Publisher Pitch for My Work Is Not Yet Done

Introduction

Hi, my name is Spencer. I’m an American video game designer and developer based in New Jersey, and represented through Sutemi Productions. I am currently working on the investigative horror game My Work Is Not Yet Done, which will be published by the boutique indie (un)publisher Raw Fury.

This write-up will go over the process of pitching the game to Raw Fury, including the state the game was in prior to submitting the pitch, the contents of the pitch itself, and some personal thoughts on the process as a whole, as well as in regards to common advice surrounding the broader topic of “how to pitch a game”.

The first section, “The Premise”, is a presentation of why I’m writing this and what I hope to accomplish in doing so. More nakedly, it’s an articulation of my personal beliefs surrounding what the pitch process actually is, and how one should orient themselves to and around it. It’s the closest this write-up will come to offering any kind of “advice” of any sort; although it’s not really necessary for the ultimate sake of this piece and I confess I mostly am including it out of some likely misguided sense of self-indulgence.

The second section, “The Materials”, is likely what you’re here for. It is a concrete presentation of the pitch submission, the pitch email, my playable submission, and some thoughts on all of those.

As per my publisher’s request, I am obliged to include a link to the game’s Steam store page, and to encourage you, if you are so inclined, to wishlist and eventually purchase the game. Thank you for your time and interest.

More information about the game is available here.

Thank you for your time and patience.

The Premise

One of the most enduring and popular questions amongst independent game developers is how to successfully pitch one’s game to a prospective publisher. There already exists a pretty substantial amount of advice out there, from a wide variety of people coming from a wide variety of backgrounds and approaches, each seeking to answer this question. As with most advice, some of it is broadly useful and applicable, but — and let’s just be perfectly honest with ourselves here — the bulk of it isn’t.

I reckon that the biggest “problem” (if one could even call it that) underlying the general uselessness of most advice in this sense rests in the inherently paradoxical nature of how we relate to and make sense of specificity in our learning experiences. People love concrete, specific details: this much is certain. But the problem with this in relation to certain ideas of “success”, especially when defined in such a limited capacity as a rather competitive selection and vetting process, is that such “success” is by its very nature a deeply idiosyncratic — and thus, practically irreproducible — thing.

The natural counter-argument to this is to bring up the relative effectiveness of research-driven speculation. However persuasive this may seem though— especially nowadays, where there are entire industries dedicated to organising, storing, and making sense of the already-unfathomable quantities of data ripe for all manners of exploitation— I reject the relevance of this framing for the scope of this write-up. I’m neither a marketing strategist nor a business analyst; and anyways, if you’re looking for advice on how to approach this topic from that lens, in a manner where you can neatly corroborate conclusions from data-sets and arrive at hypotheses through coefficients, there’s no shortage of people out there who have attempted such (in my opinion, fruitless) experiments and offered their perspectives.

I believe that the process of pitching is, first and foremost, a philosophical endeavour, which is how I will approach it in this write-up, and how I approached it when I was in the midst of the process myself. With that in mind, I caution that you do not attempt to derive or emulate any specific concrete strategies from this particular example; but rather, use it as a point of introspection in regards to your own work, if and where applicable.

My intent with this write-up then, as follows, is not to provide any kind of specific advice in itself, but instead, to interrogate through demonstration the inherently limited nature of existing advice on this topic by providing a living example of a project pitch that thoroughly runs counter to a variety of traditional assumptions about how to properly pitch a game, but which was still able to succeed at a high level, not in spite of its departures from convention but precisely because of them.

At the same time, I don’t intend for this to be any kind of articulation for a “game plan” either, or some kind of argument for an “either/or” approach specifically when it comes to determining the “best approach” for pitching one’s work. I took this particular approach precisely because the traditional approach to pitching didn’t and won’t work for me, based on my understanding of my work and my priorities and inclinations as a creator. But that doesn’t mean it categorically won’t work for others: and, as plenty more traditional examples will very clearly demonstrate, it works perfectly well for a whole lot more people than it fails.

