There have been many articles about the current game development crisis, a lot of analysis of the crisis’s sources, and numerous debates about layoffs and the irresponsibility of top management in companies, highlighting how their “maximizing shareholder value” approach hurts individuals in game development. However, there are not many articles discussing what studio heads can actually do in this situation.

One reason might be that nobody truly knows what will work. Once we navigate through this storm, there will likely be many interesting post-mortems. For now, everyone is keeping their heads down, trying to survive. On the other hand, people are hesitant to publicly discuss tough decisions for fear of being criticized if those decisions don’t pan out.

I’ve decided to write this article because it might spark some discussion around what we can actually do in the current situation, and perhaps someone will find it useful and use it to help turn around their studio.

Keep in mind the context — Anshar Studios is a 160-person company that is not publicly traded. What we can do, not everyone can. Things will be different for a 16-person company and for a 1,600-person company, so you need to consider that when reading this.

I’m writing from the perspective of a third-party developer that usually works for publishers and other developers — so, from the perspective of people depending on capital. If your core business is supported by the sales of your games, and your long tails are high enough, there is no crisis for you — the games still sell, and people are still spending a lot of money.

It’s also important to note that I don’t know if all of this will work. We have not gotten through the storm yet, and there has never been a storm of this size in my 17-year career in game development. This is something we are trying to do, hoping for the best.

Cashflow is king

Cash flow is king. Period. No business has ever got under because of low evaluation — you go under because you ran out of money.

Understand your cost and income structure

What you need to do, if you have not been doing it already, is to get your controlling in order. You need to precisely know what you are spending, where you are spending it, and why. On the other side, you need to realistically assess what income you can expect, and from that, calculate your runway. You’re going to make different decisions if it’s a month, six months, or twelve. You need to have a deep grasp on this, I can’t stress this enough.

Cut on everything non-essential

Once you understand your cost structure, you start cutting immediately. The first things to go are all the nice strategic things you had planned. Wanted to expand to another location? Build a new mocap studio? Buy new fancy software for proper asset pipeline management? Give your people training in properly giving feedback? Yeah, not this year, it all goes. You cut absolutely everything that is not essential to your core business.

What you can’t do is cut on things that, if gone, would make your company operate at a much lower velocity or be unable to perform daily tasks. However painful it is, you probably can’t cut P4 costs, or Slack, or Atlassian, because if they’re deeply ingrained in your current pipelines, cutting those will make your daily operation run slower and will directly impact your income. So you need to cut everything that is “strategic,” but cut as little as possible in the “tactical” or “operations” sphere.

Transparency

Be transparent with your team about all these actions. Clearly communicate what you are doing and why, and establish a regular space for such discussions. It’s far worse to leave people in the dark than to share unpleasant news about cost-cutting. Everyone is aware of the situation; they expect you to respond, do your job, and protect the studio. Failing to communicate your plan for navigating through this will create significant anxiety within your studio.

Bizdev like never before

You need to bizdev the heck out of the current situation.

There is still money out there. Publishers are much more cautious right now. They want more advanced projects — preferably past the vertical slice — with a short time to market — preferably way below two years. In general, the size of funding for a single title has dropped — they prefer to invest in more smaller titles, to diversify the risk on their side. This is actually an opportunity for smaller devs, that couldn’t compete before with the expectations of AA quality and budgets.

This basically means that whatever was your time to close a deal previously, it will now increase significantly. The number of leads you will generate will probably be about the same as always, maybe even higher — but the closure time will increase and success rate will diminish. This means you have to double down on your efforts. The absolute worst thing you can do is reduce your bizdev efforts, discouraged by the market situation — this will mean a slow but sure death.

Be aware also of the financial situation of each entity you approach — there are companies out there, with a lot of money on their hands, trying to take advantage of the situation and invest when everybody else is risk-averse — make sure you identify these leads and pursue them harder than others.

Pivot and diversify

Wherever possible, diversify your income streams and pivot to other markets, that you did not consider before. At Anshar Studios, we increased the number of active projects from 2 to 6 — the original strategy was to do only full-cycle development on beefy AA games, right now we’re not nearly this rigorous — we have an indie premium game signed, a proof of concept of an AA game, a full-cycle AA development, and 3 co-dev/staff augmentation deals. Which means that according to our original strategy, only one of these 6 projects actually fits perfectly. Well, tough, if this allows me to avoid mass layoffs, I will take it.

Layoffs

The elephant in the room — layoffs. Nobody likes it — it’s one of the hardest things to do as a manager and the most publicized and vilified part of the crisis.

Why?

Whatever you’re going to do on the cost optimization side, by far the biggest chunk of your costs are salaries — always. And the size of the salaries and the number of developers doing the projects is one of the biggest contributors to the current crisis. Because capital was cheap, we over-hired and overbudgeted. We need a correction as an industry. In short, if we want to create games cheaper, we need to do it with smaller teams. Whatever that means to games themselves is a topic for another time — in short, it will probably mean less content and, in turn, fewer hours of gameplay per game, which, to be frank, our industry could actually use, in my opinion.

When?

A usual mistake is to wait in hopes that things will get better, all while burning through your runway faster than you could be doing it with a smaller team at a slower pace. People also often forget to factor in the fact that firing people costs money — you have to pay people proper severance according to the agreements you have signed. I can’t stress enough how much better for the image and the morale of the company, not mentioning basic human decency, it is to fire people with proper severance vs. cutting them off without any personal runway for them because of the company’s financial situation. Make sure you can afford to fire people.

Who?

The best way to identify who to fire first is to imagine the following scenarios, about a person you’re considering to layoff:

- This person is turning in their notice — they found another job. Do you fight for them to stay? Do you try to convince them with an increased salary, change of a project, or some other incentives?

- This person is not part of your company but is available on the market to be hired. Would you hire them? Is their work so crucial to your ability to deliver and operate that you would find the money to do that?

If the answer is no in either of these, the person should be laid off. To be honest, these questions are valid despite the crisis. I honestly believe that part of the problem we have creating video games is that we don’t ask ourselves those questions often enough because “everybody adds some value,” and we inflate the budgets much over what is truly needed, but that is a topic for another day.

Firing people who are not essential was the easy part. What if, because of your financial situation, you need to cut deeper? You focus on protecting the “billable” people, those directly responsible for bringing in money to your company, usually the production specialists (programmers, designers, artists, etc.), and you cut overheads as much as possible. Cutting overheads is tricky — you can do it as long as it only slows down your operation, but it can’t clog. You can also make cuts in the production staff if it lowers the quality or speed of the production but not to a level that prevents you from continuing to operate. For example, you are still expected to hit and pass milestones with your publisher, or your community will forgive you for slower updates on your live game, or you cut to a level that allows you to sustainably work while living off the long tail of previous projects.

Once you need to start firing people that are directly responsible for your ability to operate, you need to consider a bigger restructuring or bankruptcy.

How?

Being transparent about the situation is key. People need to understand the criteria and reasons for the layoff. One of the worst things you can do is fire somebody because you can’t afford them anymore and blame it on their skill level. Yes, you’re usually firing the weakest link in the chain, but they need to understand that it’s because the criteria have changed. As for the process itself — make it as humane as possible. I know it’s easy to say for a medium-sized company like mine, but I can’t imagine not doing it in person, taking time with each person. This should not be an email, this should not be “if you find yourself in this room, you’re fired,” and so on. Each person should have the opportunity to ask questions, take time to understand the situation at their pace, and have the chance to say goodbye to their friends. Having said that, I do believe it should be quick and concise from the employer’s side — it is scientifically proven that being laid off is one of the most traumatic life events, second only to a death in the family, which means that nothing you will say or do will make them feel better about the whole thing. Be as professional as possible, but just get over it and let them process it at their pace.

Survive

There was a theme at DICE this year: “Survive 24 to thrive in 25.” While I’m not sure when, if, and by how much things will pick up, I’m sure that on the overall scale, things eventually will get better. The industry will be less leveraged on capital, some companies will go down, and things will more or less get back to normal — although I truly hope that we will learn a lesson from all of this.

So, basically, your job is to survive, to outlive the competition. That’s it. Don’t worry about the fact that your long-term strategy has just evaporated — it’s better to reorganize after surviving a crisis than to start from scratch because your business went under.

The direction the ship is pointed does not matter when it’s sinking. Focus on the present.

Final thoughts

Now, I’m just going to leave you with one of the most powerful quotes that helped me tremendously in my career in recent years. It’s from the movie “The Martian” about an astronaut stranded on Mars, trying to survive and get back home:

“At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you… everything’s going to go south, and you’re going to say, ‘This is it. This is how I end.’

Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next.

And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”

And that’s it. There’s nothing more to it. You’re going to think this is too much, you’re going to see the industry giants crumble around you, you’re going to have projects canceled, people laid off, people vilifying CEOs and Execs, while you’re just barely trying to survive and run your business. Well… you can either accept that, or you can get to work. You just begin.

Summary

For the 10th anniversary of Anshar Studios, an AA video game developer from Poland, employing ~160 specialists, I made a speech at a Digital Dragons conference:

From a Sustainable Company to an AA Developer followed my speech from four years ago — From indie to a sustainable company.

This article summarizes these speeches into a tight series of lessons learned throughout the ten years of running a gamedev studio. Enjoy!

Gain experience before you start a company

While many dream of young entrepreneurs ditching college to kickstart their own companies, that path might be apt for general startups. But if you’re zeroing in on founding a video game company, I’d say a deep dive into the industry is a better move. Why burn through your cash and learn the hard way when you can gain invaluable insights, get paid, and work in the industry for a few years? Plus, having experience with shipped games boosts your credibility. Fellow game developers tend to trust those who’ve been in the trenches.

Treat choosing a business partner like choosing a spouse

You’ll be clocking in endless hours with your business partners, hashing things out, and making countless decisions together. If the vibe isn’t right or the dynamic feels off, things can go south real quick. Even if it does click, it demands consistent effort from everyone to keep it that way — kinda like a marriage. So, choose your partners wisely. It’s got to be more than just, ‘Hey, we share a dorm room!’

