You’ve decided to work with a publisher, and the time is right to start looking for the ones that are a fit for your studio and your game. There are several ways of finding a publisher which differ based on how effective (quality of reach) and efficient (quantity of reach) they are.
It would be great if we could, but we don’t think that it’s possible to rank the different roads you could take, as the right one depends on the time, finances, and other resources at your disposal. We looked at five scenarios through which you can pitch your video game to a publisher:
- Pitching a game at a conference or convention (in person)
- Working with professional consultancies and agencies
- Reaching out directly to publishers by yourself
- Posting your game on an online platform
- The fastest and most effective way to pitch your game (coming soon)
Pitching a game in-person at a conference or event
Safety belt on, fly halfway around the world, share handheld devices to everyone in the conference room, and have them see first-hand just how good your game is. Then repeat this several dozen times, with each individual publisher you’d like to work with. If you’re an indie dev, that’s not a likely scenario—although pitching a game in person is the most effective way to show your game and get quick feedback. To scale the process and reduce costs, consider going to conventions and conferences.
At major events such as Gamescom, GDC, or PAX, for a couple of days you’re in the same place with hundreds of publishers and fellow developers. Having a booth to show off your game will also get you the attention of general attendees, and hopefully an increase in the number of wishlists along with feedback from players. You will also have the opportunity to interact with other studios, see what they are making, share insights and ideas, and learn about them and how they operate.
During these several hectic days, publishers will see dozens of games and talk to even more people. You’ll have 10-15 minutes to show off your game, and the same amount of time for questions you’ll want to ask each other.
How ever energizing and potentially very effective, attending a conference does not come cheap. It comes with significant direct costs and the fact that you need to make sure your demo is top-notch for a specific date. Some direct costs you’ll want to keep in mind when thinking about attending a major conference:
- Attendance tickets
- Travel costs
- Accommodation
- Food & drinks
- Booth space ($100 or more per square meter)
- Equipment (gaming hardware, monitors, furniture)
- Utility bills (some conferences will charge you for electricity and internet use)
- Decorations, swag, giveaways (everyone loves pins and stickers)
If you’re not looking for an increase in general visibility or feedback from players, you can always choose the guerilla budget approach—just you, your laptop, and a controller.
Tip #1: schedule your meetings at least a couple of weeks in advance. The moment you decide to attend a major event, check out the publishers and investors who will be there and reach out to their people to set up a time for a meeting. Expect that business development people will see their calendars packed tightly several weeks before the event, and you’ll want to book your time asap.
Tip #2: join an association. Things become much easier if you’re a member of a gaming association (at the national or regional level), as costs get buffered and other familiar studios are there on the stage with you. At events such as Gamescom, you might also get access to the association’s booth at the business area, making you much more visible in the area where publishers and investors are most active.
Pitching at an online event
Throughout the year, keep an eye out for online events in the industry that include a segment dedicated to game pitches. Some events such as the ones organized through MeetToMatch or the Global Games Pitch by GDBAY are fully dedicated to indie developers pitching their games, while others combine talks and panels with pitching segments.
With preventive restrictions on in-person gatherings during the pandemics, online events have grown in numbers and have become a more effective way of pitching and finding games to publish.
The main benefit of online events is the free or relatively low fee for attendance compared to in-person conferences. The main difference is between events during which you pitch your game to a wide audience, and those where you get one-on-one sessions with publishers.
Drawback of online events is the scale and reach you get—you’re limited by the number of stakeholders attending and time allocated for connecting with and pitching to publishers.
Professional consultancies and agencies
There are professional agencies and consultancies whose primary focus is to connect game developers with publishers and investors. Reputable agencies bring a large network of contacts to the table, and will do the whole search & pitch process on your behalf.
Agencies have a more direct and privileged access to publishers, which makes the pitching process faster and more efficient—and significantly more expensive.
What makes specialized agencies expensive is that they usually offer a rich package of services, from deck design, to business advisory, publisher sourcing and pitching, and help with negotiations.
Some agencies work will charge you with just a success fee (they win only if you win), while others have a starting fee and a success percentage based on what is eventually negotiated with a publisher.
When evaluating an agency or consultancy, you should:
- Check their portfolio for variety of clients and partners
- Did they work with different sized studios, or only with big / small ones?
- Do they have access to both major and indie publishers?
- How many projects did they work on recently?
- The team behind the agency
- How big is the team?
- Which roles do they have in-house?
- Industry and media presence of key personnel?
- Schedule a call with them
- Don’t fear hopping on a call with them—they will be more than happy to answer any questions you might have
- Come prepared with a set of questions
- Don’t forget to prepare a quick pitch for your own game to spark their interest
Additionally, you should reach out to developers they’ve worked with and get their feedback about what it was like to work with that agency. It might sound like a lot of work, yet you are making a significant investment when entering a partnership with an agency and you should do due diligence.
You’ll find that agencies can be a great way to get your game in front of publishers if your game is at an advanced stage of development, you’ve got the finances set, and you feel confident about working with them.
Online platforms
Online platforms are websites dedicated to showing off video games and connecting them to publishers and investors. As a developer, you fill out a form that populates a page about your game which is then public and through which interested publishers can find out that you exist and what you’re making.
The greatest benefit of online platforms is that they’re (mostly) free advertising. The downside of platforms is that your idea is out in the public and you have very little if any control over who can see your game, and no feedback mechanisms let you know whether anyone actually looked at or is interested in what you’re making.
