30 Things I Hate About Your Game Pitch

[dsmart]

#9 - You Never Mentioned Your Glaring Obvious Tech Risk  (8:55)
"A lot of times if you see a lot of pitches and if you've been working them on the publisher side a lot you kind of know what's feasible and what's not and you know what things are hard to do and what things are easy to do and if somebody comes in and says yeah we want to do a thousand person multiplayer game with real-time firefights then alarm bells go off and it's fine to do something that's really technologically ambitious it's fun to do something that's really dangerous and hard but if you say something like that that sounds dangerous and hard and then you don't explain how you're going to pull that off then that really makes people nervous."

#13 - You Polished Too Early  (12:20)
"Part of the reason this image is in here this is from a game I worked on where we did like final art for all the ships before we had our combat modeled down and all the stuff got thrown out and so if a game is really really visually polished but the mechanics are still really broken in prototype that also is an alarm bell because it suggests that the team is not putting all the effort where where it should be and it also suggests that a lot of work is going to be redone. So again if you want to showcase what you're capable of in the art department that's great but make sure that it doesn't overshadow the fact that your your game in the prototype phase may still be really really incomplete. A few still images of show with your art team is capable of is much better than a prototype that is broken in a variety of ways but what that looks amazing because the person you pitching to knows that's all gonna have to be thrown out when the game actually gets nailed down so make sure that work in progress actually looks like work in progress."

[David-2]

Derek, Thanks!   :thumbsup:  A wonderful presentation and what struck me was how applicable it is to other kinds of pitches - for example, suppose you want to start or promote an open source project - if you think in these terms - why is it worth doing, what's the hook, are you capable of executing, do the hard stuff first, etc. - then you'll not only have a way to have your one-page readme.md on your github site be compelling to people (*) but you'll also have a way to organize your development so that it makes sense.

-- David

(*) Think of how many intro pages you've seen on github which are "here's how you build it, here's the bug tracker, join our community, done."

[Star Chip]

That video is basically everything gone wrong with SC. It is impossible to not find any of these "sins" from CIG's approach to game development. But SC is not just a game, it is a religion, the way Crobert running this marketing campaign is as far as a conman can go. Is this intentional or accidental? We do not know, YET, but SC's marketing can be perfectly matched to a CULT. This is when supporters no longer motivated by their personal gain, instead they are perfectly aware and willing to make sacrifice to the scheme. SC is not selling a game or a product, it no longer need to "lie" about anything, it is selling a vision, and the only business that sells vision to its customer is called religion. This is why SC had long passed the state of a scam, and become a cult. Crobert is the savior of PC gaming, and SC is the promise land of paradise. And therefor hostility toward any criticism that disrupts shitizen echo chamber. SC qualify as a cult is also in a sense that typical brand loyalty is based on a lengthy history of trading real good and service with the end customer, SC is unique because it gained the so called "loyalty" without any "product" and only replied on marketing. When SC go down, it will be a catastrophe for crowd funding as a business model, on a scale that will dwarf the likes of NMS and Mighty number 9. It will become a classic textbook material for sociology in the times to come.

[Ghostmaker]

Somewhere in the afterlife, L. Ron Hubbard is applauding.

[Motto]