2023 was a Terrible Year to Look for a Publisher.... (and 2024 is Worse)

hi Alex Austin hi Dan owire should we should we talk about Publishers yeah aren't they great that's fun they say to understand somebody you have to walk a mile in their shoes so last year in an attempt to understand an area of games development I knew nothing about I decided to do exactly that last year I tried to pitch our game stunt Derby to Publishers and after about 12 months of some of the most frustrating and amusing professional interactions of my entire life I'm here to tell you all about it let you know if we manag to get stunt Derby signed So today we're going to talk about who it is in games who has all the money how you pitch to those people to get that money and why 2023 was the worst year in living memory to try and get some of that money that was until 2024 and why that's kind of going to be a big problem here comes the so about a year ago I set out to get funding for art game stunt Derby up until this point it's been a oneman show with Alex working on the game and me supporting him in as best as way I can doing ancillary work like promoting the game managing the steam page and doing business admin last year I stepped into a new role getter of money you see you can't make a game without cash and while I've been paying Alex some money out of my own pocket to make sure he can pay the occasional rent bill without having to burn hours doing corporate work I don't have enough to pay him fulltime or say for an artist to make it look less like programmer art while still retaining the Retro athetic so to get this funding I would have to pitch some money haers and to my surprise much like a High School Sociology report asking people to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars is done using Microsoft PowerPoint okay so right now there are two main players in the world of video game funding there are Publishers and there are Venture Capital firms Publishers you probably heard of there are big ones like 10cent and epic H there are smaller ones like devolver and anera and then they go all the way down to single person operations you've probably never heard of publishes tend to be more experienced in the world of video games development and marketing they understand what it takes to make a game they have the email address of whoever runs Microsoft Game Pass they they know how Steam Works generally they're to they're there to help uh to get involved as much as they can and uh for that you pay a premium you have to give them a percentage cut of every game that's sold in the past these were pretty terrible deals especially back in the world of it was hard to get on consoles and brick and mortar shops you needed to make boxes and all that sort of stuff sometimes developers would get like 20 30% of the actual uh revenue from any game that was sold and in recent years it had been getting better you had a lot of Indie Publishers coming into the space offering these 7030 splits where the developer got 70% and often the recoup wasn't as bad recoup is basically you know hey look we'll give you a million dollars and we'll split it you know 77 7030 but not until we have recouped all of our initial Investments so that means that you don't see a lick of it the developer doesn't until all of that initial million has been made back for the publisher and often times there were 2x recoup or 3x recoup meaning that if they put a million into a game they wanted to see three million back before you saw any of it that stuff for the long longest time seemed to have been sort of going away but in recent years those percentages have gotten a little bit stingier now even some of the cooler Indie publish are looking for 50/50 splits um on the other side of the table you have uh Venture Capital firms or VCS as we'll call them for the rest of this VCS have operated in you know tech for years uh you know doing a lot of investing in these small tech companies to try and hopefully be the biggest new thing they go public they IPO they make the initial investor shitloads of money games is kind of a weird fit for this cuz we're an entertainment industry but for the past couple of years VCS have looked at gaming is this sort of new green pasture to try and make these end roads into H in the past few years VCS have been investing in big studios small Studios all that type of thing but they generally don't have the industry experience of Publishers maybe that's a good thing maybe that's a bad thing maybe they're less involved in the day-to-day it all depends on what you want H one thing to make sure with VCS that you're aware of though is that often times they are investing in the company not the game so while you might have some weirdness with a publisher who may want to own the rights to the IP again something that kind of used to happen in the past but maybe it's creeping back in again on the VC side often times they will own the company which means that it's not so much of an issue of them like canceling a deal more of an issue that they could fire you from the company that you started because they're you know the biggest investor in it uh so both sides have positives and negatives depending on kind of how much money you want how much help you need as well and for us we didn't want to go down the VC route and also we didn't want to go down the route of some Publishers who just wanted to give us cash and then kind of let us on our merry way we kind of wanted somebody who was a bit more involved maybe a developer who was a publisher as well uh because Alex is working on his own and honestly the more people and ideas we can get in the room as early as possible uh the better for us the more support basically the better for any pitch you need a deck basically a Google Sheets presentation that tells the publisher or investor everything they need to know what the game is how much money you're looking for what you're going to spend on what your team looks like all that sort of stuff and thankfully there are loads of resources online to help you build one from YouTube tutorials to successful pitches from other Studios that they've simply uploaded to YouTube Once I built my first version of the pitch deck I needed somebody to vsh give me some idea of where I'm going right and where I'm going wrong so I reached