Make connections

How you approach this varies based on your specialization and experience, but as with any industry, relationships are key. The go-to way to network in game dev? Industry events. We’re talking conferences, game jams, academies, and the like. My advice? Build a tight-knit circle around your specialty. Say you’re a Tech Director — ideally, you should be able to ring up top Tech Directors in your country, or even abroad. Share insights, seek advice, or just chat about the latest industry buzz. Don’t forget, specialized Discord groups are gold for connecting with your peers these days.

Cashflow is king

The top reason companies fold? Running out of cash. Always keep an eye on cash flow when making business decisions, especially when partnering with a publisher or taking on work-for-hire gigs. Things like milestone acceptance criteria, upfront payments, payment frequency, and due dates are critical to lock down.

Find the right investor

You might choose to stay small, aiming for a stable enterprise that turns a profit regularly — and that’s okay. There are game dev companies that thrive this way. However, many companies, particularly those with stock market ties, pursue growth. This doesn’t always mean expanding the team. But if you expand significantly, you’ll find yourself a mid-sized player in a vast pool with bigger competitors. To maintain or boost this growth, you’ll likely need a financial partner at some point. Going solo can make you vulnerable, unless you have some blockbuster titles under your belt for security. Yet, the trick isn’t just finding any investor with cash to spare; it’s about finding the right kind of money. Do you share strategic goals? Do your values and mission align? Does the investor genuinely grasp and back your vision, offering more than just funds? Perhaps it’s publishing capabilities, IP, tech expertise, or other knowledge. Opting for funding based on money alone isn’t the best strategy.

Fail faster

“Fail fast and follow the fun” isn’t just for game design. Whether it’s a core gameplay loop in your game or a feedback loop in your studio’s daily operations, the key is to test quickly and iterate. However, remember that failing simply for the sake of trying isn’t success, contrary to what Silicon Valley startup culture might suggest. Failure is beneficial only if it’s relatively quick, cost-effective, and you’ve learned something valuable from it that you’re actively using to improve.

Have more than one bank

Banks can go under, face liquidity issues, change their rules, or get acquired. They’re not a guaranteed service. Your assets could be frozen, or your credit line could be canceled. It’s always smart to have a backup.

People are everything

We’re in a knowledge worker industry, where the most significant value comes from executing an idea. Studios typically have little to no value in tangible assets. If you’re lucky, much of your value comes from your IP, but beyond that, your company is worthless without its people. The most critical asset you have is your ability to execute development tasks. Given this, one of the key metrics to monitor and enhance is talent retention. A bit of turnover can be beneficial — it keeps things fresh and ensures you mostly have people who are truly aligned with your company’s vision. However, high turnover damages company culture and efficiency, and hinders knowledge transfer among your team.

Additional materials:

· Radical Candor

· Dare to Lead

You won’t be making games anymore

You’re either running a company or making video games; it’s tough to excel at both simultaneously. When you’re running the company, your primary role is to foster an environment where others can efficiently produce games. If you’re not ready for that shift, consider appointing a CEO and return to game development. Juggling both roles can be detrimental to you and the company.

Additional materials:

· Game Studio Leadership: You Can Do It by Jesse Schell

Adapt

You must remain flexible and continuously adapt to the market landscape. That said, whenever feasible, stay true to your mission and current strategy. This way, you capitalize on the specialization and experience you’ve already accrued. But always be open to refining the methods and tools you employ. Evolving and iterating your company is an ongoing process — there’s no final release date; it’s continuous live ops.

Keep in mind the industry you’re part of. You’re not just a VR or mobile game developer; you’re in the video game business, which at its core is an entertainment industry. If the landscape seems to be shifting unfavorably, be ready to pivot — change platforms, engines, or genres, especially if there’s a promising opportunity. Just remember that pivoting has its costs. Every time you venture into uncharted territory, there’ll be a learning curve, and in some areas, it might feel like starting from scratch with your company’s progress.

Free/fast money can change your company

Anshar Studios was fortunate to secure a substantial amount of government funding, primarily from the National Centre of Research and Development. If you find yourself in a position where you receive a large sum of money rapidly — whether from the government, an investor, or even from game sales right after launch — you need to be cautious. Many companies use this influx to grow quickly, and there are several risks tied to such a move. The most pressing concern is the substantial increase in costs, predicated on the hope that by the time the initial funds dry up, the investment would’ve started generating higher returns. This can be a dicey bet, and overextension is a genuine threat. Moreover, rapid growth can strain your company culture. Maintaining the quality of onboarding and other processes becomes challenging. The solution? Implement robust financial controls, ensure proportional growth in support staff, and have a solid plan for where future funds will come from to cover increased operational costs.

Have a mission

A mission helps concentrate your company’s resources on a specific goal and serves as a tool for straightforward communication, both internally and externally, about why you’re doing what you’re doing. Without a clear “Why” behind the “What”, rallying people behind your objectives becomes a challenge. Your company’s current strategy, which can naturally evolve over time based on circumstances, should always be rooted in the mission.

Additional materials:

· How to scale a gamedev company (“Mission, Strategy, Goals” paragraph)

· Start with why — how great leaders inspire action | Simon Sinek | TEDxPugetSound

· An example of a mission statement by Insomniac Games

· The Paradox Formula

Get your shit together

For a significant duration, and possibly always, you’ll be a bottleneck in your company. Decisions and actions will often wait on your approval, whether you’re taking them on directly or delegating. Delegating itself requires effort, especially when it comes to providing the right context and parameters for the task. A lot hinges on the team you build around you, but equally, it’s about your efficiency and self-organization skills. There’s a plethora of resources out there on this topic — some great, some not so much — but the crux of it is understanding that there’s an endless amount of work. Your role is to manage the pace, set priorities, maintain quality, and ensure nothing slips through the cracks. It’s not about working harder or longer, but maximizing the quality of work in the time you can realistically commit without burning out.

Additional materials:

· „Getting Things Done” by David Allen

· „Essentialism” by Greg McKeown

· „Atomic Habits” by James Clear

· „Deep work” by Cal Newport

· „Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman

Develop the company, not just the team.

At first glance, this might seem contradictory to the “People are everything” point, but it’s not. What sets companies apart from mere teams is the infrastructure that facilitates growth, support, and professionalization of game development. This encompasses IT, administration, legal, HR, and well-defined processes and procedures detailing how the company operates, from hiring to continuous integration. While all these elements are invaluable, they’d be meaningless without the people (the team) to begin with. However, these structures can significantly enhance the consistency and impact of the team’s work. Their importance grows with the size of the company.

Additional materials:

· How to scale up in gamedev

· How to scale a gamedev company

· Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t

· Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Good to Great, Book 2)

Be strategic with your bizdev

It’s tempting in bizdev to chase every lead, driven by the fear of missing out. While casting a wide net might seem effective due to the low average success rate, it often leads to wasted time on unlikely prospects. Don’t feel the need to attend every party or accept every conference meeting invite. Instead, curate your leads, eliminating the dead-ends, and focus on the truly promising ones.

For instance, if you’re targeting a publisher, don’t just send a generic email pitch. Research your connections to that publisher, find if they have events at upcoming conferences, or even schedule a face-to-face pitch if they’re nearby. Maybe tap into contacts who’ve worked with them before for insights. Instead of spreading yourself thin, invest your time wisely in meaningful connections. Remember, even with this targeted approach, you’ll face more rejections than acceptances. Build resilience for this journey.

Nobody knows how to make games

If you’re not creating a sequel or a clone with minimal changes, using the same team and tools, you’re in uncharted territory as a game developer, facing potential failure and learning on the go.

Because of this uncertainty, precise planning and budgeting can be a real challenge. To validate your game idea, you’ll want to use every method available, from peer reviews for game design validation to UXR-backed playtests and sharing your game with the broader public through betas or early access. The “Mike Cerny Method” and the ideation phase are essential here. Many games dive into production without a solid design or a well-defined target audience. It’s crucial to understand who your game is for. Some creative directors claim they’re designing games for themselves, believing they inherently know what players want. This mindset sometimes leads to arguments like “if we asked people, they’d just want faster horses.” I strongly disagree. Ignoring your audience’s preferences is a gamble, especially when aiming for innovation. Ultimately, the gaming world is unpredictable. The most iconic games often emerge as unexpected hits. All you can do, is try, there is no do.

Additional materials:

· D.I.C.E. Summit 2002 — Mark Cerny

· A Playful Production Process: For Game Designers (and Everyone)

· The Black Swan

Play the infinite game

The video game industry is unpredictable. Game development is intricate and often costly, particularly when aiming for high production values. Even though the industry is expanding, supply is outpacing demand, making mere survival an achievement. There’s a reason companies that have been operating for at least five years are seen as “doing something right.”

Anshar Studios has been around since 2012. We may not be the best, but we improve with each passing year, and we’ve persisted while many others haven’t. Your goal shouldn’t be to top the industry. Instead, focus on improving incrementally every year and ensuring you have the resources to remain in the game.

It’s not about beating the competition, but outlasting them.

Additional materials:

· The Infinite Game

· No Rules Rules

· Nine Lies About Work

Final Thought

Running a game dev company is a daunting task. I imagine that running any enterprise where you combine love for the subject matter with the need to professionally run a business is challenging.

For those challenges ahead, I will leave you with a quote from the movie “The Martian”, which helped me tremendously throughout many perturbations in my gamedev career:

“At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you… everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end.

Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next.

And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”

What Is it all about

I co-founded Anshar Studios in 2012 with a friend, and with our first contract, we hired two specialists as our first employees. Since then, we have scaled to a company of over 150 employees, with a publishing label alongside it.

