GameDiscoverCo has started compiling a pitch deck archive to help developers understand how to present their projects to publishers, investors, and other industry players.
The nascent collection currently features nine pitch decks for titles including Cosmoteer, Wargroove, Yes Your Grace: Snowfall, Cryptmaster, and Trash Goblin.
GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless (formerly a co-runner of GDC) said there’s currently very little in the way of publicly available resources for devs looking to curate their own deck aside from Glitch’s pitch deck archive.
Notably, he added that GameDiscoverCo’s collection contains completely different content from Glitch’s archive, meaning developers have some fresh resources to pore over.
How to use the example pitch decks
Carless spent a bit of time in his latest newsletter highlighting how some of the decks housed within the GameDiscoverCo archive might be useful, and noted that Wargroove’s pretend pitch deck—which was created by developer Chucklefish post-launch—is a prime example of how to target publishers.
“Chucklefish kindly sent along this pitch deck that it made, post-release, for its 2019 Advance Wars-ish hit Wargroove. It has a ‘perfect for publishers’ structure–one-pager, gameplay video, features, timeline, what the dev needs from a publisher, budget,” he wrote.
There’s also the deck created by Cosmoteer: Starship Architect & Commander developer Walt Dester, which was pulled together closer to release in an effort to court multiple publishers (you can see a slide from that deck below). Although Dester eventually chose to self publish–which proved to be an astute decision with Cosmoteer going on to sell over 300,000 copies–Carless describes the deck as “very clear-headed.”
“Decks are pretty important if you want up-front funding for your game: obvious, I know. But you need some kind of structure in place (in addition to a ‘vertical slice’ or other demo),” continued Carless. “Why? To convince publishers and funders you have a) a great idea b) a rational business view on what you need to finish it. Some don’t!
“You can use a deck to talk to publishers and then… not use them: a couple of these games—notably Cosmoteer, which already had good ‘Hype’ and was a solo-dev project–ended up opting to self-publish. (We’re estimating it’s grossed nearly $7 million now, btw!) So just noting—if you can bootstrap, that’s a choice.”
You can check out the free to all GameDiscoverCo pitch deck archive on the GameDiscoverCo Plus website.