out to Nick sutner you may remember him from egm or one up back in the day but he spent most of the past decade helping to sign games at various places he's also a developer and his team just announced their new game Ranger a role puzzling Adventure you can wish list it over on Steam if it catches your eye see we're all pitching you know ideally it's like 10 pages and then if people you can you know you can have things like if you want a more details budget go here more detailed timeline go here or like to be provided upon request kind of like a resume but I think keeping it like 10 to 20 is like the most I think if it's over that if it's over that it makes me feel like maybe you haven't quite figured out what the heart of your game is all right so here's the front page of this deck uh which immediately has over here a video version of the deck here where I I'll probably play this after I show you guys this which is basically just like you know hey if you want to just watch a quick guess it's sevenes I didn't think it was s minutes long maybe I'll put a clip of it in here and you can I'll put a link in the description if you want to see more of it I think when you're pitching it's kind of a three-stage process where the and it kind of goes with like again getting getting a person excited at a publisher platform or whatever the first thing they think is like like am I excited about this personally does this game speak to me do I want to play it I think rarely are people really they sort of like what is my employer want to sign I think it it's important that they get excited about personally too so I think that's the first thing is like can you get the person you're talking to excited about the game if not it's like a non-starter but hopefully so so next page is pretty easy yo what is this game what other games do we think it kind of looks like or combines the next one is just saying like the you know the physics feel really good half the joy of this game is the fact that it controls the Fidelity super high it doesn't feel like arcadey doesn't hold your hand you might be a bit weird at the start but you get used to it tracks are nuts multiplayer um and these gifts is something that came across a lot if you have motion and your if it's static all these Pages it doesn't sort of you know games move and games are fun because of the motion and movement so um you know the the car the cars don't look this crappy anymore but so I was doing a lot of like annoying production work to get these gifts really good but um you know on every time Alex would update the game I'd have to go back and do a bunch more all right let's pause that for a second because I want to talk about the elephant in the room and this is something that people were uh saying in the comments and something I wanted to talk about for a while but I didn't really have a good spot until now this is like the perfect time to talk about it people know no clip h and a lot of people know who I am as well and that's going to make a difference if I'm out there pitching a game if I'm looking for wish lists if I'm trying to get money from a publisher or at least trying to get them to look at a PowerPoint for like 2 minutes right it's going to be easier for me to do that than it is somebody else and that's obviously an important thing to consider with this whole stunt Derby experiment right this whole thing was started to try and like basically give me an excuse and a like a trojan horse to try and understand areas of development that I just don't you just don't understand them unless you try them yourself um it has turned into a game and a project that I'm like I really love and Alex is really loves working on um and that has changed some of the communication around it but at the very least when we're trying to open doors with Publishers which is arguably the hardest part of pitching somebody is trying to just get them to open the email or respond to an email or get the initial first meeting it's definitely been easier for us than it would be for somebody else and then if they're into the game the second question I think they should be asking themselves is can this team pull off the thing they're pitching me that's like the critical second step and I think both of are important cuz if they can't doesn't matter if they like it and if they don't like it you're going to not get to that second step anyways this was based on some feedback that I had a lot of people asking us what do we think you what what do you want to do with the multiplayer and we had some people who were like saying oh you guys should do like games of a service type thing or have seasons which I think is why this one is in here there was some degree of tweaking the decks for different people I'll I'll admit I'll say it and then if they like the game if they think the team can pull it off then the third thing is like can the organization I'm representing in this pitch afford to take this risk on it and then that that's a bunch of other questions and that is you know sometimes it's kind of out of your hands at some point and lots of financial forecasting or whatever but I think those two pieces are really important so even if it's a killer idea and sometimes it's like too killer you're like oh this is like sounds great but this reasonably is not a thing someone can make especially on like a you know couple year timeline or whatever so so that that's some things we can return to here but I think that's that's the biggest things for me is that I think like the timeline feels ambitious and you're not asking for enough money the 200,000 we were asking for was based on this budget but also based on what you ask for cuz you can ask for like 40,000 which will probably get us a lot of the way there we'd have to figure out the art wouldn't be much better um the sound wouldn't be much better and we you know it wouldn't be the type of game that a publisher would want to invest in but it it might be enough to get to Early Access to get to like a a client be could release for that and I see a lot of ducks that people actually like if they go sort of the full mile they're like here's our like conservative realistic and optimistic sales forecast for our own game and like a lot of times I think I just sort of like I'm like whether this is real realistic or