This article is meant to document the tools and solutions we implemented and iterated on to grapple with obstacles that came our way while scaling from 4 to 150. Some of the problems we saw coming, some took us by surprise, and addressing those on the fly took a lot of effort. Hopefully, after this read, you will better understand what you are getting yourself into while scaling.

Tools and concepts I will cover in this article:

· Mission, strategy, goals — the importance of vision and direction and the effect it has on scale

· Conscious culture forming — the importance of culture over rules even while scaling

· Production processes and pipelines — how they must iterate with you while you grow

· Controlling — the importance of having a firm grasp of your cost and income structure

· Human Resources — when having just a lead/director structure does not cover all the bases

· Middle Management — the layer that pops up at a certain scale and usually has it very hard

· Top Management — the responsibility and a decision-making shift that occurs at a certain scale

· Corporate — the sometimes forgotten intricacies of legal consequences of scaling

· Infrastructure — what are the infrastructure milestones that you will face while you scale

You could write a separate, detailed article about each of those topics, but the purpose of this one is different. In this article, I will provide enough information about each point on the list for you to understand its purpose and how its importance relates to the company's scale. This way, while scaling your business, you can be prepared for the challenges ahead.

Reasons for growth

The game development industry is focused on growth, and it’s not hard to see why. The number of game IPs and new releases is increasing, as is the complexity of creating a video game. It may seem that the barrier to entry for game development has never been lower, thanks to tools like Unity, Unreal Engine, and Godot. However, it could also be argued that creating a video game to industry standards has never been more complex and requires more skilled professionals each year.

It’s important to distinguish between the terms “scale” and “growth” in this context. Sometimes “scale” refers to a disproportionate increase in revenue compared to the growth of headcount. However, in this article, I am using “scaling” to refer to growth that requires changing how the company operates.

Apart from investors’ pressure, there can be multiple reasons for growth. An increase in revenue is the simplest, but it can also be wanting to jump from a certain industry segment to another, like jumping from Indie Premium to AA or from AA to AAA, which requires a drastic increase in headcount.

Anshar Studios’ growth was initially driven by an increase in revenue, which allowed the company to develop side projects in addition to work-for-hire projects. Later, the company jumped from indie premium to AA, which required much larger teams. It’s important to understand why you want to grow your company, as sometimes it may not be necessary. Every time you increase the size of your company, you need to change the way you do things and essentially learn how to run the company all over again. In some cases, it may be more beneficial to focus on improving the efficiency of your current-sized company instead of attempting to grow it.

Size classifications

You can classify the size of a company by a couple of factors, but the two main ones are yearly revenue and the number of employees. Although the size of the revenue does in fact, impact scaling, most problems to overcome are due to the number of people involved, and this metric is usually categorized along the following lines:

- Microenterprise — fewer than 10 employees

- Small enterprise — 10 to 49 employees

- Medium enterprise — 50 to 249 employees

- Large enterprise — 250 or more

Now, the theory is that solutions that are a good fit for one size of a company can be an ill fit for another. And while I agree that this is generally true, it’s not so black and white. How well a solution scales, or how bad it scales, depends heavily on the company's internal culture, the strength of the key management, and the average level of self-management savviness of an individual at the company. So, for example, you can stretch some micro-enterprise solution usefulness to work fine in a company of 30 if you can compensate with the culture and strong management.

Considering my expertise, in this article, I will focus on analysis and solutions from micro to medium studios, I will not cover large studios, as it would be only in theory.

Tools and concepts

Mission, Strategy, Goals

A strong mission statement is the most crucial tool you have when it comes to scaling your business. At Anshar Studios, it took us a few years to define our mission clearly, but I believe it is important to have a clear mission from the very beginning.

By “mission,” I mean the “why” behind the company's existence. It’s not just a PR tool but also a way to concisely communicate to everyone in the company why we are doing what we do.

One of the biggest advantages of a clear mission and strategy when it comes to scaling is increased employee retention. Assuming you pay your employees fairly, having an interesting project and a good team are the most important factors in retention. When you communicate your values and how your projects and work practices align with them, it is easy for people to determine whether they identify with the company’s mission. When people identify with the company’s values and mission, they are more likely to accept the strategy, goals, and, ultimately, the project.

For example, if you say that you want to innovate in the RPG genre because you are passionate about the medium, it will be easier to retain talent that shares that passion. On the other hand, it may be harder to retain talent that doesn’t care as much about RPGs.

I like to divide a mission statement into values, goals, and strategy. Values are the beliefs that define who we are as a company and should not change over time or be revised based on changes in the market or business strategy. Goals are the things we want to achieve in alignment with our values. Strategy is the actions we will take to achieve our objectives while staying true to our values.

For example, one of Anshar Studios’ core values is “systemic narrative,” which refers to our belief that video games have evolved to allow players enormous agency through interactivity, which can be used to build a narrative. Our current goal is to explore this approach to systemic narrative by specializing in RPG development with choice and consequence systems that shape the narrative. Our current strategy is to partner with publishers and work on full SKU production or remakes of existing IPs in the premium AA space (PC and console).

Maybe in the future, the strategy will change, and we will shift to our own IP creation. Maybe the objective will change, maybe the market will shift, and we will decide that we need to blend the RPG with something in order to stay relevant or to innovate. But we should always stick to developing systems that evoke narration in players’ brains because we believe games are special above other mediums.

This value alone makes it much easier to hire anybody in gamedev that is passionate about systems designs and their relationship to narrative and overall RPGs design. Some specialists want to explore this as part of their professional life. When waiving that flag as a company, it’s easier for them to spot you.

Some great resources on the company mission:

Start with why — how great leaders inspire action | Simon Sinek | TEDxPugetSound

An example of a mission statement by Insomniac Games

When?

You will need to pitch to your team why it makes sense to work with you from day one. It’s fine if the mission changes, even better if it evolves based on the same core values you have as a developer. But you will need something your people can follow and believe in from the very beginning.

At Anshar Studios, we started with the core value of radical truthfulness and no crunch policy from the very beginning. Back then, loudly declaring that we were not crunching and not bullshitting (about deadlines, for example) was a real differentiator in Poland. Over time the industry, at least in Poland, got better, and we also, as a company, got better at doing games. We added game-specific elements to the mission, like focusing on high quality but on a smaller scope (i.e., no open worlds) and systemic narrative (i.e., making games that give player agency and build narration by interacting with the game systems, not only by writing).

Conscious Culture Forming

Culture is the set of formal and informal ways of doing things at a studio: what is the dress code, what are the core hours, how and when people eat, how people give feedback, what is the organizational structure, and many more, from how and if the birthdays are celebrated to the way the conference rooms are named.

All these things, small and big, define what it’s like to work in the studio. The company's founders usually install it, but if not cared for, it will drift into whatever the influences of the new hires will be.

Culture is not set, it’s formed by repeated behavior that is either being accepted and/or endorsed or by not being corrected.

A conscious approach to culture forming is important because you do not want to end up with a random result, usually heavily influenced by the “old guard” if the company is growing slowly or by new hires if the company is growing rapidly.

For example, there was a time when Anshar Studios was growing very rapidly (from ~80 to ~120) in a couple of months. That was also when a friend company in the same city was rapidly shrinking due to strategy change. Logically a lot of ex-employees of that company applied to Anshar Studios. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that, when you have a huge influx of people from the same company, sharing the same culture, joining your company in a short period, their culture will rub on yours, whether you like it or not. In effect, there was a short period at Anshar, when we looked very carefully if we should accept an application from that said company.

When?

This should constantly be on your mind, or at least at the back of your head. When the company is super small, it’s easy to do it organically, sometimes without even a conscious thought (although I would not recommend that), but the bigger you get, especially when nobody can have an equal amount of time spent with the founders and observe them in daily action the more you need to think about passing on the torch to the top management and leads. People look to management as to what is acceptable behavior in the company. Hence, it’s super important for them to set an example after the visibility of the founders becomes limited.

Production Processes and Pipelines

Companies have different definitions of pipelines and processes in production, at Anshar Studios, we differentiate them in the following way:

A pipeline is a linear set of steps from a technical perspective you need to take to produce something tangible. For example, a character creation pipeline would involve creating concept art, then sculpting, creating materials, rigging, and setting the mode in an engine to be used (for example, by animators).

A process is multidisciplinary and involves how the different pipelines interact with each other between departments. How and when the character is handed off to the animator, how the concept artist collaborates with design etc.

Think of an assembly line on which different machines operate on a single element in a certain order — that is a pipeline. The way this element moves between different assembly lines is a process.

When your company is small, you don’t need a lot of processes, you need solid pipelines to deliver high-quality products. On-the-fly decisions and hand management substitute the processes by the leads or founders, and things move along. But once the team grows, you need to set up processes so that production does not stop when a lead or a founder fails to decide in time.

An example of a pipeline is how your character creation is set up, what sort of tools and software you use to model characters, export/import them, how they end up in the game engine, and how they are set up for the non-artists specializations to be used.

An example of a process is a handoff of that character between departments, i.e., how a narrative designer prepares a brief for a concept artist, who then delivers the concept art for the character artist, and so on.

When?

This is a very dynamic process that should be correlated with the size of the company. Strong pipelines are important, but as the company grows, it’s important to have more systematic and structured processes. If this isn’t done, chaos can ensue, leading to two outcomes. One, self-driven, self-organized individuals who are good at finding work for themselves may thrive, but they will eventually burn out. On the other hand, people who thrive with direction will become lost, highly inefficient, and unmotivated, which is the case for most people. It’s important to remember that under pressure, people don’t rise to the level of their goals but rather fall to the level of their systems. This means that the efficiency and success of the company will depend on how it is set up. However, it’s important to find a balance. If process building outpaces the growth and needs of the company, it can lead to an “over-corporatization” effect, where it becomes difficult to get anything done. It’s important to ensure that process building is proportional to the size and needs of the company.