Like I said — I’m not here looking specifically to prove anyone, or any philosophy “wrong”; but rather, to offer what hopefully might be a clearer and more concrete articulation for the oft-stated, but just as often poorly-framed belief that there is no “right” way of going about things. I largely much agree with this sentiment, although I also think that, in its most frequent quotations, it’s missing a very important subordinate clause: there is no “right” way of going about things, as long as you’re able to answer the right questions.

I suppose it would be rather unfair to drop a line like that and then withhold what those “right questions” I mentioned were until the end, as is habitual for what is generally considered “good” promotional writing practice. But since this is not a promotional piece and I myself hate delayed gratification for dramatic sake, I will simply leave them here so that you may keep them in mind while reviewing the following materials.

Let’s return then to my initial point: the process of pitching your work to a publisher is, first and foremost, a philosophical endeavour. I will clarify this further: the process of pitching your work to a publisher is, first and foremost, a philosophical discussion in which you’re trying to convince another person (the publisher) about the validity of your argument (your work). It’s a dual interrogation of understanding. The first, is whether you can actually understand your own work. The second, is whether you can understand your work from the perspective of others.

I’m going to assume that, if you’re reading this and looking to pitch your game to someone, that you’re a reasonably self-respecting creative of some sort operating in good faith. With that in mind: the moment you start thinking about it in any other framing— as a sales pitch, as a business arrangement, as a vibe check — you risk losing sight of the gravitas of what’s being argued.

Contrary to how bizdev people might view it from their perspective — and all the respect to their perspective for them— you are not trying to “sell” your work to the publisher. Rather — you, as the primary generative force in this process, are trying to persuade the publisher that your work, as you intend it to be, is something worthwhile enough that they would be willing and able to help you accomplish.

From this, we can extract several questions that I believe are the foundational corners underlying the developer-publisher relationship, and the ones to which both you as developer and any prospective publisher should hold you accountable.

For you as the developer, it might look something like:

1. What am I making? Do I actually understand what it is that I’m making? What is its thesis? Do I understand how it will actually function in practice? Do I have a relatively stable idea of how I intend it to exist as a complete experience?
2. Why am I making it? Do I understand why I’m actually making this? Do I understand why I’ve chosen to make it this way? Or am I just making excuses for myself?
3. How will I present this? Can I properly articulate my design? Does my understanding allow space for others? Does my understanding factor in the consideration of others, or is it primarily self-centred and self-serving? Do I have an understanding of the prospective audience for my work?
4. Can I actually make this? Do I understand the capacity of my own abilities? Am I able and willing to honestly admit my limitations? Is my product feasible?

A less existentially-tinged version of this may be extrapolated, from the opposite perspective, as follows:

1. What is the game you’re making? What are your expectations for it as a finished work?
2. Why are you making this game? Why are you making it the way that you’ve chosen to make it?
3. Can you clearly and effectively articulate the “what” and “why” of your game? Why have you chosen us as a prospective publisher?
4. Are you able to present, and adhere to a clear and honest understanding of how you’re going to make your game? Do you have evidence to back up that understanding?

And lastly, before we move on, I’ll just admit outright the real punchline to all this: being able to perfectly answer all of these will still not even close to guarantee that your pitch will work in your favour. There are plenty of mitigating factors that stand between you and a successful pitch, and plenty of hard-assed marketing dudes out there who will jump at the gun to remind you that actually, your game probably looks and plays like shit and is out of season and anyways, who really needs another platformer-as-metaphor about overcoming depression.

And maybe they’re right. Or maybe they’re not. But all of that — that part’s on you alone to figure out.

The same way that it’s psychically irresponsible and destructive to both those we meet, and especially ourselves to attempt to use others to compensate for our weaknesses and uncertainties, it’s just as artistically irresponsible and destructive to attempt to resolve our insecurities about our work through some external process, especially one as mercilessly particular as a publisher pitch. I firmly believe that one’s work is an act of faith: a means to come into communion not just with some greater part of ourselves or our understanding of our world, but also with one another. If you’re going to share your work, do it because you believe in it so strongly that you want others to share in it it with you; not because you want others to believe in it for you.