not doesn't really matter to me so much it's like that's that's kind of a shot in the dark however it shows me that you're being really thoughtful about this and you're being optimistic about it so I appreciate seeing that in there too um I'm not saying you need to do that but it's one thing you can think about and then yeah it was it was to also highlight like how we got here like you know what the the vibe of this development has always been super transparent like from day zero this game was playable and we were doing community play tests and it was just showing like look this is how the game progressed over those months say hey grab a key join the next play test boom easy email me come play a game and that was the deck people like the deck but they didn't like it [Music] enough once I had the deck it was time to fire it around I built an Excel spreadsheet of Publishers I thought would work well with us and started pounding the internet pavement I emailed well over 100 people over the course of these months many of which replied and some of whom conducted remote meetings with us so here's what I learned about talking to Publishers it's largely indistinguishable from online data there's a superficial element for sure an initial attraction to the art or genre but you basically go on date after date some remote others in person and slowly over weeks and months you decide whether or not you're going to move in with each other or not it also has the same problems as dating being that sometimes people just stop texting back or they just tell you that it's not going to work that's actually preferred because then you can stop wasting time trying to contact them but unlike dating the asymmetrical nature of this relationship is ever presentent especially the closer you get to signing a contract so in a second you're going to see myself and Alex talking about everything about trying to get deals done about deals that fell through and all that sort of stuff but first I want to do a quick bit of table setting first of all about what 20123 was like and then secondly about the deals uh that I thought I had and then didn't have H so 2023 was sort of the canary in the co mine for the current situation uh or lack of money or lack of investment or lack of confidence maybe in gaming at the moment last year I was talking to a lot of fellow Indie devs I guess I can say in this context and they were saying a lot of the same things which was that VCS in the past you could show them a PowerPoint and hey if you used to work at Riot then you probably got some money um up until last year that kind of was the case and then last year they started to want to see demos they wanted to see the game running they wanted to have some some sort of proof of concept which honestly is like due diligence that's what the Publishers were doing too but on the publisher side a lot of the Publishers either had slates that were full because stuff got sort of Knocked Down the Road due to covid or they were just not packing their deck like they used to like indie games there's a lot of really good indie games out there at the moment and I really do think that because there's this abundance of of games out there that are and the quality's gotten so much better that fewer games are selling or maybe like it's a bit more of a struggle than it used to be maybe the budgets have gone up to I'm not quite sure but for whatever reason the Indie Publishers were also kind of holding back a little bit on on giving out money and that just continued throughout the entire year I recently came back from H dice in Las Vegas which is The Big Industry Summit and there were a lot of desperate people basically trying to get deals struck and a lot of Publishers and VCS who were basically saying we're not spending anything right now talk to us in 3 or 4 months maybe and uh we'll see about then so right now it seems like as bad as last year was this year seems like almost not impossible but there's going to be a lot of people going to GDC in the next couple weeks really trying to make sure that they stick uh get get get pen to paper on some sort of deal and it's it's wild we'll talk about it a bit in a second but it's it's made me think like what happens then because there are games out there like ours that don't need that much of an injection of capital to make them real um so in an years past you had stuff like Kickstarter but Kickstarter seems to have kind of gone out of fashion because of you know a bunch of projects that didn't really work out and I guess it just be it kind of became a lazy place to try and get some quick money to throw something together that then you'd eventually just go to a publisher anyway and and and try and get more money for it um so we're just in a weird place right now and I'm not really sure where the right option is for folks to get uh to get funding H secondly and we'll talk about it a little bit in a second um we had two different Publishers that were basically ready to sign us one of them twice and we were really good fit with that one but there's something about the asymmetrical nature of Communications in this stuff that I just find absolutely poisonous and I I had heard this talking to developers who have pitched their games it's like a soul crushing Endeavor you know I'm a competent person I think I'm a pretty like shrewd negotiator I feel I've been an independent freelancer H for most of my career except for the five or so years I worked at Gamespot either side of that I I ran my own companies and did my own thing um and I'm used to doing deals and I'm used to you know talking to people and compromising and I have never in my life experienced such a one-sided power uh Comm in communication as I have with this whole process um people just not responding to emails or ghosting you we had one publisher who was completely down to do it seemed super enthusiastic and it just stopped replying to emails we had another one who told us we basically had it done and then started getting a bit weird on them emails and then eventually after weeks of of of keeping us along and my naivity I stopped talking to other Publishers that was my first mistake is that I should have kept talking to everyone else but I was like I don't know loyal like an idiot and it strung a along and by the end of that my