Sat 18 Nov 2006
Was reading the recent interview with John Baez on “indie freedom” at Gamasutra (originally in podcast form). Overall a great read on the trials and tribulations of The Behemoth’s indie dev efforts.
Was happy to read the following pitching tip:
You need to go to the IGDA and go through their white paper list of what to do in a pitch situation, and really look at those documents, because the people on the publishers’ side know that the IGDA documents exist. Any developer showing up at their doorstep who doesn’t have all those things in the document, it’s like, “Well, you guys aren’t doing your homework. Why should I even talk to you guys?”
Admittedly, the Game Submission Guide referred to is one of our older papers that could use some refreshing. Still, it remains one of our most popular downloads and it largely maintains its usefulness.
That said, gotta wonder how many publishers truly do know about it…
November 18th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
I think the emergence of “online” publishers, particularly in the casual market, has lowered the risk profile of evaluating new games and gives more slack to the process, if the demo isn’t entirely shiny, for example, a publisher can afford to still be interested because the costs of improving that demo are one tenth or less the cost involved in improving a 3D console game. Still many of the guidelines in the whitepaper are solid, you need to give a clear sense of where the game can go and whos going to take it there.
I think the importance of a competetive anaylsis is underestimated, and could use more work in the whitepaper.