Hi Broadway,

I wish you good luck in your venture, and your confidence and determination will undoubtedly serve you well, but I’d like to warn you of the following obstacle in your path.

You will not find a publisher anywhere that will fund you without an established game team, no matter how good your idea is. Tom, Dan and the others in this thread have tried (with immense patience) to tell you this, but you don’t seem to be listening. There is no great conspiracy to discourage you here; they are simply presenting the facts as they are in reality.

This seems to be what you are proposing: You have a game idea. You are going to take it to some publishers. They are going to give you $20 million. You will then go away and hire an experienced development team, find and rent premises for them to work in and buy all the equipment and software they need, give them your game design documents, and sit back as you watch them make you a multi-million unit selling game that will make enough money to pay back the $20 million advance from the publishers plus interest, and still have enough money left over after that to fund your next game.

Nobody has ever managed to do this before, so if you are successful, you will have achieved a world first. Good luck!

> You will not find a publisher anywhere that will fund
> you without an established game team, no matter how good
> your idea is.
> {...}
> Publishers don`t NEED to take the risk on a start up so
> they won`t and no amount of hard work will change that.

The harsh reality is there exist far more game studios than there are publishers. Publishers can affort to be picky, while game studios need to compete for few publishing slots.

And you will need to compete with a lot of other game projects out there, most of which are at a more advanced stage than you are. This is where the 'risk' factor (from a publisher's pov) comes in. It's not that it's impossible to stand out and be published based on an idea or a tech demo, but more that there are a lot of better-prepared teams out there, some of which may already have games up and running. And for a publisher looking to maximize its ROI, a completed game ready-to-market is more appealing as an investment.

-cb

Will wrote:
>Tom, Dan and the others in this thread have tried (with immense patience) to tell you this, but you don’t seem to be listening.

Thank you, Will. Exactly the point I made after the OP completely ignored my genuinely helpful posts and sidestepped Dan's help as well. Naturally, the OP chose to bite my hand when I said it.

A big part of his concern was proving to us that he's "not some 16 year old." Now I can't help but wonder how old the OP and his partners are, what level of education they've completed, and what their current occupations are. Also can't help but wonder what else in terms of game creation the team has done besides evolving and creating "a storyline/gameplay" and filing for an LLC.

Quote: It's a storyline that has never been done with twists just like any other good storyline, and it will have some of the best gameplay available...you'd want to play it.

I'm not a business-guy, but I often visit this forum to try and learn more about it. The designer in me feels obligated to respond to this post, because this one sentence can ruin your chances with any intelligent decision maker. Lets break it down:

"It's a storyline..."
I thought you were making a game? Are you making a game? Do you really think Jack Marketer gives a flying funk about the storyline?

"...that has never been done..."
You sure? Is it possible that it may have been done before? Is this just rhetoric to try and claim innovation which may or may not exist?

"...with twists..."
Wow! Twists! Gameplay twists? A unique graphical style? Or does it just have "twists". What the hell are twists, anyway? I went to the store and bought a jug of milk. It turned out to be sour. See, not every twist is interesting. The point is, the story is not going to sell your game to a publisher. Ever. If you want to write stories, check out the Storytron.

"...just like any other good storyline..."
I thought you said it had never been done before? So your idea is unique, just like all of the others. Congratulations... you still haven't sold me anything worthwhile.

"...and it will have some of the best gameplay available..."
Ah, now you finally mentioned the gameplay... secondary to the story but at least it's there. And apparently it's the best available, whatever that means. Well, at least "some of" it. What about the rest? Or does it mean that it's some of the best, but not the best? Who decided that it's the best? And what makes it the best? Does it really matter whether or not it's the best? Will it sell? Will it sell enough copies to make it worth the investment?

"...you'd want to play it."
I don't. And do you know why? Because what you've pitched is a bunch of rhetoric, and I get the impression that theres not much substance behind it. Of course, the point of your post wasn't to pitch the game, but you chose to anyway and did a piss-poor job of it. You need to be a bit wiser as to what you discuss and where, or you'll never convince a publisher that you aren't "some 16 year old trying to pitch some pacman spinoff" (and what's wrong with Pac-Man, anyway?)

Quote: Saw it back in october when I first had the idea with this story

And I'm spent.


Now for the reason I felt obligated to post this:

This is the business and legal forum. This is not meant to discuss game design. Yet you spent at least some time trying to talk-up the design, and apparently none of the business-types in this forum cared. If they don't care, why would a publisher care?

You need to listen to these people. People like them are the ones who will be deciding whether your game will ever get funded. You came here looking for advice, and then spat in their face when they gave it to you. Tom and Dan... these guys know their stuff and if they say you don't have a solid plan then you should probably rethink your approach. If you're not willing to do that, you shouldn't have asked for help in the first place.

