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A pitch deck is a slide show (typically presented as a pdf or in Google Slides/PowerPoint) that conveys your game’s potential, progress, and identity. Since you submit your pitch to publishers via form or email, your deck has to do a lot of heavy lifting to convince someone to start talking to you.
Your pitch deck should include the following:
An Overview
A Story with Personality
Creative Pillars
Comps
An Ask
Your Timeline
Your Team
An Overview
There should be a good amount of high-level, must-share info in your pitch deck. It can be helpful to capture it on one slide. Here’s a list:
Genre: take a look at your comps to find the right terms to use here.
Platforms: PC? Mac? Xbox? Switch? If you’re speculative, you could say something like “PC/Mac, Switch TBD,” which is perfectly fine.
Intended audience: who will play your game? Is it for kids? Adults? Hardcore gamers? Casual gamers?
Needs: are you looking for funding, marketing, QA, localization, porting, or all of the above?
I’ve seen a lot of pitch decks that put this info in a neat little list on their second or third slide with a short description of their game above. That’s fine—neither a plus or a minus in my book, and it checks the box. Just keep the slide clean and visually appealing.
You also don’t need to format this info as a list. Get creative! Here’s an example: “Flippin’ Pancakes is a casual co-op cooking frenzy for kids aged 4-99 (but they’ll like it best if they’re sub-12). Coming soon (with your help) to PC and Switch.” Then you could have a little graphic of someone perusing a menu with all the publisher options (Funding, Marketing, QA, Localization, and Porting) and a speech bubble that says “I’ll take it all!” It’s a great way to ensure that your personality shines through even on drier slides.
A Story with Personality
Personality is what separates great pitch decks from average pitch decks. It’s conveyed both visually and narratively. It makes your game's story engaging and intriguing.
Imagine you’re making a pitch deck for Borderlands. You could include creative pillars like “never too serious” and “endless loot” and then show examples of comical killing and weapon tables. That would convey your development goals. Your reader would understand what type of game you’re looking to develop.
Now imagine you do all of that, and you have Claptrap narrate it. And the pitch deck advertises to you, Vault Hunter, the glory that you can find on alien planets, and the ludicrous things you’ll do there, and treasures untold. That pitch deck doesn’t describe the universe to you—it puts you in it.
While not all games have narrative structures that lend themselves so well to a pitch, you can always find ways to capture your game’s spirit in a pitch deck. A Super Mario pitch deck might show Mario jumping from slide to slide bouncing on Goombas, powering up, and navigating lava on his way to rescue Princess Peach. A Fortnite pitch deck might drop you from a battle bus and show you building and looting as the storm condenses over a few slides.
These examples highlight the importance of establishing player perspective in your pitch deck—and the importance of step-by-step storytelling. When we write about or present things that we know well, we have a tendency to share too much at once. It’s not hard for us to digest our own thoughts, since we know them so well, so we blast people with too much information all at once. This results in reader fatigue and disengagement.
Imagine you’re a game scout at a popular publisher sifting through dozens of game pitches. Do you think you might get bored after the tenth one? I sure would. I’d need something to grab my attention so I’ll say “this game’s unique, this game’s special, I want to meet the people developing this.” To stand out from the crowd, your pitch deck needs personality.
The story is the beating heart of your pitch deck, and it will probably take up at least half of your total slides. I'm deliberately shying away from an ironclad formula here. Every game is different. I once saw an amazing pitch for a WWII plane builder that dove into captivating personal histories of WWII pilots. It had nothing to do with a gameplay loop or mechanics, but of everything in the deck, that's what awakened interest in me. That's what you need to do: awaken interest.
Creative Pillars
I used to be a big advocate for using a creative pillars slide to act as a table of contents for your pitch deck. Basically, if my creative pillars were “A Living World,” “No Turning Back,” and “Meaningful Progression,” I might organize my deck this way:
Slide 1: Title
Slide 2: Overview
Slide 3: Creative Pillars
Slides 4-5: A Living World
Slide 6: No Turning Back
Slides 7-8: Meaningful Progression
I’ve since drifted from this approach because I think it makes for bad storytelling. Consider a perfect slow-cooked brisket. I could tell you how I make it—a complex blend of seasonings, twelve hours of slow cooking, the right cut of meat from the right butcher—but is that what you think of when you take a bite? No, you think it’s juicy, and tender, and bursting with flavor, and rich, and heavenly (disclaimer: I really like brisket).
When you experience something, you don’t experience it as the sum of its parts. You experience it as the final product, and as a feeling. That’s what you want to convey to your prospective publisher.
I once got great music composition advice about dissecting existing pieces and using their underlying formulas to write my own. The advice was: don’t do it! The best creations aren’t built by recipe. They focus on the feeling, the impact, and the inspiration that led you to build in the first place. Sell that instead.