Spirit was totally broken and then trying to get back on the horse trying to go back and email people again and then that publisher did it again they were like oh actually I think we're good now and then like again it was and that time I was like you need a to tell us right now yes or no and then eventually I got a firm no again but it's it's basically this whole section here is to just say that I while I had empathy for developers before this about what it must be like going through this and getting down on your knees and asking people for uh money that they're then going to give you a shitty deal and you're basically doing all the work um I have even more empathy for them now um there are great Publishers out there we talked to great people who were excited to fund us and it just didn't work out or it didn't feel like a good match or whatever I I'm in I am not the type of person who signs contracts that don't feel like everyone is going in the right direction because we need that momentum and we need positivity and we need help um so I wasn't going to sign some some sort of wet deal uh but yes I have massive empathy for anyone trying to get money in this industry especially now all right let's talk to Alex hi Alex Austin hi Dan OWI should we should we talk about Publishers yeah aren't they great that's fun I feel like I learned a lot about both uh how hard it is to get people to sign a contract and also my sort of my own the limits of my ownis Charisma uh or ability to get people to stick the Landing um yeah it's been a wild we picked the worst year I think to try and find a publisher that is also that was slowly Dawning on me as the year went on is that everyone else I was talking to in the Indie space was like oh yeah money's getting so tight and then and then you sort of saw it catch up with the rest like big studios were kind of next then like it was like the Indie stuff was like the canary and the coal mine for what was coming now we've had all these layoffs and it's just like a weird time to be asking people for for money you know it seemed like a couple times we had a deal so it's like okay we can we can do this and then it falls through it's like oh how am I going to pay rent you're right how am I going to pay taxes it happened twice where we had somebody and maybe this is my own like naivity or lack of experience but both times we were like it was like it was like online dating once I was like having a conversation with somebody that felt like oh we're actually going to do this I like stopped talking to other people which that was my first mistake I should have like kept going down the road um I had it in my head that I was like oh I'm going to negotiate hard I'm going to like have I know your worth I know like the worth of this project I know what it needs so I'm not going to go for any like silly offers basically and it meant that some of our negotiating was like long because there was a lot of back and forth and figuring stuff out but we had one publisher who kind of on two separate occasions said they were down for it like which was particularly annoying and a lot of like people not responding to emails and like just the weirdest that like I'm just not used to yeah yeah the ghosting is pretty frustrating and then the second one we had straight up ghosted us like they were like we're going to do it we're going to sign the contract we're you know this is great we had multiple meetings with all of their people and then just stopped replying to emails yeah what I mean I kind of Wonder do you know if anybody got laid off there or something or maybe they but then we had Publishers like I don't know if I want to say the names of like the good ones but like I'll just say it and I can edit it out later but nigela devolver was very upfront about it he was like we might be interested in this obviously he they published Soso they helped you a bit with that um and he was like I'm going to talk to him about it and then like a week later he was like not sure because like we've pretty Full Slate we've had some stuff in 23 that's been pushed to 24 uh and then a week later he was like no it's not going to happen and I was like cool yeah thanks thanks for letting us know thanks for trying it out and then not wasting our time I guess yeah like we had some Publishers who they were talking to us we like okay this could be like an like a sort of a live game where we can like add skins in and we can you know like that's because like the the the investment we were looking for wasn't even all that much but like it's not really worth the energy on their side for some of them if they're not going to get like a 5x return or a 10x return or yeah you know a 20 extra turn yeah like I'm not gonna lie and say that we're gonna do a live service thing because I'm I'm not gonna make a live service game right and it I think those are finally starting to like people are realizing like people don't want a second job right for a game right another thing you saw last year is just games like people making a game and selling it and like that working really well but I think part of the appeal with that like you can host your own servers and stuff in power world right right and and Le company I think is peer-to-peer mostly like stunt Derby is yeah and people miss that you know just being able to play with their friends like not having to play with strangers all the time yeah not having to go into like matchmaking lobbying all that sort of stuff like there does seem to be and In fairness you said this a long time ago to me that there is these and it makes sense with the games you've been making over the years you know what I mean like these groups of people who want to play these games over and over and sun is a game you can play and we did play over and over and over again um but yeah there obviously this year it's been proven out that a lot of people are happy to have their like they've got their like four five six buddies they play with all the time and they need a new game to like go in there yeah but I'm with you I it was honestly like the first six months of 20123 it was almost like the game was in Early Access because we were doing like weekly play tests at least and updates were coming every single week but I hear what you're saying but I think I was too focused on like okay