Warhorse Studios RPG Pitching Tour Blog

Warhorse Studios’ creative director Daniel Vávra has blogged on Gamasutra about his experience with his recent pitch tour, which had the objective of finally securing a publisher for the studio’s unannounced open-world RPG. It’s an interesting look at some of the behind-the-scenes politicking that gets rarely talked about, and well worth a read:

We were fairly well prepared for the trip I would say even well above standard. We had a working version of the game that looked good and contained a half-hour quest with all the basic game mechanics fully functioning, a several minutes long trailer, lots of screenshots, a presentation and a nice flyer on luxurious paper all data recorded on flash disks shaped like gold bars and packed in leather cases. You’ve got to make an impression, and when I compare it to how we pitched other games in the past, this is a whole other league.

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Pitching is a thankless task. Usually you’ve got a few (score) minutes to persuade someone who’s not very interested in you to give you money for something you’ve already invested a huge amount of time and money in. And if they don’t give you the money, very often it means the end of the line.

The pitch usually has several rounds. First you have to get past the (doorman), who weeds out the worst trash and sends you on further. Then you get to meet the producers, who really can make decisions, but even if they like you, they have to sell the idea internally to the company management and marketing division. Someone from a publishing firm once said that out of several hundred pitches a year, only about five games reach the shelves. Anyway, 100:1 odds are still better than the 100,000:1 shot for iPad, especially when the deciding factor is quality and not chance.

I admit that even though we’re no greenhorns, it would be beyond our powers to set up meetings with the right people in all the important publishers, so we employ agents. Those are people who help you sell your game and are usually themselves producers. They know who to go to, who needs what, how and for how much. I’ve known our agents since back in the day when I pitched a game to one of them when he was still working for a publisher.

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I was pretty nervous before the first meeting. How will my presentation come off? Will everything work? Will we make an impression with our game? What if our competitors have done the rounds of the publishers with something much better and the benchmark has totally shifted? As a Czech, and therefore a representative of a nation unpleasantly frank and pessimistic, I was also a little anxious about dealing with Americans. Just like the majority of Czechs, I am thrown a bit off guard by extra-positive people who out of politeness say things they don’t mean (which is the European idea of Americans).

The very first meeting straightened things out, though. The presentation went down well, pretty well I’d say, and the negotiations were straightforward and open (really almost shockingly for me). The turn-up was that what we do was too expensive for them, despite the fact that we cost about a third of what a US company does. We left in a good mood though. They liked it, even if our seed will not take root there.

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In rainy London we were joined by my good friend Francois. We had a major meeting lined up in the UK with the European branch of a corporation that had taken a real shine to us. We were expecting a lot from the meeting, but we didn’t meet with the kind of optimism we saw in the US. They didn’t think their American cousins would be very keen on a game set in medieval Europe, even though they liked it. Now, if it were about King Arthur… Our hope vanished as fast at it had arisen.

In the next company we came across an old acquaintance, who back in the day had discovered a few teams in Eastern Europe, and so we were hopeful that history might repeat itself. Of course, we would have to wait through the in-house green light process.

At another Japanese publishers they liked our game so much and it fitted their portfolio so well that it almost looked like they were ready to sign with us on the spot. They would definitely get back to us and they were looking forward to collaboration! I was looking forward too.

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To sum it all up, we had a good feeling at the end of the day. There was only one clear NO. A few more NOs came due to issues at the publishers (other RPGs in their portfolios, bad financial situations.), but the game went down very well. With several publishers we pretty much got to the second round of talks and we even had interest from people we had gone to practically just on the off-chance. More than half of the meetings ended with a promise of further talks and some turned out very promising indeed.

But it wasn’t all rosy. Quite often we heard the criticism that the game didn’t look epic enough and the hero wasn’t cool enough and looked a bit square. Our hero isn’t a boring character the mistake was that we chose the beginning of the game, where the majority of heroes in RPGs are starting from the bottom.

The fact that our game isn’t a fantasy game and it could be an issue came up a few times and once it totally ruined our chances. On the other hand, in at least two cases it was a huge plus. The presentation itself basically went down well. The game didn’t crash, everything worked and the reactions to my explanations seemed good and our answers to queries were satisfactory. According to our sources, no one had any problem or concerns about our ability to get the game finished.