From Concept to Contract: Making A Successful Product Pitch

From Concept to Contract:
Making A Successful Product Pitch by David Mullich

3. CAPABILITY, the physical element that enables your idea to become a reality. Implementation is at least as important as inspiration for successfully making a game. It is vital to demonstrate that you have the creative, technical, managerial and financial wherewithal to participate in the game's development before a publisher would seriously consider enter into negotiations with you.

Try assess what resources you need to develop the game, where to acquire those resources, and how to maintain them. If you find that you don't have a clue about how to implement the game, you are probably not in a good position to be pitching the concept to a publisher.

Having a great game idea is not sufficient for pitching a game. It must exude passion, integrity and capability before you should even say "hello" to a publisher. If you lack any of these elements, return to the drawing board for idea in which you can be further involved in developing the concept, or consider finding a development partner who can bring more to the negotiating table when you are ready to visit a publisher.

Writing A Proposal

Once you have a solid concept, put it into writing as a game proposal. Not only is this is a good way to organize
your thoughts prior to your first meeting with a publisher, but also gives you something physical to leave behind afterwards. It is rare to meet all of a publisher's decision-makers in an initial meeting, so a document or some other record of your proposal is important for sharing your concept with the rest of the company.

A game proposal does not need to be a lengthy document. Five to ten pages is often sufficient; anything more than thirty is overkill. Decision-makers tend to be extremely busy people, so reading a massive document is not going to be high on their agenda. Also, it is very likely that your game will undergo many changes during development, so specifying everything down to the last detail can be wasted effort at this early stage.

In general, a game proposal should communicate your concept to decision-makers who are not available to meet you in person, give a sense of what it would be like to play the game, and most importantly, demonstrate that you are serious about creating the game and have the capability to pull it off. Specifically, here are some topics that your proposal should address.

1.WORKING TITLE. There are stories of games being given a "green light" just on the basis of having an intriguing title, but at the very least, you should come up with a title that serves as a short-hand description for what the game is all about.

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