this Mode's super fun how can we like perfect it right uh and I think one thing we need to do is make some single player stuff it already is kind of fun like there's um fail race did the stream uh the video and he had a lot of fun like just making tracks with 100 AI players throw AI in um and the AI doesn't like that's one thing I'm definitely going to fix up so it can drive around more tracks not just go flying off all the time not having some more stuff like that for the demo because it's hard to rely on people having like 10 friends ready to play a game totally and we also did a lot of work to get it you know you did loads of work to get the nextfest demo up yeah just finishing any game for any sort of public consumption is like weeks of work and so yeah like I didn't have time to fix I wanted to fix the AI I had like a huge list notepad that I wanted to fix but you know you get to that last week and it's like oh there's this this bug this bug this bug it's like and you don't want to with it then cuz you could break everything as well like you could do something it's like yeah you don't want to do any major changes but I mean you're not even thinking about that at that point yeah I think the graphics could definitely be improved but like that's something you know we need an artist to help out with that like if we're really going to overhaul the graphics right yeah it's either going to cost like nothing or like this much it's like there's no like like there's a few things I can still do like I haven't put the clouds in and like some more trees and stuff like that dust you saying smoke things like that yeah but I think the main thing that I've been thinking about that's missing is kind of like something that appeals to like a 10-year-old okay you know so like that's like we've been talking about the Rockets have you heard of Pokemon no if po world can do it why can't we now what do you think capture cars uh no like rockets okay yes absolutely fun yeah uh like the grappling hook the grappling hook has been yeah you've done a bunch of this stuff behind closed doors too also been working on some of this yeah captur the trailer mode yeah yeah and then uh jump Jets I think could be another fun one so just having some like kind of like crazy stuff like that having a few more cars we only have three cars that's H what type of cars did you put in if you had your like top three cars definitely want to put in like F1 Style Open Wheel car gets in um like a bus I think would be fun right even in the team mode I think like just being able to literally park the bus Jose Mourinho style yeah but like if you can figure out ways of other people can contribute to the team without being the best player and that's the fun thing with Team mode already yeah you don't have to be the best driver to contribute you know like the the best driver might get hit by a van and like you have to take over and you know we get this thing funded we get it in Early Access what's the end goal of stunt Derby cuz we've already said like making a live service game isn't really like there will be a 1.0 version and that's the game right and like people can just do what what they want play with their friends make their own tracks tear the Cod apart I don't know do whatever you want kind of thing right yeah I like I think that's another thing where it's kind of fluid like I don't I don't know exactly what 1.0 is like we have to see what people like you know like there's a lot of different mode ideas that we've been talking about like the soccer mode you know the the trailer capture of the trailer modes and um I kind of just want to see what what people like what people react to and um eventually I would like to have it so people can make their own modes you have some sort of scripting thing right um Pokemon mode pal mode get it I'm just trying to hop on the trends man okay I'm the producer let's get some P lethal company right exactly got some great advice that I should make sub Rosa more like lethal company is that what somebody said I mean basically look how successful that game was don't you just do that just do that just make a great game everyone plays yeah so what's the future for stunt Derby myself and Alex think it the game is too early for Early Access he needs like two or three months to get it to a position where we feel confident putting it up there early access games on Steam now are like a pretty decent quality and he needs some time to work on it like dedicated uh and do need an artist to come in and help us out with some of that stuff and clean up the UI and get some new cars in there and just make the game feel like an intentional Retro Game rather than programming art respect to Alex I love his programming art but I think I think there's a look there that we'd like to aim for um and short of getting initial investment from a fund or from a publisher I don't know what the option is aside from me throwing more of my my cash at it it might be Kickstarter I I don't know do people still use Kickstarter I have some things I funded 10 years ago I'm still waiting to get the uh I'm still checking my mailbox for it um so I don't know I mean the game is playable we play it every week it's lots of fun we could just sell access to it like that we've been giving beta keys to patrons for over a year now and they've been enjoying it um I think that's probably the most pragmatic way around it but honestly I'm going to wait until after GDC before we make any final decisions cuz who knows who knows what can happen I'm an eternal optimist this whole I wouldn't start I don't think anyone makes a game or starts making a game unless they are some sort of an optimist because the more I get you know into this whole process and the more I learn about it which is the whole point of this series um the more I realize how impossible it is that any game comes out but stunt Derby will come out that's the one thing I'm determined about so don't worry we're not going anywhere until next time it won't be a year until we post the next video I promise we'll see you then good stuff all right buy stunt Derby today fund it today do the thumbs Alex there we go

Channel: Noclip Crew

Views: 49,682

Keywords: noclip, crew

Id: lRVsrVZrfyg

Length: 30min 27sec (1827 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024