In the game development industry, a key performance indicator (KPI) for introducing production pipelines and processes into a company is the number of producers on a game. Initially, it’s often zero because founders take on that responsibility. However, as the company grows, it’s important to ensure that process building is proportional. As a rule of thumb, a healthy ratio is one producer per 10 specialists. This helps to ensure that the company can scale effectively and maintain efficiency.

See the infrastructure chapter for pointers about specific tools and software.

Controlling

Controlling is the fourth branch of finances, alongside taxes, accounting, and audit. It covers the overall discipline of knowing the costs, how they are structured and what they will be. It is crucial for company efficiency. Cash flow is king, and you need to control it (pun intended) to sustain it.

The idea of controlling is two-fold:

- Understanding the past so you can optimize the present

- Using the past and present to project and plan the future

At first, Excel will suffice, but you should switch to more sophisticated Business Intelligence tools when your company grows.

What you should do is:

- Track costs, putting every cost in an appropriate bucket, like Project A, Project B, Marketing, etc., to know the costs of each project, the overheads, monthly expenses per category, etc

- Estimate a budget for a fiscal year

- Update the budget regularly, i.g. every quarter, using the real data from the last quarter to re-estimate the rest of the year

- Analyse the actual results vs. budgeted results

- Have a visual representation of data.

I know we all love making games, and this must be boring to read, but you cannot make games without money — cash flow is king — and controlling is your treasurer.

There are a lot of materials online on how to organize your financial data in a nice and readable way, how to interpret them and use to your advantage, searchable under the term “Business Intelligence” (BI).

When?

You should clearly understand your cost structure from day one. As the complexity of your studio and projects grow, so should the tools you use for controlling. The overall goal is to understand the cost structure per project, so if you have one project, the task is fairly easy and probably very much in line with the accounting unless you do a lot of magic on tax subsidies, government funding, cost capitalization, etc. As the employee's costs represent most likely the biggest part of your monthly expenses, the most important thing to implement early on if you have more than one project are timesheets that track the employees' engagement per project and translate that into your cost structure. If you track that, the rest is just how fancy is your data representation.

So to summarize, when you’re a micro-enterprise, a well-labeled accounting will probably do the trick. Introduce timesheets if you start to grow, especially if you work on more than one project. Excel is fine, but the bigger you get, you want to aggregate the data into some nice representation, so you do not get lost in the enormous Excel models, and that is when BI comes along to help you to base your decisions on data.

Anshar Studios started with Excel but recently, for showcasing data, we use Microsoft PowerBI. We also test a great tool from our friends at IndieBI that integrates sales data from game storefronts.

Human Resources

Typically, human resources can be divided into the following categories:

- HR Business Partner: specialists that support leaders within the organization by guiding, developing, and supporting employees.

- Employer branding: specialists that handle the external and internal branding of the company from the perspective of being an attractive employer.

- Recruitment: specialists that handle recruiting and onboarding new personnel.

- HR/payroll Admin: specialists that handle all the paperwork and legal aspects of the hiring and payroll process.

Depending on the company's size, these responsibilities may be distributed among the founders, senior leadership, or specialized HR personnel.

When?

At Anshar Studios, we introduced HR (apart from HR Admin) when we had over 100 people. Before that, the tasks were split between the founders and management. In hindsight, this was too late, and we are currently struggling to catch up. Here are some recommendations based on what we would do differently:

- HR Business Partner: We introduced this role when we had over 120 people, which was too late. An HR Business Partner can help with processes such as bi-yearly employee reviews, supervisory feedback loops, handling employee departures, and building career plans. Depending on the founders' skillset, the sweet spot for a full-time HR Business Partner may be between 50 and 100 people.

- Employer branding: We have done employer branding over the years, but not through a dedicated HR branch. Instead, it has been handled by our publishing and marketing department. At our current size of 150 people, we still do not have a dedicated EB person, as we do not feel it is a full-time job. Instead, tasks related to employer branding fall under the responsibilities of the HR Business Partner and recruitment and are executed by marketing if needed.

- Recruitment: Before the pandemic, we used recruitment agencies to support our recruitment efforts. However, the cost of acquisitions in game development has increased recently, especially with the explosion of remote work and the general boom in the industry. It now makes financial sense to have a full-time recruiter, regardless of company size, if you are scaling. However, this may change depending on market conditions and specific strategies. For example, a full-time recruiter may be necessary if you constantly hire (as is often the case in game development).

- HR/payroll Admin: This role should scale proportionally with the company to ensure smooth operations. At Anshar Studios, we have two people covering HR administration processes for 150 people. It was only one person until we reached around 80 people, and for much of that time, it was a part-time role. However, with time this led to an understaffed and overwhelmed HR Admin department, which is not ideal. The exact number of HR Admin personnel will vary depending on the labor regulations of your country and the type of business you operate.

Middle Management

Middle management was the trickiest change implementation we did at Anshar Studios. The problem was that our initial team department leaders had become directors, so the top management. And while they were initially overwhelmed, at least we had something to build on: they had been leaders for years before and had some management experience. When you advance your leads to directors, you are left to either advance your specialists to leads or hire externally. And while hiring is always a nice option for scaling, hiring leads is tricky, and it’s an unreasonable expectation to hire the entire middle management. Consequently, you need to advance the specialists to leadership positions and there are a couple of problems with that:

- Lead hard skills — if the person does not have them, she will not be initially respected, which poses a problem. On the other side, promoting your best specialist to a leadership position is also usually a very bad idea, as you want the best of the best from a perspective of hard skills to do exactly what she is best at.

- Lead soft skills — absolute must-have for the position and not always present in the department team.

- Whatever the person's skills, there is a good chance she did not have any managerial training.

- It’s a hard transition from a colleague to a direct manager.

When?

Ideally, you want to have 6–8 direct reports, this number allows you to squeeze in a good chunk of work apart from managing a team. Following that rule, you need middle management when direct reports to the board have direct reports exceeding that number, especially if it’s by a lot. You can’t reasonably manage a team of 15–20 creative specialists. Thus, middle management actually should come pretty early, somewhere between 50 and 80 people. Anshar Studios started the transition with 100 employees it was too late, and the process was a pain because of that.

Top Management

By top management, I mean people who directly report to the entity in charge of the company, be it a single person or a board, and at the same time, they have their direct reports.

Usually, there are no directors in a micro or a small company; it just sounds silly, but there are leads. And leads are in charge of either a team or a certain department in the company. They have the ear of the person in charge and can directly influence and shape the company — nice. The problem starts when the company scales and those leads start having many people reporting to them. The projects are either bigger, or it’s more of them, and the people in charge of the company naturally lose their grip on everything, so they focus on their direct reports — the now fresh directors who used to be leads. The problem with that, as that is how it usually goes, is that the new directors have no idea how to make big decisions and take responsibility for them. There is a big difference between being responsible for a specific department inside a set strategy, where the Board makes all the big decisions and shaping that strategy and making decisions that impact the entire company, which is what being in top management is all about — making decisions.

When?

Following the previously mentioned 6–8 direct reports optimum, you should have leads super early in the life of a company. Those leads will probably transfer into directors when you introduce middle management, but you want to do it earlier so that you can squeeze in some coaching and training for them first. Anshar converted leads to directors at around 80 people, and it was too late. The process took well over a year to work — I would start doing it at around 50 the second time.

Corporate

People often don’t realize the paperwork required to run a business. My perspective is skewed toward Polish and EU laws, so take this information carefully. When you’re a micro-enterprise, you do everything yourself. Then you hire administration staff to do most of the tedious paperwork, and for legal matters, you probably use an external partner, which is fine until it’s not. When a company grows to a certain size, especially if it has a certain legal status or is listed on the stock market, a lot of legal and corporate paperwork needs to be done according to specific calendars and reports. For this, you need an internal lawyer to handle the corporate affairs, which are all legal matters related to the size and status of the company. And when I say legal matters and don’t mean creating contracts or mitigating tax risks, which an in-house lawyer could do, corporate role is to ensure that the company runs smoothly from a legal perspective.

Examples of duties that stem from the fact that Anshar Studios is incorporated under Polish laws include:

- Having a board and a supervisory board that meets regularly and performs various legal obligations, such as creating reports.

- Registering changes concerning shares in the shareholders' register kept by a specialized entity.

- Reporting obligations regarding the closing of the financial year.

- Obligations related to data protection regulations.

When?

It’s important to note that these requirements are not solely tied to the size of the company (although some may be according to the law), but rather to the type of company you are and the laws under which you operate. For example, the requirements changed drastically in Poland from a sole proprietorship (the simplest form of running a business) to a listed joint stock company (the most complicated and legally restricted form). So be aware that changes in the type of company you run may have certain corporate overheads, typically requiring an in-house lawyer supported by an external law firm on an hourly contract.

Infrastructure

This concept is tricky and very dependent on the founders’ skillset. Suppose you have a programmer or anyone with a strong IT background among your founders. In that case, you’ll probably have some infrastructure foundations early on that will mostly be hindered by cash considerations and your mind space. If not, may God have mercy on your soul. Let me put it this way: what differentiates a professional team from an amateur team are their processes and pipelines, but what differentiates a professional company from a shack in the woods held together by some nails and duct tape is infrastructure. You can’t grow a professional game development company efficiently without IT and dev ops departments, and yes, those are eventually separate departments.

When?