Anyways, onto the important part…

The Materials

This section contains all the relevant materials submitted during the pitching process. They have preserved as close to possible to their original forms, except where otherwise noted.

Setting up for the pitch

I started working on Work in the summer of 2019, as far as my memory permits. Truthfully, there was no formal “setup” for any kind of pitch to any publisher as, up until the moment that publishers started reaching out to me, I was fairly confidently convinced that no publishers would be interested in my work to begin with. It was never intended to be much more than a diversion at that point: a small project that I had begun at the behest of some new friends, both to ease myself back into the possibility that I could make games again, and to distract myself from the onset of a profound depressive suicidality that had begun to settle into my life.

My first breakthrough came at the beginning of 2020, with the success of my Kickstarter campaign. (You can read the postmortem for that here if you’re interested.) Although the amount I actually received from it was pretty much pathetic relative to the average American salary, let alone the average salary for where I live, let alone most game budgets, it nonetheless was able to sustain me for at least a year in the conditions in which I was living. The campaign, but especially the first trailer, garnered a significant and surprising degree of media attention which brought it to the attention of the circles in which scouts for publishers tend to circulate.

(I also elected to write and post monthly updates on my Kickstarter page, which I’ve mostly kept up on. I was told by both my scout and producer after we started working together that the consistency and dedication to my Kickstarter updates was a major persuading point for them during the consideration process, in that it demonstrated a high level of discipline and consistency.)

A considerable number of representatives from publishers ranging from reasonably niche to alarmingly conspicuous contacted me in the months afterwards expressing interest in the project. (Most of this fairly informal, through Twitter or email.) This interest continued for several months, during which I continuously shared my work on Twitter, where I had achieved a minor degree of popularity as a developer.

(My thoughts on Twitter are a bit more ambivalent, but I disagree with the common talking point that goes something like “Twitter is for other devs and publishers, not players, so it’s a waste of time when you could be using a much more audience-oriented platform like TikTok”. If you’re thinking about signing with a publisher, the only audience that should matter in the immediate are publishers.)

At the time, my idea of what the game could be was still pretty firmly fixed within the more limited constraints in which I had been operating up until that point, and so working with a publisher — as interesting as I found the possibility to be — seemed like a bit of a waste of time. I was still not entirely convinced, despite the success of the campaign, that this game would have any lasting purchase, or ability to make back any meaningful sum of money; and anyways, I figured I’d be done with the project by the end of the year.

These were, I suspect, just excuses, though.

There was an element of stubborn bravado (and concomitantly the inverse, profound insecurity) to it all which, in retrospect, I think was the real reason it took me so long to sign with someone. I knew from the very start that the game would be somewhat strange and unconventional, even confrontational: and on the very, very slight off-chance that it could find some degree of success, some part of me kept on hanging itself on the belief that if I did it “alone”, I could somehow emerge stronger from that, more dignified in my loneliness, perhaps. If I could turn this into something good on my own, I figured, maybe I could finally be someone worth living for and with.

This was, in retrospect, a deeply damaging belief which continues to destructively impact both my views about, and my practical ability to meaningfully engage with (and work on!) my work in the present. It was not until I was able to confront and work towards resolving this within myself that I finally came around to my senses. I think that resolving this within myself was the real reason I was able to sign with a publisher at all, when previously, while I had always wanted to do it, I suspect I’d been self-sabotaging under the cover of a variety of seemingly practical excuses to justify myself.

At this point I’d narrowed my choices in commitment down to two publishers with whom I was having fairly regularly discussions: one of whom was Raw Fury, and the other, a publisher specialising in games with a strong narrative focus. While I believed (and still do) that the latter would’ve been a better fit more immediately given the design of my game, I found myself continuously intrigued by Raw Fury’s apparent commitment to a certain kind of openness towards experimentation which, in this industry, is fairly unusual. For me, this was best embodied in their publication of their developer contracts the previous winter holiday, which was a major point in the “Why Raw Fury?” section of my pitch deck (available below).

