It's a common refrain in game development. When you need to learn more about programming, design, marketing, etc., head to the GDC Vault.
The resource maintained by our sibling organization is a dense-as-hell repository for over a decade of video game history. But there's a small challenge that comes with plumbing its depths: all the insights you find were most apropos for the year they were archived.
Some talks might evergreen, but others fade away as console generations advance and the industry landscape changes. The landscape that's arguably seen the most change is the economic state of the game industry. The already-turbulent business has been upended in the last two years, with studios laying off thousands of workers and investors closing their doors to anyone not pitching the next Fortnite.
In 2019 Finji cofounder and CEO Bekah Saltsman gave a talk for indie developers on pitching publishers. The talk was direct, to-the-point, and challenged developers to accept they were playing in a crowded market, and their pitches needed to be the best they could be for a shot at publisher support.
Five years later, that fact is more true than ever. Saltsman admitted in an email interview with Game Developer that she's not an "optimistic person" anymore about the game industry and funding opportunities. She's still out there though, signing games like Wilmot Works It Out and continuing to support titles like I Was a Teenage Exocolonist and Chicory: A Colorful Tale. She's also doing pitching of her own, often looking for funds to support those games.
Saltsman seems more world-weary, but she took the time to tell Game Developer—and more importantly, our readers in search of funds—what she's expecting out of pitches now, and how her assessments of the industry have changed.
In 2019, Saltsman explained Finji sorts pitches into different tiers where they assess how many copies a game they're pitching or being pitched might sell. They range from as few as 300 units to as high as 300,000 units and beyond (the last category was an outlier, to be clear). Most games the company publishes target the 3000-30,000 range.
They're still the tiers it uses, though Saltsman said she would add a "small increment" between the 3k and 300k range. "I would likely add a small increment between 30k and 100k" she wrote. "I would do this because hitting 100k copies of an indie game on a single platform can be quite difficult."
"Budgets for games are even higher than they were when I gave this talk—and I am talking about North America specifically. It is so much more expensive for normal people to make ends meet in the US and that directly affects your game budget."
Should you include your budget in your pitch documents? The answer is still "no." "I put a lot of other information in there," she said. "I put my goals of the pitch, which might be something like 'we are looking for an enthusiastic partner who wants to make something special and wants to work with our team. We are looking for finishing development funds, a co-marketing partner, and a team who wants to ship this game alongside us.'"
Image via Northway Games/Finji.
She said it clearly communicates what she's looking for: that Finji is looking for money, that it is looking for 'end of project' money, and when the pitch goes to platform owners, that the team is seeking an account rep or production team to help the developer out.
Saltsman still has a budget prepped—it's just not something she shares up front. She said that "the last thing you want to do is to get someone to respond to you and ask how much and you aren't ready to talk about that." Her budgets are standalone documents that estimate production costs, unit sales information at "various launch price points" and a breakdown of milestones that would correlate to budget payments. She'll make several of these documents to be prepared for different prospective partners.
Her documents will clearly state the costs of the game she wants to make, the game that can be made if a certain amount is cut, the amount that can be produced if Finji needs to make a "minimum viable product," and the game that she wants to make plus 6 months of content post-launch.
That's four flexible models, multiplied across many documents. Devs should definitely take time to get the math right before sending them out in the world.
Speaking of flexibility, Saltsman's original talk breaks down how devs should be prepared to pitch their games to all kinds of parties. Investors. Publishers. Players. Your dog, cat, or ferret. Your mom. Your stepmom. Your polycule's extended branch that stretches into the finance world and there's that guy Jim who hangs out sometimes but his dad is a dentist who patented a chemical that helps teeth deal with aging and you know what this just kind of got out of hand.
"I will never stop encouraging developers to learn about people," Saltsman said (no reference to the dentist, but she did press learning how to talk to "friends, parents, and partners."). "If you are going to be in charge of walking in and out of pitch meetings, going to shows to talk to fans, taking press interviews—you need to practice communicating."
Because developers can wind up in a state of "culture isolation" (talking to other developers and becoming familiar with words like 'blueprints,' 'jungling,' or 'bunny-hopping'), they'll start to speak in ways that are intelligible to ordinary people not cursed by such knowledge. "It's like when you're in the grocery store and middle school kids behind you in the queue are speaking in YouTube," she said.
In 2019, Saltsman stumbled on another form of flexibility that's evolved her approach since. After being left scrambling for the Nintendo Switch launch of Night in the Woods, Finji grabbed some assets for Nintendo's storefront that they hadn't really intended to be public-facing. It turned out they were perfectly optimized for that platform. Should developers prep different assets for different storefronts today?
"Short answer: yes," she said, implying she'd give an "entire talk" on the subject. "Slightly longer short answer: every platform has a different audience who have different expectations. It is your job as a developer (or at least the person communicating to the world about your game) to understand how these different platforms work. This directly influences how your art assets and store text are interpreted."
"You should understand your audiences—your first audience who will buy it on day one, your second audience who will buy it in the first month, your 3rd audience who need some peer pressure and validation from others and your long tail sale audience. Your assets: visual, both static and video—and text-based—should communicate with those first 3 audiences directly."
Stay tuned for more from Saltsman on that. Hopefully we'll see that talk sometime soon.
2024 Bekah Saltsman is just as ardent as 2019 Bekah Saltsman on the subject of prototypes. She does not want to see them in a pitch. Developers, she said, should head into pitches with vertical slices. "The idea of a prototype is still that it is playable version of your game that is a proof of system or proof of mechanics. This is not enough for most people to understand what the game actually is."
"In general, you still want to work toward a playable that shows a publishing or funding partner what the game will be like when it ships."
Image via Hollow Ponds/Richard Hogg/Finji.
Don't panic, you don't need the most polished vertical slice or a full-on Steam Next Fest demo ready (couldn't hurt though). Her advice is once again, about communication. Developers want the biz dev person in the room to understand very clearly what the game is like and who it can be marketed to.
You can stuff your vertical slice with everything it needs to communicate genre, "vibes," and what players will do in the game.
"It is more competitive now than it was five years ago," she noted. "There are less resources to go around. Show up with your best chance to secure your funding or your contract."
In a perfect world, the artists would get to practice the art, the technicians research their tech, and the money people work hard to get the money to the people who need it the most. However we live in a world where Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles did not get a third season—the tiniest indicator that we are not in a perfect world.
It's a post-pandemic world where everyone is exhausted by the still-lingering presence of COVID-19, wars and invasions, inflation (or is it greedflation?) and...well, you get it.
Tight funding for games is maybe among the more minor plights we face, but if you're an indie out there struggling to get funds, Saltsman feels your pain. "People funding prototypes existed for about 20-24 months, but they have mostly canceled or cut all their projects loose. Diversity funds, platform funds, angel funds, investor funds—all are at a fraction of what they used to be."
Indie developers, she said, need to do their best to be "less of a risk." They can do that by having a better vertical slice, a wide array of funding methods, and being ready to adapt to whatever comes next.
"You have to spend some time on business."
Game Developer and Game Developers Conference are sibling organizations under Informa Tech.
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