The solutions and costs associated with them are highly adjustable, so in this section, I’ll try to show the journey we went through at Anshar Studios with each of those:

• Versioning system — your number one infrastructure you set up in a gamedev company allows for a smooth collaboration of multiple professionals on a single codebase. It also allows you to move backward to previous versions of your codebase, so it’s also useful even for a single developer setup. This is an absolute must-have for any software company, regardless of the size, now depending on the size. You might use different setups, there are free online solutions, but they usually come with great either space or license limitations, or there are free local server solutions based on SVN or GIT, which are great for small teams. Most of the small gamedev is either on SVN or GIT. When your company gets bigger, especially if you are working on Unreal, Perforce becomes the standard. Unfortunately, it’s ridiculously expensive. It became a standard at Anshar at around 80 people, before then, we were SVN-based (VisualSVN Server + TortoiseSVN). The biggest hurdle when dealing with a versioning system is how to handle big art files and if you want to use branches in production. If not, I think everybody would use GIT for art files.
• Backup — you need to have backups, especially of the server that holds your versioning system, which is your company's most crucial data. Again, there are online solutions for that, hardware solutions for that, and professional companies that offer backup services. The two most important things about backups are 1) to have them and 2) to have a procedure in place that periodically tests the backup to see if it works. Backup is a very scalable element. Depending on the money spent, you can have multiple fail-safes, tracking back longer periods, ranging from bigger pieces of data. You decide this depending on the type of work you do and the risk assessment. The important part is that, regardless of size, you have SOME backup, which is periodically tested to see if it actually works.
• Continuous integration — it’s building automatization based on the versioning system. Ideally, it takes daily states of the codebases. It builds it for every platform the game is created for automatically, running some basic tests at the same time and sending out info to the right people if something went wrong (e.g., the code did not compile or the code did compile, but the build failed, or the code compiled, the build succeeded but it crashed on a test scene, etc.). There are software solutions where you write scripts to set up such processes. In the industry, the most popular are Jenkins and TeamCity. Anshar Studios currently runs on Jenkins.
• Software for task tracking — you start with simple and free solutions in a small company. We started with Trello, then we moved to Scrumwise, a paid solution, and around 50–60 people moved to Jira. The move to Jira was mostly because of Confluence, we needed a documentation tool, and we decided to go “full Atlassian” package.
• Software for bug tracking — we started with our server setup of a free solution — Mantis Bug Tracker, then later moved to Jira.
• Software for online file sharing — we started with free google doc accounts. Because I can’t imagine living without Microsoft Excel, in time, we moved to the full Microsoft package office.com. So we use One Drive mostly because it’s part of the whole suite.
• VPN — with the rise of remote work for security reasons, you need some VPN to access your servers outside the company’s building’s local network. There are multiple free and paid solutions out there that can scale to your needs.
• Internet with a backup — you obviously will need a good internet connection. With remote work, you need good speeds both ways, not only download, so a symmetrical connection is up for consideration. When you scale, your uptime is crucial, so having a backup internet connection becomes a thing — the costs are minimal considering your overall overheads. When your internet goes down, your developing efficiency decreases drastically, especially with remote/hybrid work.
• Security — physical and digital security is a thing, especially if you start working with bigger publishers that require you to pass certain due diligence procedures to ensure the code base and IP materials are secured. Those include camera setups, server redundancies, door securities (fire and break-in proof), VPN/firewall strengths, antivirus, domain policies, etc. Those do not necessarily need to scale only with people, they scale with budgets, IP, and partners you work with.
• IT / Help desk — in a small company, this is handled by a most capable team member as a side job, usually a programmer. In time this is becoming too big of a time burner if you do not introduce a dedicated person handling it. We had an IT/DevOps person at around 40. Currently, our IT is two people, but it’s separated and independent from DevOps, which is its own department now.

It’s not one size fits all

Every company is different. Gamedev is diverse in itself when it comes to genres, platforms, and monetization methods, I could not presume that what I’m proposing here would work for a drastically different, yet still gamedev, environment. Be it as it may, I think the biggest differentiators are people, their strong and weak points, and their level of organizational experience, which should not be mistaken for technical skills. Through organizational experience, I understand the maturity of communication, understanding both pipelines and processes, and being able to iterate those. You can’t implement Management 3.0 ideas in a Management 1.0 run organization. You need to do it step by step.

Every company is different. Context is king, so be my guest, pick and choose, disagree with some concepts, and modify others. I would love to hear your thoughts on it in the comments or on Twitter.

Bibliography

This article was largely based on my speech at GIC 2021 in Poznań: “Growth Pains — How to scale up in gamedev”

Books I recommend to a broadly understood studio leadership (many concepts in this article are derived from these):

· Radical Candor by Kim Scott

· Nine Lies About Work by Ashley Goodall and Marcus Buckingham

· No Rules Rules by Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings

· Creativity Inc. by Amy Wallace and Edwin Catmull

· Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Deepak Chopra

· The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker

· Built to last by Jim Collins, Jerry I Porras

· Good to great by Jim Collins

· The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

· The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

· The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey

· Start With Why by Simon Sinek

· Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Special Thanks To

Agata Hacura, for feedback on this article.

What it’s all about

Clearly and concisely conveying an idea to another human being is one of the most important aspects of video game development and probably of any collaborative endeavor.

In our industry, pitching is a skill that can enable funding of your game idea and help sell it to your team and players.

It is essential.

We pitch in various circumstances — To investors, publishers, clients, and our peers. But the goals of a pitch are usually the same. We are trying to convince someone that our idea is fantastic and plausible. There is never one without the other. For example, while pitching to publishers, it’s essential to show that the idea is good and the game can be pulled off.

I have worked in gamedev since 2006. I co-founded Anshar Studios in 2012 and am the primary person responsible for business development here, meaning I’m responsible for pitching ideas to other companies. I make them pay us millions for the games we make.

In this article, I will convey some of my experiences to do the same for your gamedev endeavor.

Why are we pitching? The importance of motivation

Before you get into the nitty-gritty of your game idea, it’s essential to understand your motivation. That motivation will determine the pitching outcome more than the idea itself.

We often know what our game is about; we sometimes even know how to do it, but we rarely focus on why we want to do a game we are pitching, and this is a critical factor. You can pitch the same game in the same way, but depending on the “Why,” the strength of the pitch will vary.

Let me give you an example: Let’s say we want to pitch a battle royale game in 2021 after having already had games like PUBG and Fortnite. So, because of those games, we can say:

“Battle royale games are continuously popular, and although we will be a little late to the party, there is still a lot of money to be made in this genre if you put a good idea on top of that. So, we propose to do a game about….”

Vs.

“Yes, we know it sounds crazy to pitch a battle royale game in 2021, but hear me out — we love BR games, we breathe BR, and most importantly, we understand BR games. Despite the immense competition, we have an idea that can push this genre forward. So, we propose to do a game about….”

Even if you pitch the same game afterward, you know you’re dealing with an opportunistic dispassionate approach in the first pitch. You’re dealing with a passion-driven, innovative approach in the second one. Of course, I’m simplifying things here with this example, but the point is that the “why” gives you an insight into people, and this is what it is all about — the people.

Ideas are cheap; ideas are easy.

I am not saying that having a great idea doesn’t help or is irrelevant, but the hard part is doing it. You have to forge that idea into actual gameplay. That is also how most of the investment sector works. Investors do not invest in ideas; they invest in the people behind them. People they believe can pull it off. So, the “Why?” in pitching can be translated into the authenticity of motivation. What drives you as a person determines the believable degree of success you can achieve.

The theory behind this is well explained in this Simon Sinek TED talk, “How great leaders inspire action.” In it and his book Start With Why, Sinek explains that to inspire someone, you need to focus on the human reasons for creating something before focusing on the product itself.

With this subject, it’s crucial to watch Jason VandenBerghe’s “Forging Honor: Providing a Coherent Vision for a New IP.” This encapsulates the Simon Sinek “Why” idea in an authentic game development context.

How are we pitching? The importance of a great logline

How to pitch your game is closely connected to whom you are pitching the game to and in what phase of development. But we need to start somewhere; we will get back to different types of pitches and phases later. For now, let’s break down a basic pitch structure.

I use a logline movie template from a popular book on screenwriting by Blake Snyder titled “Save the Cat!”. The first chapter, called “What is it?” describes in detail how a movie script logline should be structured:

- Isn’t it ironic? — Irony in setting up unusual and exciting situations, like a cop trying to reconcile with his estranged wife and getting trapped in an office building with a bunch of terrorists (Die Hard).

- A Compelling Mental Picture — When you hear the idea for the movie, you should immediately be able to visualize it, which should be interesting to you.

- Audience and Cost — The pitch should give at least a broad idea about what type of movie we are talking about to derive a ballpark budget and a target audience from it.

- A Killer Title — Self-explanatory; a good movie script pitch usually involves a good title.

Although movies are very close to video games in many ways, you cannot copy this approach for both without some transformation. Here is what I propose:

“Isn’t it ironic” -> “Unique Selling Point”

The infamous USP must not necessarily be a new, fresh, and unheard-of idea. There is no such thing. True innovation is iteration and added value to already existing content. But you do need to flesh out what you will be iterating. It can be anything from a systemic, narrative, or art angle. But it needs to be encapsulated in one or two sentences.

“A compelling mental picture” -> “Player Fantasy” and/or “Reference mashup”

This part is the most important one. You must be able to paint a mental picture with one sentence that answers the following questions: “Who am I? What am I doing? Why is it cool?”.

Most video games are about playing out a fantasy. If you can describe that fantasy in one sentence, it is compelling; that is your pitch. You can follow it up with a reference mashup. Some sources will tell you that using references in pitching is dangerous because it can lead to monster pitches like “It’s GTA 5 meets Minecraft, but better.” It can create a mental picture of a spectacular production-wise disaster instead of a compelling player fantasy.

Using wisely can drastically shorten the time needed for mutual understanding between the one giving and receiving a pitch.

“Audience and cost” -> “Genre description”

If you know exactly what the genre is, it should be mentioned in the pitch. If not, it can be a part of the reference mashup to help show the cost and audience.

Things that hint at the camera, art style, and how animation-heavy the game is will give a pitch receiver an idea of what the game scope can be and what types of players will be interested. An RTS with a survival mechanic twist immediately points to an isometric or big zoom-out top-down view. This creates the cost and scope of the project, the same way a third-person action-adventure perfectly encapsulates the immense animation scope the game will require.