A huge part of my personal ambitions as a developer rests in my commitment to promoting a very high level of transparency in my own development process. The games industry is notoriously opaque in its machinations, often, historically, intentionally in some misguided attempt to preserve the semblance of some Hollywood-like acheiropoietic “studio magic”. The cost of maintaining that illusion though has contributed to the formation of a culture where the people who partake in the works have become deeply alienated from the people who make the works; and in that gap misunderstandings and resentment have bloomed in poisonous ways.

Against that end, I seek to make as much of my process and assets accessible for public use as possible, so that we may be reminded of the necessarily human nature of these endeavours. In practice, this entails a number of stipulations — releasing the source code for public use, and promoting a pay-what-you-can pricing model alongside the traditional fixed one in particular — which are understandably pretty difficult for most publishers to easily agree with, both from a legal and practical perspective.

At this point, and in light of that, the major point of decision was whether I wanted to form a relationship based more around the work itself, or around my greater priorities as a developer in the long run.

After a couple more months of discussions, I made the decision to sign with Raw Fury. It was the only pitch I submitted, and at this point, I had firmly decided that I was either going to sign with them, or with no one.

Here’s what I proposed to them.

The pitch “deck”

This pitch piece served as the equivalent to what people would usually present as a “pitch deck”, which is traditionally a relatively short (especially on text) slideshow presentation. Here are two decent templates, and two examples of other successfully pitched games’ pitches that I looked at briefly.

• eggnut’s Twitter write-up of their pitch for Backbone
• A collection of curated pitch decks

I hate slideshow presentations though and did not feel like confident in my ability to adequately articulate the purpose and scope of my project through a PowerPoint, so instead I just prepared a write-up instead. It was submitted as a single-spaced text document which, including two pages of images, came out to just a little over ten pages.

The pitch is available as either a PDF or a Google Doc. Initially I had reproduced the text here in its entirety, but I didn’t like the way it looked so instead I will simply refer you to the original.

Further thoughts

• Honestly, especially in retrospect, I feel rather embarrassed re-reading my pitch presentation; and the idea that at some point someone had to stand up, literally or otherwise, in front of the entire company and present this shit straight-faced as a legitimate investment opportunity is pretty ludicrous. I’ve been told at various points in my life with varying degrees of charitability that I have a tendency to talk too much and slip into obsessive and circular tangents, which is no doubt greatly exacerbated by the absence of an editor in writing. I would say that very much applies here…
• Following that, I think that much of this is pretty excessive, although ultimately I also reckon that the level of detail I went into was likely a strong persuasive point for them that I knew exactly what it is that I’m making, why I’m making it, and how I’m making it. Although I talk relatively little about how the game actually plays in practice, I think the more philosophical approach combined with the practical demo helped paint a decent picture of what the game will play like in completion.
• The budget I proposed was, as I rather quickly came to discover, extremely low, to the point where I was strongly recommended by my scout to increase it pretty substantially in the contract (which I did). I had calculated this number based on an estimated minimum required to live somewhat reasonably in my area. I was rather embarrassed by this amount, honestly, and I had placed it so low because I figured it would be more than I’d ever expected to earn from the game in sales anyways, so anything would be better than nothing. Next time I’ll strive for a bit more confidence in myself and my work, and ask for a bit more.
• I maintain that the strongest part of this was concluding with the “Why Raw Fury?” section. Despite what some embittered individuals on Twitter or Reddit may say otherwise, a good developer-publisher relationship is just that: a relationship. There are two parties involved and each must complement the other. I think I did a good job articulating not just what Raw Fury could do for me, as a publishing house with a strong, demonstrated practical commitment to an ethos of transparency, who would permit me a much wider range of experimental freedom in how I represent and release this game; but also what I could do for a Raw Fury as well, as a relatively low-cost, philosophically-attuned agent through which they could experiment with and pursue a much more radical expression of that ethos which, if successful, would serve as a strong affirmation of their stated philosophies as a company.

The pitch email

The following contains the reconstructed email I submitted to Raw Fury as per my scout’s instructions, when it came time to officially initiate the formal process. I sent this on 3 September 2021. It took me about twenty minutes to write and assemble. I didn’t follow any templates or look for any examples at this point as I regarded it primarily as a formality, and I think I was vaguely hungover that morning. Instead I just focused on answering several points which I considered to be most salient:

1. Who am I?
2. What am I pitching?
3. What are my plans for it?
4. How can you help me?

In any case, here it is.

