"We haven't spent as much time with your baby as you have. We might not have read your deck completely." - John Young, Perfect World vice president of business development, on pitching publishers.
"We haven't spent as much time with your baby as you have. We might not have read your deck completely."
- John Young, Perfect World vice president of business development. What advice does Perfect World's VP of biz dev have for developers who pitch their games to him? Like the old saying goes: Keep it simple, stupid. "Convoluted pitches make life more difficult for us, as most business development people are often fairly simple," writes Young. "We haven't spent as much time with your baby as you have." While your game may be a genre-buster chockablock with completely original ideas, that's not the way to get someone's interest piqued at the beginning, he suggests. "When you tell us that you want to make 'Gears of War meets Tribes', we can understand the rest of your pitch easier. "Such phrases sound trite, and don't do justice to the subtleties of your design, but they really, really help us to get a sense of what you want to build," Young writes. "Remember, we're simple people. You can fill us in on the details later, after you have our interest." The worst outcome he mentions is that if your description isn't clear, your prospective publisher might "imagine what we want to hear, not what you're trying to convey" -- which could create serious problems down the line. This advice comes as part of Young's feature on pitching, which has nine more tips from the biz dev exec about approaching publishers with your ideas.
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