“A killer title” -> “Promo art”

I have personally worked on over a dozen video games that changed their title at the last possible moment. Using codenames or even a copyrighted title in production is common. For example, I worked on a game codenamed Gravity inspired by the movie under the same name and later released it under the title Detached.

I learned not to get too attached to a game title, so I do not think it is essential in a pitch. A codename or work-in-progress title will suffice. But the one crucial thing is the promo art. By promo art, I do not mean a mock screenshot. By promo art, I mean art that conveys the emotions and tone of a game.

It is much easier to sell a game idea with good promo art. It can be costly to develop — a professional illustrator will create one anywhere between two weeks and two months — depending on the complexity, number of characters, and more. I think it’s a worthy investment for an AA game that tries to get millions of euros in investment. But it might not be worth it for a small indie project. The thousands of dollars promo art might cost could be spent on something else. Video games are a visual medium, so it helps immensely if you can pitch with words and art.

An excellent example of suggestive promo art is “Ark: Survival Evolved”:

It’s a matter of opinion whether it’s a fantastic piece of art, but it describes the game well. Lady with a machine gun riding a dinosaur with sci-fi buildings in the background. This art speaks volumes about the game, adds a brief visual description of what you do in the game, and shows what the USP is. With this kind of promo art, you are golden.

The famous elevator pitch

A logline from “Save the Cat!” is also often referred to as an elevator pitch, which got its name from when you’re in an elevator with a high-level executive, and you want to pitch them your idea, you have about 30 seconds, so you need a clear and concise way to do it.

While I know that such situations happen in real life, I would not count on them. You often have a short time to pitch an idea in a standard business environment. Your idea will usually be pitched to a busy and easily distracted person. This could be a meeting with a busy CEO or a tired developer. Either way, communicating your idea in such a way is crucial, and it takes time to practice it. So practice on your friends, co-workers, and others whenever you have the chance. Always remember to Practice. Your. Pitch.

What are we pitching? The idea and the team

Once we know why we want to pitch something and how we will pitch it, we can finally focus on what we will pitch. As I mentioned in the beginning, it is about the game, who will create it, and how. You need a great idea and a great execution plan; one without the other will not work.

The Game

To convey a game idea, we first need to define it clearly for ourselves. What constitutes a game idea? Most games are not single mechanic gimmicks. Even if they are, implementing and iterating on that single mechanic means dozens or hundreds of mini-decisions that need to be made along the way. The ideas can evolve into drastically different products, depending on the execution.

This is precisely why publishers are reluctant to sign a deal based on a pitch document. The decisions have yet to be made, many questions remain unanswered, and the risk is too significant. Studios that get funding based on a pitch usually have a track record showing they know how to make those decisions and execute an idea. Especially if it’s in the genre they have experience in.

So how do you define what a game is before it exists? I don’t think you can. But what you can do is confine the future decision space. There are different names for those in game design; some call these confinement design pillars, others a creative box that limits the decision space. Either way, it’s a set of clear guidelines by which you decide if an idea fits your game vision.

Let us take the 2018 God of War, for example. The design pillars for that game are combat, exploration, and a relationship between Kratos and his son. If a system or a feature idea does not support any of those pillars, it should be scrapped from the game.

Such an approach to a game vision helps build a mental picture of the game. Clearly defined game vision is far from a defined game design, but it allows us to imagine what the game will be about and understand the pitch better.

The Team

The team is much more important than the idea. You can deliver a lousy pitch like “I want to create a 3rd person action-adventure game.” But if, for example, it’s Patrice Désilets saying it — the creator of Assassin’s Creed — you will listen carefully.

The team portfolio legitimatizes the pitch. If there is a gap between the ambition of the project and the team's potential, then it is a significant weakness. Aiming for the stars is good, but a team of scientists and astronauts at your side makes it better. Making games is challenging, and even a team with all the expertise in the world will not guarantee success, but it minimizes the risk.

The way you showcase your team is super easy; you line up the titles they worked on previously. Their degrees do not matter, their years of experience do not matter, and their unique personalities do not matter.

Only what they have done matters. I had a discussion once with one of the world’s leading gamedev studios, bizdev. They have a vast back catalog of big IPs, and we wanted to offer our remastering services as a company. The first question was, “What have you remastered so far?” This was before we did “Observer System Redux”, so I got nothing, and I also bizdeved nothing that day besides a relationship that I could use after I got more remasters under my belt.

I have heard hundreds of stories like mine over the years. A team portfolio is a crucial factor in a pitch. Nobody will believe you can deliver the next Hellblade cause you want AAA quality in a nicely scoped AA game with the rag-tagged team of five friends fresh out of college.

And yes, I know that there are examples of indie teams going big, but don’t give in to the survivorship bias of these successes. To create a game of certain quality and complexity, you must have a certain quality and complexity on the team.

How to pitch depending on the development phase

To better understand how to pitch and include in a pitch, depending on your development phase, we need to agree on what those phases are. Different companies have different nomenclature for each phase, so I will describe what I mean by them.

Context phase

This is the phase where we develop a business context for an idea. This is a pre-pitch phase where we decide what avenue of gamedev we are trying to explore. This is a phase where you decide the estimated budget or genre you will attack. You will also decide the target audience and how the project will fit into your overall strategy.

This is super important and is often skipped in small companies. You never develop ideas in a vacuum; there is always a context to the things you will be creating, and defining that context will make the concept phase much easier. At the end of that phase, you should end up with a Vision Doc. You usually do not pitch a game at this stage. Some rare examples of extremely well-known studios or individuals can say, “I want to make an RPG,” and that will be it, but this does not usually happen.

Concept phase

This is a critical phase for pitching because even if you will not seek funding at this stage of development, this is the first time you start vocalizing what the game is about. This is where you start learning to speak about your game, a process that will not end until launch.

You should end this phase with at least two things: A Pitch Document and a series of questions you want to be answered through prototyping. Another thing to create at this stage is a Rip-o-Matic.

Pre-production phase

Pre-production has two stages: prototyping, where you try to answer as many questions as possible by prototyping different mechanics and approaches. This minimizes production risk and allows you to prove to somebody else but yourself that the idea is genuinely remarkable.

The second stage is creating tools, pipelines, and restrictions for production. The more time you spend planning those out, the less waste there will be in production. Depending on the idea, you can end this phase with a Vertical Slice, a Target Render, a main Prototype, and a series of prototypes. Every project is different, but there should be something tangible that you can show.

This is also when many publishers like to start participating in the project — the hard questions have been answered, we have proof that the idea works, and the risk is lower. The only thing left is to invest a lot of money into production. This is not always the case; some publishers like to be involved from the beginning to shape the context. But that is more of a first-party development scenario, and even if it happens for third parties, it usually does not involve funding, only feedback.

Production phase

Pitching a game after you have a vertical and are well into production is relatively easy. You already have the pitch prepared, although it is a good idea to update it once in a while because things change in production, even if they should not. You probably have a Trailer; if not, record some Gameplay Video, and you are good to go.

Last stretch

Sometimes, be it rarely, you pitch an almost-ready game. It’s usually super easy; you send over the game alongside a pitch and a trailer — usually a gameplay trailer — and that is it. Creating pitching materials at this stage is easy; you have talked about the game a hundred times. Usually, pitching at this stage is not to publishers but to storefronts and first parties for better visibility or some minimal guarantee deals.

Pitching materials

Vision Doc

I have seen hundreds of pitch documents during my career, but not that many Vision Docs. The line between “This is the context in which we want to create a game” and “We have an idea for a game” is very blurry at many studios. I try to distinguish between the two because you never create a game in a vacuum. So how do you convey the context to the team that is supposed to create the game pitch and develop the idea?

You start with a statement — what do we want to accomplish here? It’s not a logline yet, because you do not know what the idea is precisely, but you know you want to accomplish something in a specific context. It can be your personal preference that you want to explore. You might have something to say with the game, or you can work for a company with a clear publishing strategy planned out and look for titles aligned with that strategy.

The second thing to consider in this context document is the target market — the type of audience and platforms you want to develop. This can but does not have to determine the genre of the game. Some market analysis must be here; there are tools out there that can help you do that, from Quantic Foundry reports to SteamDB and SteamLabs.

You must develop a time frame and budget context if the company strategy does not determine that. Those are usually not rigid and will be subject to change depending on the developed idea and new information. But anchoring ourselves at this point — that we are or are not creating a 200m USD franchise — is important.

Vision does not need the actual game idea, especially one often passed down by executives and marketing people. It just builds the context for the actual idea to flourish. But it can contain something like a mandatory IP that needs to be used with this game.

Some tools can help you determine if you are there yet with your idea. One tool you can use is Warren Specters' 6+2+1 series of questions described in his Classic Game Postmorem: Deus X.

Pitch Document

This is the most critical document that you will create for pitching. It should sell your idea clearly and concisely while answering all the most important questions raised in the readers’ minds while going over the pitch. It should be so good that it does not require any pitch meeting to sell the game well. Even if you’re lucky enough to be in the room and pitch the game the first time you present it to a publisher, it’s going to be distributed to multiple stakeholders and decision-makers along the process, and you’re not going to be there every time it’s read.

Every project is unique, and every publisher is different. There can be times when you need to squeeze your pitch in a particular format, but in case you start with a carte blanche, below is a structure that I propose you use. I have iterated it over the years and used it as a starting point for my pitches, but every pitch is unique, so make sure to adjust accordingly if your game requires it.

Overview — Sometimes, I call this section “summary” instead of “overview” because it is essentially a summary. It should never be longer than one page and should have all the information required for a successful pitch.

Why do you start with a summary, and why precisely one page? Because you usually have that exact one page to convince somebody to read it further. You don’t want to push your luck; the person reading it might not have a lot of patience and read through the entire thing if they aren’t hooked on the first page. We live in a world where mind space is crucial for many people, so you don’t want to add an additional strain. All the necessary information should be on this single page.