Good luck, and hopefully things turn out well for you. But please open your mind and listen to the people on this board, and come up with an elevator pitch* for your game.

* Elevator pitch - A short pitch, 45 seconds or less when spoken or one paragraph typed, that will grab the person you're pitching to and get them interested in learning more about your game.

It's me, chiming in briefly from the exterior. I'll answer the question you asked in your original post: Pitch Research is actually heavily covered in any books you can find on Sales techniques. Now, myself, I didn't study sales and marketing, so I don't know the best books to steer you towards. But if all you want to know is "How do I pitch a game?", then the plethora of books on techniques for salespeople is the way to go.

Back when I was 17, a friend of my father once told me "To make money, you have to spend money." I didn't realize what that meant, my teenage mind unable to comprehend the idea. It wouldn't be until my mid-20s when it hit me, and I scraped together some money, started a business, and then slowly worked up to being moderately successful at it.

So: spend your own money and make a small game that you can make. Work up to being successful. Even John Romero and John Carmack started small, and began by doing shareware and working for a game company. Then, after your game, with its unique twists and gameplay, is a cult hit, publishers will take notice.

Quote: Original post by Obscure
id didn`t start out by failing to get published...

As far as I'm informed, they did. Their first project was a x86 port of Super Mario, which they wanted to publish through Nintendo. They denied to ever enter the PC market, however, and Super Mario for the PC never got published :-/

Crytek didn't have a track-record. In fact, Cevat was one of the few people from Crytek, who actually had experience in the game biz, which goes back to Commodore 64 software. The company itself only sold licenses for a technology called PolyBump. Farcry was their first title. But like ODIN said, the company is somehow interesting, because after finishing the Farcry title, they even received dev kits for various next-gen platforms, although you do usually only get access to those with more than only one AAA title in your record.

Quote: Original post by ZMaster

Quote: Original post by Obscure
id didn`t start out by failing to get published...

As far as I'm informed, they did. Their first project was a x86 port of Super Mario, which they wanted to publish through Nintendo. They denied to ever enter the PC market, however, and Super Mario for the PC never got published :-/

That project was Commander Keen. According to everything I've read on the topic it's unconfirmed whether Nintendo was ever contacted about publishing this as a PC port of Mario Brothers or not, but it certainly was published as Commander Keen.

The Mario clone wasn't even made by id Software. Carmack and Tom Hall wrote it whilst still working for Softdisk. Nintendo did get hold of it and didn't want mario released on the PC. Romero decided they should use it to create Commander Keen which they did and set up their own company called id Software.
Keen was really popular so were it's sequals, so was Rescue Rover so was Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake etc.
Erm...Where is the failure there?

This seems like another version of the "I have teh best idea evar" thread. The guys are a lot more grown up if they've set up a company, but an idea is worthless - there are way more ideas than teams to turn them into games.

Broadway, I'd love to hear an account of your presentation/pitch and so on - it's something very few of us will ever do.

Who is this Tom guy anyway? He's appeared with his 64-part FAQ while I've been away!

Quote: Original post by d000hg
This seems like another version of the "I have teh best idea evar" thread. The guys are a lot more grown up if they've set up a company, but an idea is worthless - there are way more ideas than teams to turn them into games.

Broadway, I'd love to hear an account of your presentation/pitch and so on - it's something very few of us will ever do.

Who is this Tom guy anyway? He's appeared with his 64-part FAQ while I've been away!

Tom Sloper and Dan Marchant are industry veterans with a lot of knowledge of how things work. Unlike many people on this board, both are employed and have day-jobs. If they're posting here, they're posting in their precious free time, so don't expect veterans to be too willing to suffer fools gladly: we really do have other things to do. Some of which will actually pay the bills.


@Broadway: Don't take this the wrong way, but I'd expect someone in your position to know that a game is not a story, that "copywrite" doesn't exist -- it's called Copyright -- and publishers don't make games: they sell them. Publishers really don't want to have to spend their own money making games; that's not really their job.

The less risk your project brings to the table, the better. Get a demo done first. You will NOT get a publisher on-board without one unless you have some seriously big names working for you. You can rent a coder for this, or do it yourself. As long as you can prove the basic concepts and show you can project manage effectively -- publishers are far more interested in this sort of thing -- then you'll be closer to getting their attention.

A publisher's management consists mainly of MBA-toting suits who have absolutely no clue how to design or build a game. They couldn't give a gnat's fart whether it's got spaceships or fluffy bunnies. They're salesmen. All they want to know from you is who you think will buy the box and how many boxes they'll shift. They don't give a damn what's inside the box. It could be an awesome FPS, some soap powder, toy cars or a ripe Stilton cheese.

Nobody needs or cares to know how the magic is done or what spells you used as long as it's bright, shiny and makes people say, "I want one!"