If you’re thinking of using an online platform to promote your game, make sure that the platform has a strict vetting process. This helps alleviate the fear of whether you’re being contacted by a fake publisher or investor.
Direct reach out
You can also start reaching out directly to publishers and investors by conducting your own market research and building a list of companies you’d like to work with. Most developers see this as a cheap, budget option, but don’t be fooled—there are plenty of non-monetary costs involved.
Yes, you don’t have the upfront cost of consultancies and professional tools, but don’t forget to factor in the time it takes just to find publishers’ contacts and put together dozens and hundreds of emails, not to mention everything you need to know to make a good pitch deck for your video game.
Here are the steps to take if you decide to reach out directly:
- Source publishers
- Build your own CRM
- Create a pitch deck
- Reach out and follow up
Sourcing publishers
When sourcing publishers yourself, look for a balance between quantity and quality. You’ll want to pitch to plenty of publishers, but you also don’t want to waste your time contacting someone who is obviously not a fit for your game and studio.
Start by thinking about what you want to get from a partnership with a publisher. Do you need funding (and how much), what is your stance on your game’s IP, what services they have to provide and what would be a nice add-on to have, and also how would you like to communicate and work with them.
Next, make a shortlist of publishers that are on your radar because they’ve published games similar to the one you’re making or because you liked their work. Expand on this by finding names of other publishers who’ve published games in the same category. Then expand your list by looking at several lists with hundreds of publishers that are available online for free.
Powell Group Consulting has a comprehensive 600+ publisher list, and Liam Twose, the creator of #PitchYaGame made a Trello board with hundreds of publishers and their websites.
These are great starting points for your search, based on which you can start looking for clues on whether a publisher is a fit for you. Email addresses, Twitter handles, and LinkedIn profiles are just the tip of an iceberg. Things you want to keep an eye out when researching a publisher:
- Publisher portfolio
- Is the publisher specialized in a category?
- How many games have they published in the previous 12 months?
- Do they provide long-term support for titles they’ve published?
- What was the media coverage like for their most recently published games?
- The team
- How big is the team behind the publisher?
- What is the variety of in-house roles and specialties?
- Do they have established partnerships with platforms?
These should serve as talking points, if and when it comes to talking. These information should serve for due dilligence, not necessarily for filtering. Don’t make the mistake of disregarding smaller indie publishing teams—they might have a small in-house team, but a strong outsourcing network.
If a publisher rolls out plenty of games, you could ask how do they manage it all? And if they’ve published a few, is it because they’re heavily committed to a game or something slows them down in their process? Don’t rush to interpret the information you gather too quickly and without more context.
Building your own publisher CRM
As you research publishers, you’ll want to keep all the different information about them in one place. The simplest way to build a CRM is to create a Google Sheet, and if you’d like to avoid using Google there are plenty of free (and more aesthetically pleasing) alternatives such as Airtable, Notion, Clickup, etc. In our experience, Google Sheets and Airtable are the best choice because they handle a lot of data quickly without lag and hiccups, and it’s also easy to export data from them if you ever decide to use another app.
Feel free to use and share our publisher CRM templates for Google Sheets or Airtable.
If you’re building your own database from scratch, these are some of the basic information you should be gathering when sourcing publishers you’d like to pitch to:
- Name of the publisher
- Website
- Email / Social media URLs
- The reason why you want to reach out to them (portfolio, specific game, etc)
- Person you’ll be reaching out to
- Their position
- Twitter handle
- LinkedIn URL
- Reach out status
- Reach out date
- Notes on reaching out
All of this will be of great help when you get to the point of putting together a targeted email or editing and customizing your pitch deck for a specific publisher.
Depending on the time you have on your hands, it can take weeks or a month until you’ve gathered information about 50+ publishers. Keep in mind that it might just happen that some people have changed their positions or companies in the meantime and that you’ll want to take a quick glance at their LI profile to make sure you’re pitching to the right person.
Creating a pitch deck
While collecting information about publishers, you’ll want to start building your pitch deck. The software doesn’t really matter here, whether you go with Slides, MS PPT, Keynote, or any other. What matters is the quality of information you put into your deck.
Imagine eagerly awaiting the response from a publisher for weeks, and instead of giving you a straight answer, they follow up with additional questions that you could have answered in your pitch deck, but missed them. We’ve seen this too many times, which is why we asked publishers what they need to know to make a decision about a game and used that to build Pitch Maker—a tool for making the perfect pitch deck, for every game.
In general, make the deck short and well packed with information that shows that you know what you’re building, who your audience is, and what you need to bring the idea to fruition.
Read our extensive article on putting together a pitch deck, and check out the Pitch Maker—the fastest way to make the perfect pitch deck for your video game.
Reaching out and following up
Don’t forget: you’re reaching out to very busy people. With all their good will and full understanding of your hard work, they have very little time to devote to each game. Major publishers get more than 3,000 pitches every year, and even the small indie publishers get several hundred annually.
Publishers would love to thoughtfully reply to every single email they get from developers, yet those who can actually pull that off are very rare.
Count on weeks of waiting for all the responses you’ll get to arrive, meaning that sometimes you won’t get “Sorry, not a fit”, let alone a detailed breakdown of the reasons why your game didn’t excite them.
Some publishers will give you valuable feedback if for example the timing isn’t right—you didn’t prepare a demo, but they liked the idea and are willing to take a look again when you build one.
If you get zero replies, send a follow up email in the same thread. There’s a ton of reasons why a publisher might have wanted to, but didn’t reply, and you more than deserve a reply to a well thought-out game pitch.
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