You can start with either a logline or overview summary points, which are:

• Platforms you think this game will be a good fit for
• Genre and/or target audience of a game; if it’s a mashup, name a mashup. If you think your idea is unique, that mashup is not enough; you can change into a target audience. For example, you’re not saying it’s a shooter, but people enjoying shooters should also enjoy this one.
• The number of players & game modes: This might not age well, but in 2021, it’s super important to be clear about the game mode. You market and target games with different modes very differently, so it’s important to be crystal clear about it
• Estimated release date/estimated production time left: You don’t need to worry about this binding in any way. This just gives the reader an idea of how big the project is and where it could potentially fit into the publisher's release schedule.
• Estimated budget: Now, this one is controversial; many sources are stating that you should, in fact, not mention the budget. They say the combination of the genre and logline can help the recipient estimate the budget, and you don’t want to undersell yourself, especially when pitching from a country with cheaper labor costs. I, for one, like to put in the estimated budget because it immediately sets the tone. If I pitch a 4m Euro AA game, I don’t need to go through an extensive pitching process with a publisher with a limit set of 1m Euro. By anchoring the budget, we speed things up. But on the other hand, I’ve been doing it for a while, I know what budgets are floating out there, and I know my costs for a small indie studio just setting up a permanent development operation. It’s very easy to create a small and unrealistic budget, so in that situation, not to mention the budget, team size might be preferable.

Elevator pitch — This is the logline mentioned earlier; the one to two sentence pitch of your game, followed by some references. This is the most important part, so no pressure. You want to spend a lot of time iterating on this and testing it on people.

Game pillars — they are a way to clearly define the design boundaries of your game — what your game is, but also, maybe more importantly, what it is not. If you have your game pillars well defined, it’s a great tool to determine if an idea — for a system or a feature or character — fits your game. Suppose it’s contrary to the pillars; it probably does not, although there is also a chance you did not do a very good job on the pillars to begin with.

Those should also relate later to your marketing pillars — what message you are pushing in your external communication about the game — so in that sense, thinking about your game pillars as tools of how to describe your game to future players through marketing is pitching.

Game pillars may vary in form depending on the genre and the USPs of the game. Here are our pillars for Gamedec:

No Combat — By removing the combat system, players can focus on role-playing instead of tactical optimization. This allows them to focus on actual detective work, with no-fail states in the game. If we succeed, we will effectively create a new genre of games, like removing guns from FPS-created walking sims.

Cyberpunk — Gamedec gives players a chance to explore completely different virtual worlds: They can solve a case in a prehistoric landscape pulsating with dangerous reptiles only to be thrown into the blazing heart of America’s Wild West for their next mystery. Rich with dilemma, all these worlds are enmeshed within a gritty cyberpunk dystopia with no clear path to goodness or evil.

Isometric RPG — This genre broadly aims to mimic the feeling of playing tabletop RPGs. There is a thin line between designing interesting interactions for players and letting them figure out how to make interesting interactions of their own. The line between designing interesting interactions for players and letting them figure out how to make interesting interactions of their own.

I do have a problem now with how we named our pillars. Today I would go with “P&P RPG feel” instead of “Isometric RPG” because without the description, stating a genre in your pillars is misleading, but the descriptions are mostly fine and showcase the game’s focus.

My two favorite examples of well-defined game pillars are the God of War (2018) and Doom (2016). From the God of War presentation, you can see how game pillars are also subject to change during production, and you also iterate on them while you’re using them, similar to the logline.

Key features — This should be a brief list of game features that you view as either unique selling points for the game or main features that will be very important for the overall game feel so that they will receive a lot of love and iteration in the production. Although every game is different, some are more or less complex feature-wise. Your list should have between three to five features. It’s not a design document; not everything needs to be listed.

One of the excellent definitions of a key feature is if you pull it out of the game, you have a different game.

A key feature is not only a name; it should be followed by a one to two-sentence description of the feature. References and mockups are also a nice touch to have.

Here are two examples from a Gamedec pitch I made a couple of years ago:

Interactions — An advanced dialogue system that mimics the experiences of tabletop role-playing games as accurately as possible. We expand on the idea of faction effects as presented in Tyranny, where access to dialogue options depends on the player’s previous choices and gathered knowledge.

If I gave myself feedback on this one, I would have a better name for that feature, and a mockup or screenshot would also go a long way, in case the reader does not know what we are referencing in the “Tyranny” game. But other than that, it is pretty good.

Codex and Deduction — The Codex is a holistic map that links NPCs, companies, locations, and other case-relevant objects. It contains a Deduction Field mechanic where players can unscramble facts and evidence to conclude a case. What is important about deduction in Gamedec is that there is no fail state. Instead, case revelations present moral dilemmas. Players can base their conclusions on personal ethics, lawful integrity, or a sense of poetic justice, and Gamedec will remain neutral to their choice. However, the characters within it will respond to the player’s decisions according to their own ethical and personal beliefs.

This one is a bit too long; it could have been split between codex and deduction because, truth be told, nothing is innovative about the codex part. It is the deduction that is the USP. So I would tighten that up, but besides that, it is a good key feature pitch.

Gameplay summary — The intention behind this section is to “cut the bullshit.” This is where you’re not pitching, not selling, not using big words. This is a summary of what the gameplay experience on a fundamental level will look like. What you are seeing, how you are interacting with the game, and what changes, based on your input, you can observe.

Depending on the type of game, you can go about it in several ways. You could use core loop graphs — that works well for games with extended meta gameplay and many interacting systems. You could use a player story, a verbose description of the player's experience in a short time, usually one minute. It can be an extended description of game modes, which will feel like an extension of the key features section.

Whatever way you are going about it, the important thing is that after this section, the reader should have a firm grasp of what we are doing in the game. Not who we are, not the story, not the grand concept, not even the emotional state we are going for, which is the essence of the pitch, but what the player does in the game.

If, for example, we are building a tactical game with an extended meta, you should be able to say if you are aiming for a 20%/80% split between meta and tactical or 40%/60%. You need to know how many systems will be there to interact within the meta and how long you are planning to have the combat missions. This is not the final game design. Most of this stuff is subject to change, but you need to show here that you know where you would like to end up.

Story summary — If you remember one thing from this article, please remember that no one cares about your game's story.

I might be too radical here; if I wanted you to remember just one thing, it would be the importance of a good logline. But seriously — I know the story is very important, especially in a heavy narrative game. Still, the idea of a well-written narrative is that you must make the player care about it, and you can’t do it by shoving exposition down their throat. This is a known principle in any narrative. So why would you do it in your pitch? I’ve seen dozens of game pitches that lead with the story or make it a vast, multiple-page part of it. I’ve even seen story documents, written in a movie scenario format, sent out in place of a pitch. This is not the time or place to do it. A few-sentence summary that supports the mental picture and the player's fantasy is totally fine. Think of the back of a book description and then cut it in half.

Art direction — This should be heavy in art and light in words. If you have any concept art created for your game, use it here. If not, rely on references and other games. If you don’t have an art director on the team, go with similar game references. But it goes a long way if you can show that you thought things through and go outside the video game medium. Ideally, you should be able to create a mood board for your project. I am a versatile video game developer, but art is my Achilles heel, so I will not pretend that I know how to create a mood board. Usually, an artist makes one for me based on the references and a rough idea of the emotions I was going for in a pitch.

There is also a lot of online material on creating a mood board. It is important to remember to precisely describe what you’re showing on a mood board because it might be color-coding, and the recipient might think this is how you will depict characters. One to two sentences are sufficient, do not leave it up to chance. Somebody might misread the grand idea. You can also have multiple mood boards prepared if you have the time and resources — for characters, overall game tone, color coding, and more. The example of a color mood board below was created for the TV series “Russian Doll”:

And here is an example of a color palette board from “Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey” from this article:

Technical summary — This is not a mandatory paragraph for me; it depends on the technical uniqueness of the project. If you’re making a single-player PC game using UE4, mentioning UE4 alongside the platform in the Overview section would be enough. But if you’re making something more complicated, like multiplayer, multi-platform, VR, proprietary engine, hardware-dependent features, and so on. It’s good to describe this in this technical summary paragraph. It would raise questions either way, and including the answers in the pitch shows you thought things through. This is also an excellent place to list any fancy middleware you plan to use.

Team — I have already stressed the importance of the team in the pitch, so I will not repeat myself here. Show the team's experience based on the list of the projects they have been a part of, ideally together as a team. There is a different probability of success for a team of experienced individuals that already delivered something together versus a newly assembled team. If any of the titles the team or individual has worked on, won any awards, has high Metacritic user scores, or have sold well, be sure to mention that.

It’s also good to mention the team composition; a complete team is less risky to invest in than a team still looking for a programmer or an art director. Key positions are essential, like design, programming, and art. If you do not have those positions filled, it will raise red flags. Kickstarter is full of successful game projects never finished because there wasn’t a complete team behind the idea.

Contact Info — Easy to forget this one; remember that even if you send a pitch through email with all the contact info in the email footer, it’s good practice to have all the necessary information in a single document. Hence, sharing inside a company, through a pen drive, and so on is more effortless. The easier you make it for the recipient to contact you back, the better.

Rip-o-Matic

A tool widely used in movie pre-production that is getting more popular in gamedev. The idea is that you create a target render movie or a trailer of your game, but you use whatever you need that you have available, with disregard to proprietary rights. It’s like creating photo/screenshot bashing mockups but movies.

Here is an excellent example of a Rip-o-Matic for the movie Looper. It’s hard to find good examples online; most studios do not advertise using those because of the previously mentioned proprietary rights. I’ve used Rip-o-Matics for both Detached and Gamedec. It’s a great tool to pitch your game and a pre-production tool for trailer creation.

Target Render

It’s a video that showcases how gameplay will look; it’s not interactive but is usually made in an engine. I was never involved in a game that used a target render, but it is a tool widely used by companies like Ubisoft. Depending on what resources you have at your disposal, how much you can use from previous projects, and what tools you have, creating a target render might be a good way to pitch cost-effectively. There are examples of its usage in the indie world, like, for example, this video from Limbo — they called it a concept video.

