Hello, aspiring Guildmasters!
Following our previous diary entry about accessibility written by our lead programmer, Joonas, today I would like to talk about the hardship of scoring a publishing deal. My name is David, and I’m the founder and CEO of myTrueSound.
Precisely one year ago we learned that self-publishing a game is not easy. The actual process of setting game files and store pages is not that hard, but it can be tiresome, especially if any of the game stores set obstacles to your way. For instance, when we published our first audio game, GoldGun, on one of the mobile app stores of our choice, the platform administrators were not convinced with our game not having any visuals. In the end, we had to add a visible back button to solve the issue (funny story actually). However, these kinds of issues can be solved eventually, thus they are not that big of a deal. The real challenge is marketing; the task of letting the world know that your game is awesome and ready to be played.
The hardest part is not getting your game into a store, but getting it noticed.
In September 2019 we launched AudioWizards, an arcade action game that has spatial audio, great sound design, and cartoonish 3D graphics. The game was designed for the blind and visually impaired community. It balanced cognitive demands quite well when using hearing and visual senses to play. This way no one had an advantage over the other no matter if you were visually impaired or not. Back then, we did our best to advertise AudioWizards on Facebook, Twitter, forums dedicated to audio games, and other social media used by our target audience. We actually succeeded in creating a small hype and we even received the attention of a few NGOs working in the said community. Despite all the work and the very favorable critics, the game didn’t sell as well as we expected.
AudioWizards. Our pride and joy.
So, for our next project, Kilta, we were certain about the need to outsource the marketing to a third party, i.e. to a publisher. We prepared a pitch deck and performed a systematic analysis of all publishers who suited us. Our search criteria was: works with indie games, the possibility to fund the development phase, and is interested in games with characteristics as of those in Kilta. Once that was done, we sent our pitch deck to the selected publishers. Some publishers had a form on their websites for studios like ours to send their pitch decks. However, using them we only obtained silence in return.
A video showcasing our experience with the publishers.
The next thing we did was to participate in game-pitching events. This was in spring 2020, just when the big C hit the world. In a way, the pandemic was beneficial to us. All those events were now online, therefore it was cheap to participate since we didn't have to pay for hotel reservations nor flights. We took part in two events, the Nordic Game 2020 (at the end of May) and MeetToMatch Cologne Edition (in August). These two game-pitching events were both well organized. It was easy to browse the list of publisher participants and arrange meetings with them. We narrowed down suitable publishers to only 20 from a list of over 200 publishers by applying the aforementioned criteria. In addition to our “Hello, we are myTrueSound. This is our next game blah blah...”, we also sent them the pitch deck and a gameplay video of our game. This way, if they accepted our invitation, we knew that we at least got their attention. We pitched to about 12 publishers in both of these events. The meeting time was always 30 minutes.
The core gameplay loop of Kilta. The holy trinity which we so eagerly shared with the publishers.
I want to believe that we performed quite well. Our pitching and communication skills improved from meeting to meeting, and in the very last meetings, our pitching was spot on. We told everything systematically and efficiently. We talked about the game in general, its graphics, sounds, how it is played, our analysis of our competitors, our team, our production schedule and milestones, the history of our company, etc. The feedback we received was always nice – or better, and most of the publishers we pitched to asked us to send a build of the game for them. We sent a build to every publisher who wanted a copy, and except in 2-3 cases, we didn’t ask for an NDA. We kept in touch with most of them via email. Few never answered back, but most of them, often after a few days – and sometimes weeks – eventually let us know what their thoughts were on our game.
The responses we received from the publishers were mostly: a) your game doesn’t fit our portfolio, b) you are too early, c) you are too late, d) we are looking for an AA or AAA game, e) we are actually looking for a game to be shipped in Q4 2021, and f) we don’t want to publish your game, we are only looking for studios to develop our games. Nobody said that our game was bad, or that our production plan was unrealistic, or that our funding demands were too high. In the end, none of the publishers were ready to make a deal.
Fine. We'll do it ourselves then!
So, here we are, about to release Kilta as an Early Access game. Despite our hard work, we couldn't score a deal with a publisher. Now only time will tell what'll happen next. But to tip this situation to our advantage, we are going to work as hard as we can.
Written by David Oliva, the founder and CEO of myTrueSound.
Thank you for reading! If you have any thoughts on marketing, approaching publishers, and/or Kilta in general, feel free to come to chat with us on our official Discord server or send us a message on Steam.
If you want to hear more about Kilta, follow us and wishlist the game now on Steam!