Good article on the process of pitching games

Max

I know a lot of people who read these forums are interested in game development, so I figured I'd pass along <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/news/6183997.html" target="_blank">this</a> excellent Gamespot article on the process of pitching games. It matches my experience working the game industry quite well, and gives some of the reasons we didn't bother pitching Natural Selection 2 to publishers.

Abra

Interesting read. I often wonder, when I look at trailers and TV-spots for new games, how they were pitched. How do you boil your game's features down to something of a presentation-length? I can see how this stage in pre-development saves us from a couple of boring games on the marked. There is a lot of money at risk.

Drfuzzy

Yea the game development world is brutal, you have to pretty much live by what the publishers want which makes it hard to go with your own unique ideas which is what can create the best games.

Crispy

Interesting article. Most publishers are effectively big investors supremely concerned with getting a large return on their investment. They're not experts in what makes games fun, their experts in what makes games sell. This is why, even though videogames have gone mainstream in the last decade, I still feel like 'true' videogames are firmly underground, since they're not the ones bought by weak-minded parents to shut their kids up on a weekend or sate their 'can I, can I' demands; or by fumbling relatives scrambling at the shop shelves of the top10 section, desperate to find a birthday/christmas present that proves they're still 'with it' and know what the kids are into. What this means is film tie-ins and 'next-in-series' franchise titles get bought out of sheer familiarity.

Publishers cater to people who are less informed, less demanding and more frequent in their purchases of videogames. I'm glad UWE didn't go to this type of financier for funding - they just wouldn't get Natural Selection.

ZupiCo

<!--quoteo(post=1664869:date=Dec 22 2007, 11:09 AM:name=Drfuzzy)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Drfuzzy @ Dec 22 2007, 11:09 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1664869"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Yea the game development world is brutal, you have to pretty much live by what the publishers want which makes it hard to go with your own unique ideas which is what can create the best games.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is why online distribution (Steam) is such a great idea. Publishers doesn't face huge losses if their online distributed game doesn't sell as expected, which allows some great games to see the light, for example Defcon and Darwinia.

Crispy

<!--quoteo(post=1664961:date=Dec 23 2007, 02:43 PM:name=ZupiCo)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ZupiCo @ Dec 23 2007, 02:43 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1664961"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->This is why online distribution (Steam) is such a great idea. Publishers doesn't face huge losses if their online distributed game doesn't sell as expected, which allows some great games to see the light, for example Defcon and Darwinia.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->It's even better than that. Valve is the publisher, so you don't even have to deal with a conventional money-grabbing publisher at all for the distriution side.