Prototype

This artifact should answer all the questions the team imposed on themselves during the concept phase. It usually involves the most important or unique mechanic of the game. It does not need to be a singular prototype — you can have multiple prototypes showcasing multiple things; the trick is to be later able to present the results coherently.

For example, assuming that the art style is not super unique in this game and it’s not the unique selling point, you do not need to showcase it in the prototype, but it’s nice to have mockups ready to show, so that when you present the prototype, you can say something along the lines of, “It will play like this, but look like that,” pointing to the mockups. Considering the rapid expansion of art tools, high availability of art packs, and more, I recommend doing at least a small vertical art slice, sometimes referred to as a “beauty corner,” a small fragment of the game that showcases the target quality art.

This is the most common pitching material requested by the publishers. It’s not that far along in terms of the project's financial burden, so the publisher can significantly impact the production. Still, at the same time, the most considerable risk that the idea itself is shitty has been mitigated by the prototype, as in, what you play is what you get, just smoother, more extensive, and nicer looking.

Vertical Slice

This should fully represent your game, systems, narrative, art, audio — everything. In theory, it should give you a slice of the final product. The closer the vertical slice is to the final quality in which you release the game, the better the production was running. Since video game production is a super complex process, the vertical slice looked quite different from the final product, mainly on the polish and UI sides.

But at this point, there should be no surprises for the investor. You see what you get; we have a slice; you want more, pay us more. The minimal risk involved assuming the same team that delivered the vertical can deliver the entire game and scale up if needed.

Trailer

Trailers are great pitching tools. The primary idea of a trailer is to pitch your game to your players, so it is reasonable to assume that you can use it as a tool to pitch your game to publishers. Gameplay trailers are always more favorably looked at because they build a better mental picture of the game. But if you’re early in the development process, a trailer that sells the player fantasy and the game’s main idea without showing the actual gameplay will also work.

When to pitch

On the one hand, you want to pitch as soon as possible to check if your idea can take off. On the other hand, there is this very fragile moment in the idea's conception, that feedback can kill it too soon. The most common scenario is you start pitching when you have things thought out.

Sony published a blog recently that clearly stated you should have something visual to present the game, and a build or a prototype would be the best way to do it. Publishers and platform holders can share similar sentiments throughout the years.

Most discussions I had with publishers indicated that they want to know about the possibility of cooperation as soon as possible, even a simple logline that includes a genre so that they can share with you if there is a possibility of a deal. Then they like to be updated regularly about the conception progress. Still, serious discussions about funding start with a full-blown pitch document and end with a prototype or a vertical slice. Of course, there are exceptions. Especially if you have a long track record or history of cooperation with that publisher or have zero experience and no track record, sometimes just a pitch is enough to get the funding for the first scenario, and you usually can’t have any serious discussions without a vertical slice in the latter.

Analysis of examples of loglines

We covered many different ways to pitch your game, but the most important is still the logline — those couple sentences defining your game fantasy. I will now break down some examples to deepen the topic.

Papers Please

Let us start with a clean slate case study, an indie game by Lucas Pope called “Papers Please”. We know the game won numerous awards, had massive critical acclaim, overwhelmingly positive user score, and sold well, so it should be easy to pitch, right? An example logline could go like this:

Papers Please is a puzzle game where you need to match certain administrative rules with the actual state of papers of people that try to cross the border. The game becomes more complex and ramps the difficulty as you continue, all in a unique pixel art setting.

Sounds good, right? You add that promo art to it, and you are good. Well, wrong, that was a horrible pitch. Technically, everything written there was correct, but I failed to build a compelling mental picture. There is no hook, no player fantasy, nothing. Let’s try this again.

In Papers Please, you are an immigrant inspector at a border checkpoint in the communist state of Arstotzka. Every day you make life-and-death decisions about the fate of people wanting to cross, and you weigh that against your family’s survival and your moral compass. Glory to Arstotzka!

Now that was a good pitch. From now on, this is how you pitch. There are still things to tweak here like for example, the game needs to convey what camera the game will be in and how we will control the action. With Papers Please being a unique puzzle game, it is hard to do it with references, so maybe a mockup would be a good idea because adding another sentence with the word “puzzle” in it would not do the game justice, in my opinion.

Let’s go through a couple of Steam store descriptions. Those should be good examples of a logline because you need to convey in just a few sentences what the game is about. It is a bit easier because you have a game capsule above the description, and the description is shown alongside a trailer or a screenshot, but still, it should be excellent.

This War of Mine

“In This War of Mine, you do not play as an elite soldier, but rather a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city, struggling with lack of food, medicine, and constant danger from snipers and hostile scavengers. The game provides an experience of war from an entirely new angle.”

SUPERHOT

“SUPERHOT is a first-person shooter where time moves only when you move. No regenerating health bars. No conveniently placed ammo drops. It’s just you, outnumbered and outgunned, grabbing weapons off fallen enemies to shoot, slice, and maneuver through a hurricane of slow-motion bullets.”

Both This War of Mine and SUPERHOT has a really good store description, in my opinion, while keeping in mind that you show that with a trailer and screenshots. This does not need to have a clear description of what the actual gameplay looks like.

Empire of Sin

“Empire of Sin is a new strategy game brought to you by Romero Games and Paradox Interactive that puts you at the heart of the ruthless criminal underworld of 1920s Prohibition-era Chicago.”

I do not like this description. First of all, Romer Games and Paradox Interactive are shown right below that description on the Steam page, so it is a waste to emphasize it. “Empire of Sin” fits nicely into a “tactical” game genre, and instead, in the description, the broader “strategy” genre is used. The setting description is nice, but I do not know who I play in this: A police officer? A mob boss? A grunt gangster?

Gamedec

“Gamedec is a single-player cyberpunk isometric RPG. You are a game detective who solves crimes inside virtual worlds. Use your wits to gather info from your witnesses and suspects, getting to the bottom of deceptive schemes. The game continually adapts to your decisions and never judges.”

Clearly stated genre, who you are, and the two USPs — being a game detective and that the game is about choices and consequences with no right answers. The jury is still out if we need the third sentence here because it is more fluff than distilled information.

Diablo

We can even go back to the last century and see the original pitch for Diablo. The logline looks like this:

While it aged quite well, you have the USP and a clear focus on an audience, what is deeply missing is: “Who am I? What am I doing? Why is it cool?” But the next paragraph looks like this:

Now I am good.

Distrust

Except for Gamedec, one of the games made by my company, every example here was of a fairly big, well know game or from some big names. Let's try the same approach with a less know game to prove a point.

At the time of me writing this, the Steam store description for DISTRUST was:

“DISTRUST is an isometric survival adventure with procedural generation on an Arctic research station lost in the endless dark of a polar night. A story-rich fiction with multiple endings that suits both single-player fans and co-op enthusiasts.”

Alongside a promo art that looks like this:

The title, setting, and facial expression, clearly point toward a horror aspect of the game. The game genre builds a pretty nice picture of the game, except I still don’t know, “Who am I? What do I do? And partially — why is it cool?” Let’s try to tweak it a bit:

• While procedural generation is a big feature, I do not think it’s a main selling point of DISTRUST, and if it was, I would point to re-playability, not the tech
• There is a nice description of the setting, but the player fantasy is missing
• Game goal or antagonist would be nice to setup
• Mentioning coop is essential; it should stay

“DISTRUST is an isometric survival adventure on an Arctic research station, where you play as a scientist sent on a rescue op, where you quickly find out that weather is the least of your problems. A story-rich fiction with multiple endings that suits both single-player fans and co-op enthusiasts.”

I like this one better, but we could iterate on it more. If I knew more about the game, I could point to some important pillars I am missing as a player, that I would know as a developer. For example, one of the first things I would iterate on is the nature of the problems. Maybe it would be good to hint here that they are paranormal?

It’s only a couple of sentences, but you can tweak them and iterate on them a lot and for a long time. And you should. Because when time on development passes, your understanding of the game grows and shifts, allowing you to refine your logline.

Recap

That is all I have for you. If you do the following, you should be able to pitch your idea clearly and concisely, which will significantly increase your probability of being successful:

• Start with the “why;” you must clearly communicate why you want to create this particular game. Watch Jason VandenBerghe’s talk on this
• Create, iterate, and practice your logline; this is the essential part of your pitch
• Create a good pitch document; this is the most critical piece of documentation you will create from a pitching perspective. Use the structure described in this article, but adjust it to the specifics of your idea.
• Do pitch not only the idea but also the probability of you pulling it off. The team behind the execution is a crucial part of the pitch.
• Practice. Your. Pitch.

Good luck!

Resources

For reference, I listed some of the things that influenced me heavily. You should research the topic more and come to your conclusions.

Videos:

Pitching to Publishers: How to Impress and What to Avoid, 2012, Pete Smith

Thirty Things I Hate About Your Game Pitch, 2017, Bran Upton

Forging Honor: Providing a Coherent Vision for a New IP, 2017, Jason VandenBerghe

Classic Game Postmorem: Deus X, 2017, Warren Spector

Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action, 2009, Simon Sinek

Looper clip-o-matic trailer, 2013

I would also like to include the speech I gave on the topic:

How to pitch so that they believe you, 2011, Łukasz Hacura

Articles:

How to Pitch your Game to PlayStation, 2021

How To Pitch the Perfect Video Game Idea (with Sample Game Pitches That Defined Genres), 2021

How to explain your game to an asshole, 2012

Books:

Save The Cat!, 2005, Blake Snyder (just “Chapter 01: What is it?” is highly relevant to pitching)

Contact info

If you ever want to reach out, you can find me on Twitter: @LukaszHacura

My DMs are always open.

Special thanks

Agata Hacura, Marek Pańczyk and Kacper Szymczak for constructive feedback on this article.