PITCH : My Work Is Not Yet Done, a 1-bit investigative scientific horror game

Hello:

My name’s Spencer and I represent Sutemi Productions, a (1-person, so far) American studio aiming to produce challenging and unorthodox titles, currently working on My Work Is Not Yet Done. It has been in production since 2019, and I seek to wrap up development soon with your help.

My Work Is Not Yet Done is a narrative-driven investigative horror game, combining elements of the survival/simulation genres with a dense, nonlinear plot exploring the imbrication and dissolution of human identities/meanings within uncanny wilderness.

You can view a trailer here, and the successful Kickstarter campaign (+updates) here. I’ve attached a brief playable gameplay demo (Windows) as well for your consideration, which I believe demonstrates the most salient aspects of the game’s general mood and pacing. General instructions, information, and control schemes are included as separate documents in the installation folder.

In the meantime, here are some things you can do in this game:

• Attempt to uncover the source of a strange and inscrutable radio transmission
• Perform unreasonably-detail diagnostics and repairs upon a number of faithfully-reproduced environmental sensors and meters
• Contemplate lovely two-tone black-and-white wilderness
• Encounter unspeakable, claustrophobic dread and horror in your pursuit of the transcendental
• Trace the progress of water in mL through your digestive and excretory systems
• Read through many, many pages of personal journal entries and speculate about the author’s psychic state
• Experience an authentic reproduction of what it feels like to defecate in the absence of flushing toilets and toilet paper
• Ignore your mission and spend your final days processing worms into nutrient powder

Ideally, I am targeting a late 2021/early 2022 PC-exclusive release, and am expecting at least another eight to twelve months of development.

I am seeking a partnership with Raw Fury in order to cover remaining development costs (up to $60,000 USD); and with the desire to explore through this project our mutual goals of promoting through practical action radical transparency and honesty on our respective sides of development.

I have attached a pitch document further elaborating upon several points here, and am happy to discuss the project and the prospect of working together moving forward. Feel free to reach out to me at this address (spenceryan123[at]gmail), on Discord (@spncryn#9144), or via Twitter (@spncryn).

Thank you for your time, and interest!

Have a nice day,

Spencer

Further thoughts

• Overall I feel pretty satisfied with this pitch email. I think I did a decent job of presenting the game in a fairly straightforward and easily digestible way, without sacrificing any of the necessary nuances of it.
• If I have any grievances with this at all, it’s that the static and animated images were differently-sized, and not at all compressed, so my email client had to redownload all of it every time I received a reply.

The playable build

I went back and forth on releasing this for a few minutes before deciding that I might as well commit to it. You may access the pitch build I submitted to Raw Fury here.

Please note that this is not a demo of the game, was not intended to be a demo of the game, and is not an accurate representation of what the game is like. This is an intentionally stripped down version per the included description designed specifically to complement the pitch.

Further thoughts

A lot of people get really bent up trying to figure out what a playable build should contain, and how involved it should be. For me, how one goes about answering this reveals how well (or not) a person understands the essence of their work. Some people may interact with this build and come away saying something like, “I thought your game was a heavily story-driven game. But there’s no story whatsoever in this — or mechanics! It’s just an environment, isn’t this misrepresentative?”

I feel like this interpretations betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what this build functions as, which in turn I think betrays a misunderstanding of what a pitch is.

The “story” part of the game — or rather, my ambitions for it narratively and mechanically — are already articulated clearly enough in the various documents attached with the pitch. The point of this build, then, was to demonstrate that I had the technical ability to ground all of that theoretical abstraction in a concrete experience; and so the build intentionally strips out everything except what I believe to be the essential qualia of the game’s moment-to-moment experience, which is simply existing in and moving through a number of spaces.

Conclusion

I’m terrible at conclusions, and also, I have someone to meet right now, so unfortunately I am forced to cut this short as is. I hope though that all of this has been able to help you in some way or another. Feel free to use as much or as little of it as you see fit. Until then, take care.