By this point you might be wondering: “okay, but didn’t you say I should include my creative pillars?” Yes, you should, but treat them like an underlying checklist. Your creative pillars have probably driven a lot of your design decisions, and they’re what give your game its identity. So make sure they’re represented throughout the story you tell. They’re a great building block for the story you’re telling, they just aren’t themselves the story.
Comps
Comps deserve their own slide. They help prospective publishers understand where your game fits in the market. They also help give your game identity. Here are some Dos and Don’ts when it comes to your comp slide:
Do
Include comps made by studios with similar experience levels to yours. It shows you’re aware of your position in the market. First time devs can have a lot of hubris when it comes to their success potential. While confidence is good, it’s best to sell that you can match titles made by similar sized and experienced studios.
One of my favorite pitch decks included a “similar titles that you’ve published” section, which I loved. It showed two things: 1) the studio cares enough about the publisher to personalize their pitch deck, 2) the studio believes it’s a fit for that specific publisher. Green flag.
Include at least three comps. Three is typical, and I agree with that choice. You can go higher, just don't overwhelm the reader with information.
Include a picture for each comp. People recognize pictures faster.
Say why these comps are similar to your game (and how they’re different). I’ve seen this conveyed a few different ways. Tables work well, like this:
Game | Cozy? | Coop? | Explorative? |
Treehouse Tigers | X | X | X |
Galaxy Quest | X | X | X |
Setting Sail | X | X |
A simple scatter plot also works if you just want to compare along two different variables. Finally, there’s no harm in just a simple list format beneath each comp: it helps you get a little more granular.
Don’t
Estimate sales in $. There are plenty of sites out there that try their best to estimate sales, but it’s imperfect at best (wildly inaccurate at worst). They usually use steam reviews as a basis to estimate copies sold (see: the Boxleiter method), which gives them a very rough estimate of copies sold. But there’s much more ambiguity when it comes to dollars. How many copies were sold on sale? How many were given away in bundles? It’s really hard to know. One thing I can guarantee is this: publishers are better at estimating sales than you are. At worst, this info is redundant. At best it’s dead wrong.
Include smash hits. 99% of games aren’t smash hits. Yours might be, but it’s more likely it won’t be, and publishers don’t want to work with teams who have unrealistic expectations. Your goal is to convince them to take a bet on you. Do that by showing realistic comps you can reasonably match in sales and popularity.
Other Thoughts
I don’t feel strongly one way or another, but you could include:
The current sale prices or initial sale prices for your comps to defend your target price point, or to show that the titles you’re comparing to are sufficiently indie.
Review scores for games you’re comparing to to show their likability.
Estimates for copies sold (I would use gamalytic). This statistic is a little more reliable than $ sold, but it’s still iffy, and I don’t think you need it.
Many games are inspired by smash hits and AAA games, but they're not fair comps. It can be helpful info, but make sure you place it appropriately. You can make a note at the bottom of the slide "Inspired by God of War, Elden Ring," or you could add this detail on your overview slide ("Think Elden Ring meets Divinity: Original Sin").
Finally, a note on underperforming comps. It might seem counterintuitive, but I’ve actually had a number of publishers recommend including comps that didn’t perform well. It shows a recognition of the market space and a willingness to be honest with yourself and your publisher. If you can succinctly outline why they failed and what you’ll do differently, I think one bad comp could be a compelling inclusion.
The Ask
What do you want from the publisher? There are two components here:
The number
The help
The Number
Sometimes, the number stands alone. You need $140k from a publisher to make your game. Sometimes the number has a little help: you need $300k total but only $140k from the publisher, as you’ve put in $40k of your own money so far, and you’ve received $120k in grant funding.
Where’s the money going? That’s important, and it shows you’ve thought through your expenses (though you’ll convey that in your budget too). A lot of people use pie charts to break down the spending. You could have categories like: programming, art, audio, platforms, legal/accounting, and general overhead (the last three can be easily grouped). A pie chart isn’t strictly necessary, though: bullet points do just fine.
The Help
What do you need from a publisher? Here's the menu:
Financing: not all publishers offer it, so be sure to look at publisher sites to make sure they do!
Marketing: probably the flagship publisher offering, and an incredible value add if you don’t understand the landscape and aren’t an experienced marketing professional.
QA: quality assurance—testing your game to make sure it works and your potential players get it. Very common publisher offering.
Porting: it might be necessary to find a publisher who can help you get your game ported if you’re going beyond PC. While the publisher won’t (usually) do the porting legwork in-house, they can leverage their network to hook you up with a porting dev studio who can take your game and make it ready for Switch/Xbox/mobile. Your publisher should definitely be able to help you get approved with Nintendo/Microsoft/Apple via their standard processes. They’re all different: for example, Nintendo has a subsidiary called Lot Check that manages approvals for third-party publishers. It’s much easier if you have your publisher manage this.
