it's going.

>how long can publishers take to reach an opinion?

If you don't use the telephone, they might never get back to you.

>You finally get a contact to send your submission to, they ask a question, you answer in full, or send a film, or more submission details, then you get a mail from someone higher up in the chain, like the acquisitions manager, he asks a question, you mail back and then it goes all silent, again if you don't hear back for like 7-10 days do you think you have lost that one?

No. Use the telephone. Call them and say, "it's been 10 days, how's it going?" It's called "communication."

>I find it very frustrating waiting, its especially difficult as the publishers that have made an offer are kept waiting,

What? They made an offer and you're keeping them waiting???

>it looks bad when you have to contact publishers to accept offers when you last spoke 8 weeks ago, though what has stretched it out is being in negotiations on another game at the same time.

What???

>Is it normal to do this? by that I mean keep publishers waiting 8 weeks while you shop your projects around everyone.

I'm totally lost. Why is a publisher waiting 8 weeks for what reason? It's very difficult to understand what you're saying. Look. If there's an 8-week silence from a publisher you sent a pitch to, then yes, that's a bad thing, and you should assume that's a no. (7 days, not a no - 8 weeks, yes a no.)

BTW, you totally blew off what I wrote before. Should I wait 7 days to see if you're going to reply to it? (^_^)

Quote:

Original post by Dean Avanti I find it very frustrating waiting, its especially difficult as the publishers that have made an offer are kept waiting, the submission process can take a long time to do, well for me it does when I have to establish contacts from scratch, it looks bad when you have to contact publishers to accept offers when you last spoke 8 weeks ago, though what has stretched it out is being in negotiations on another game at the same time. Is it normal to do this? by that I mean keep publishers waiting 8 weeks while you shop your projects around everyone.

ack... who's doing the waiting? you are waiting or they are waiting? the context sounds like YOU are waiting. the words say that they are waiting. if they are waiting on you then what's the problem? Sounds like the fault is on your end in that case. If you aren't keeping constant contact with the people that gave you the offer that's horrible business practice. If I offered you a deal for your pitch and you took more than 2 days to contact me I'd withdraw the offer. Whether or not you accept the offer is irrelivant. You should not be silent for 8 weeks.

-me

Quote:

Original post by Dean Avanti Also is it just me or do some companies take forever to get back to you when you get in contact to try and send a pitch, some are very quick but some take forever, or are impossible to contact, good examples of these are *,*,*,*,*,*, and * are very hard to get a hold of to send them your pitch,

Also; quick word of advice.. don't badmouth people or companies in a public forum that you might want to work with in the future; you never know who's listening. A standard rule of most public forums is that you have 10:1 lurker/poster ratio.. out of the 9 lurkers, there's likely to be representatives from at least one (and possibly all) of the companies mentioned above. Not a good way to build a good report with someone you're asking for several million USD.


Allan

Allan wrote:

>A standard rule of most public forums is that you have 10:1 lurker/poster ratio.. out of the 9 lurkers, there's likely to be representatives from at least one (and possibly all) of the companies mentioned above.

This is so true! (^_^) Case in point: I recently participated in a thread (I think it was on a newsgroup) where a guy was talking about submitting a game to Yahoo. I replied to him on the NG, and just happened to totally leave out the fact that I'm currently contracting at Yahoo, within a nerfball toss of the guy he'd have to submit his game to! :oD

No way was I gonna tell the poster that, of course.

hplus0603, thanks for the info that sound ideas.

tsloper
>I find it very frustrating waiting, its especially difficult as the publishers that have made an offer are kept waiting,

What? They made an offer and you're keeping them waiting???

No I told them that we had a few more publishers to talk to and that we also had another game we was in negotiations with so I apologized and told them it could be some time. And it does take time, some publishers are very busy and your communication gets staggered due to people being out of the country or at GDC or whatever there schedule takes up.

tsloper
>BTW, you totally blew off what I wrote before. Should I wait 7 days to see if you're going to reply to it? (^_^)

No I didnt, I read your comments, read notes on your site and took in what I read, I just didnt say what I did..

[Edited by - Abbadon on April 3, 2006 1:53:04 PM]