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Pitching Game Concepts To Developers?
Andonyx writes "When I was in college, every third person I met had a screenplay they wanted to pitch. Now every fifth person I meet has a game idea. Well, there are books-a-plenty that teach you how to format, pitch and sell screen plays, but what about the aspiring game designer? Where does someone with some design experience but not the resources to develop an entire proof of concept go to pitch a game idea to an established developer? Or does that even happen? Thought the Slashdot crowd might have some useful advice." This question touches a little on the 'supervising game designer' concept discussed a couple of weeks back, but more specifically asks how/whether you can successfully pitch externally-created game concepts and documents to developers.
At a MEF forum event at E3 last month, it was pretty apparent that Vodaphone Live! is one of the most happening players when it comes to cutting in developers with a chunk of change in return for their IP.
The International Game Developers Association has a PDF Game Submission Guide that gives you ''publisher feedback on submission checklist items, and information on what to expect before, during and after the pitch, along with insight into the publisher decision-making process.'' You have to fill out a free registration before download but it may be worth it to you.
I am also employed at a game development house. My boss explained the market thus:
Think back to 1994. The SNES is the rage and games sell for $49 each in the US. At that time, the most expensive game produced for the SNES was Yoshi's Island, which cost $600,000.
Games now cost a whole lot more to make. Get a team of twenty highly educated people to work full time on a project for two years and your game will end up costing between $3 and $5 million (Shenmue, the most expensive game ever so far, cost $20 million to produce). The catch, of course, is that the games themselves still sell for only $49. So to make a profit, a publisher must sell through many many many more units than were required in the early nineties.
As a logical (but stupid) consequence, publishers are only willing to invest in games that they think are guaranteed to sell a certain number of units. This thinking stifles creativity, because taking risks in games can easily crash and burn. So while your idea may NOT be something along the lines of "it's GTA3... but SURVIVAL HORROR!!", publishers are still pretty unwilling to hear it unless you happen to work for a proven developer (like id, Blizzard, Bungie, Crystal Dynamics, Silicon Knights, Rare, etc).
Instead, publishers are looking for ways other than gameplay to move units, which is why we get tons of licensed-based games on the market. Almost all of the top 25 GBA games, for example, are products based on existing IPs (Mario, Sonic, Yu-Gi-Oh!, etc). Every once and a while something unique like Advance Wars will sneak into the top sellers, but usually only the tried-and-true franchises make are able to penetrate the market.
Here is what you should do:
Step 1: Produce a game design document. This is a document that describes EVERY SINGLE aspect of your game. This doesn't mean that the game design may not change over the course of the project, but it means that you'd rather not have it change dramatically. Lay everything out here on paper: the concept, the characters, the control scheme, the layout of all the levels, the enemies and their behaviors, how scoring works, how the UI will work, and how long you plan to spend to finish the entire project.
Step 2: Type all this up and make it look nice. If you have some technical or art skills, making a simple engine/mockup of some of the things you discuss will help. Depending on the size of your game, the resulting document will probably be between 50 and 200 pages long.
Step 3:Be sure to note areas where adjustments in the design can easily be made if the mechanic you've chosen doesn't turn out to be as much fun as you had hoped. Note entire modes/levels/characters/enemies that may be cut if time pressures become a problem.
Step 4: Submit this monster to a game development house along with an application for a game designer position. You wont get your game made, but if you can get into the industry and make a name for yourself, you *might* be able to eventually make your game in a couple of years.
As other have said, publishers are not interested in ideas unless you have significant experience and a proven track record.
waka