How to Make a Great Pitch Deck for a Game Publisher?

If you want to have money to fund your game and terminate faster you may want to contact a publisher. In addition to funding, publishers are usually there to help you localize and market the game. That’s why it's very important to find the right one and to succeed to convince one. Game Publishers receive hundreds of pitch decks yearly, so you need to make yours distinct from the others. It needs to be short, engaging, and covers all the main points a publisher may be interested in. Here are some initial tips:

- Try not to use more than 30 words per slide.

- Try not to go over 12 slides. You will have the attention of the publisher for less than 1 minute.- Either put 1 idea or 5 bullet points, nothing else.

- Make it simple, but make it visual.

- Don’t use heavy technical words

- Take care the file is not too heavy (below 10MB)

- Each slide must be an argument for your game

Here are the main template points you should cover in your slides:

1. Cover page

Some super nice artwork from your Game. The Company Name, Game Name and eventually a slogan.

2. Game Overview

Brief description of what your game is. Two or three sentences that describe your game… The genre (RPG, Adventure, Platform,…), + eventually an external link to your trailer.

3. Product Details

Describe the target platform (Mobile, Switch, PC, …). Describe what is the business model (Premium, Freemium,…). What is your target sales price? What is your platform?

4. Gameplay

Explain the gameplay. Explain the core loop. Put some easy graphs to understand. Add self-explaining illustrations of your game. Explain the art style and why you choose it.

5. Target/Market

Who is your target player (Describe the games they playing, their age, territory,…). What are the 4 or 5 games you compete with? How are you different from them? You need to show your USP (Unique selling points). Put as many numbers as possible to support your arguments. If you find it, put the growth rate % or CAGR of your game genre in the presentation.

6. Roadmap

What is your timeline? (Vertical slice/demo, alpha, beta, QA, minimum viable product, master/soft-launch,…) Are you able to finish the game without the financial support of the publisher? If yes when?

7. Financial

How much money are you looking for? To do what? What is your monthly burn rate? When will you break even?

Based on the competition and your knowledge of the market put a sales forecast. Don’t be too optimistic. Try to be as reasonable as possible.

To make a financial forecast try to take the average between a successful game and a less successful one. For PC games, if you can’t find financial data online, you can try to find out the sales based on reviews. Here is a methodology: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/using-steam-reviews-to-estimate-sales

Divide the development cycle into milestones and put their cost.

For mobile game, you should ideally use some of your soft launch KPI’s as CPI, D1, D7 and D30. Still better if you can add the ARPPU, percentage of paying users and where your revenue come from (Ads, IAP’s, subscriptions,…)

8. Team

Who is the team developing this game? What are the responsibility of each (Game Designer, Artist, Front end developer, etc.) Add links to Linkedin or other online CV/Portfolio. Add your experience and portfolio of games, your awards and other accomplishments.

9. Thank You & Call to Action. Ask for feedback. Ask what you expect from the publisher (Cash, marketing, QA, localization, monetization support, sound support…). Provide your contact details. Be sure they have access to the demo link or when they will have it.

If you are afraid to be copied feel free to send them a NDA or ask for it. However, the risk of losing an opportunity because of not signing an NDA is often bigger than the one of being copied. You can be copied till the present stage of what you have disclosed. However, the strength of your studio is the way you work together with a multi-skilled team and how you will make the game evolving in the future. This is something that can’t be copied.