Localization: you’ll probably want to localize your game in different languages to maximize sales potential. There are a number of standard language packages. One is EFIGS: English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Similar to porting, your publisher will hook you up with a localization studio to get the job done.
Note that you shouldn’t estimate these costs. Marketing can easily be a six-figure expense, and porting/localization costs depend dramatically on the number of platforms, number of languages, and word count. Better to let your publisher work out the numbers. You also don’t want to back yourself into a corner: if you say you want a commitment of $80k for marketing support from a publisher, you’ve set a baseline. Let them do that: maybe they were thinking $200k.
Your Timeline
You’ve put in hard work to get to this point—don’t let it go unnoticed! This is a great place to show publishers where you’ve been and where you’re going.
It’s typical to use a visual timeline to convey the past, present and future. Here’s what you want to convey about the past and present:
Any previous milestones, if they show momentum. Don’t look back five years and say “this is when the idea came to me, and I’ve been noodling on it ever since.” Not a good look. But you can definitely say that vertical slice development started three months ago, and that you consider yourself to be at a particular development milestone now.
If your game spawned from a game jam, and that game jam has notoriety, include it. Especially include it if you won any awards from that game jam.
If you’ve built a Steam page and have an impressive amount of wishlists, include them.
If you have social media and have built an impressive following, include info.
If you’ve fundraised through other mediums (ex. Kickstarter) and it’s gone well, include that.
If content creators have played your game, posted about it, and reviewed it favorably, include a good still of their video and a link.
If you’ve attended shows and marketed your game there, include this information.
Effectively, you’re marketing organic momentum and social proof that your game is desirable. Lots of games don’t have social proof at this stage, so no worries if yours doesn’t.
Here’s what you want to convey about the future:
Your development timeline. Since you started with your long-term production schedule and budget, you should know how long it will take to make your game once you receive funding. That’s very helpful for publishers who have a slate of games set for future release. It tells them if your game will fit their timeline or not.
The big future milestones. If you have milestones every two months, you probably don’t need to include each one. They’ll clog up your slide. But include major events, like alpha, beta, and gold standard. They show thought and help publishers understand how you’d fit into their game portfolio.
Your progress can live on the ask slide if there’s room, or it can have its own dedicated slide. Typically I separate the two. I hate slides with overwhelming information.
Your Team
Some teams should be mentioned right at the start of the pitch deck. Some should be saved for the end. If you’re running a new development studio and your individual contributors don’t have much experience shipping games, yours should be saved for the end. Impressive slides first (no offense).
Show some personality here! If you work in person, it’s great to include a team shot. If you don’t, include headshots for everyone on the team. Talk about their experience—where have they worked, and what games have they shipped?
Sometimes you’ve got nothing to advertise, and that’s okay—everyone starts somewhere. Just know that you’re fighting an even-more-uphill battle, so everything else has to pop. Your vertical slice needs to be polished, your budget needs to be thoughtful and attractive, and you need to display a high degree of competence at all turns.
General Tips
Maximize concept art. Gifs and screenshots are essential and shouldn’t be overlooked, but concept art gives you an opportunity to really show personality. It can also be catered to a specific slide or concept. It’s worth paying for if you have a bit of money and can commission an artist.
Make sure your concept art matches the game’s art style! There shouldn’t be an enormous valley between the two.
Don’t mess up gifs. They're so useful for conveying information, but they can also be a distraction. Common gif mistakes include:
Too many on one slide. One is enough. Two is probably too many. Three is definitely too many.
Not relevant to the slide’s content. Don’t just show general gameplay—it lacks context and is distracting. Show something specific and clearly link it to the text.
Not interesting. Make your gifs interesting! I should be excited when I see a gif on your slide, not wonder why it’s there.
Don’t fear having extra slides for color. You don’t have to put together a tight, 10-slide pitch deck. One of my favorite slides in our Deathland Drifters pitch deck was a ship rendering that highlighted all of the different stations you could mount. It was impactful, intriguing, and unique. If I’d tried to create a really slim slide deck, I might have removed it—but it would have been a mistake.
List your contact information on the last slide. You never know how a pitch deck will be passed around.
Learning More
This article is based on my experience, advice from producers, and guidance from scouts at indie publishers. It’s also based on my personal review of a lot of pitch decks that I either can’t share here or don’t have access to.
I do have some pitch deck resources under the Resources page that I’ll link here:
Sample Decks
Pitch Advice
My top tip is to tune into Indie Game Business’s weekly pitch deck review most Thursdays at 2pm EST on Discord. You get a ton of exposure to different pitch decks and get to hear experienced industry professionals critique them. It’s an hour, and it’s a great way to grow.
I’m happy to review your pitch deck. Shoot me an email at znfried@gmail.com.
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