作者：John Young

作为开发者，你只是每隔几年在市场上寻找发行商，而发行商却在不断地讨好开发者。如何突出自己的游戏？离开工作室后要怎么做？当你确实不知道自己的优势时，你要如何显示出独特性？如何才能成为“必须交易的对象”？

当然，你必须拥有一款优秀的游戏及一支强大的团队。但是你已经具备这些条件，对吧？因此，你该如何避免常规错误，给开发商留下深刻印象，说服我们与你合作呢？同上百个开发者打交道多年后，我们内部探讨了这一问题，并得出了以下10个有助于开发者赢得发行商亲睐的技巧。

1.LinkedIn只用于诱惑

首先是，请求会面。

我们收到许多LinkedIn请求，而效果最佳的当数简短且切中要点的普通邮件。我们喜欢看到邮件信息写着：“您好，我们投入300万美元的预算，开发了一款动作RPG游戏。如果您能回复下工作邮箱地址，我乐意为您传送更多的具体细节。”

然而，我们通常会收到长篇大论的邮件，而且我们通常无法找到邮件的关键要点。其中最糟糕的部分在于他们将文章嵌入到LinkedIn的邀请模式中。也就是说，如果我们想同你联系，这篇文章便会消失。结果无疑是我们容易忽略整个请求。

使用LinkedIn最初只是为了诱惑发行商。发送一封能引起好奇心且重点明显的信息，能够增加同发行商会面的机会。

2.给对方留下深刻印象

通过熟人引荐，也能引起我们的关注。我们推崇这种方式，我们信任之前合作过的伙伴，作为无话不谈的朋友，我们相信他们的判断。

如果你不认识推广的对象，可以寻找他们认识的伙伴。你可以通过参加社交晚宴、聚会或者开发者会议，认识游戏行业中形形色色的人群。

或者你可以考虑聘请一位代理。DDM、CAA、ISM、UTA——这些中介方在这行业的渊博知识能够影响交友过程，这也为我们的生活带来了便利。如果你能聘请到Ari Gold，那你就能取得突破性的进展，获得相关人士的关注。

3.时间就是一切

清理收件箱会让我们感受到部分的幸福感，有时也是我们的生活目的。我们确实想对每个请求及时作出回复，尤其考虑到可能有机会发现下一个《Portal》或《英雄联盟》。

但是当我们参加会议或者开发者的巡回宣传时，我们无法抽空检查邮件。后来当我们查看自己的收件箱时，那些堆积下来的邮件就可能无法引起我们的注意。而你那优秀的提案可能就会杳无音讯。

你可能认为自己的创意非常出色，任何知道的人都想对其进行投资，然而事实是，你必须紧跟行业动向。为此，你不仅可以加入行业，建立社交关系，同时你也会认识到在那个阶段发送的邮件大多数可能都石沉大海了。

显然，发行商/融资者可能更能在空闲时间接受你实行的项目提案。

4.尽量使用简洁的措辞

复杂的提案只会让我们的生活更加麻烦，因为大多数业务开发人士的想法尤为简单。我们无法同你一样在初始游戏上投入大量时间。我们也不可能完整阅读你的文件。有时，我们关注的细节信息又不是你们的卖点。

所以，当你以复杂的方式推广那款转变了玩家之间互动方式的爆炸类游戏时，我们可能无法了解你真正试图制作的游戏。或许更糟的是，我们会想象自己希望听到的措辞，忽略你试图传递的信息。

所以，一句简短的标语确实助于首次推广。如果你告诉我们，你想用“《战争机器》结合《Tribes》”，我们就能更容易明了你接下来的推广内容。可以试试这一方法：你能想象“《英雄联盟》与《NBA Street》相结合的情况吗”？“在《Hero Academy 》添加建设元素”如何？或者“《无冬之夜》结合《FarmVile》”？这些平庸的措辞无法让人判断游戏设计的微妙之处，但它们却可以让我们多少了解一点你的游戏概念。

记住，我们都是简单的人类。只要能引起我们的兴趣，过后你可以再增添具体细节。

5.时刻备好竞拍的心态

假设你的推广工作效果不错。出资方对此表示满意，打算加快项目进程。我们要求提供制作计划表、员工结构、项目资金预算、团队能力、设计文档、艺术效果、游戏感想以及服务器网络结构体系概述。你准备好发送所有这些内容了吗？你最好已经做好充足的准备！

是否准备好这些细节内容，会影响我们是否要与你合作的决策。正确的做法是，你给我们的感觉是你已就此项目同我们及竞争对手讨论了一周，我最好赶快行动，因为你已准备启动发行计划。当你拥有我们要求的所有条件时，你会呈现令人安心的结构及执行计划的能力。

相反，如果你一周后才发送团队相关信息，我们可能会认为这个团队并不完整。若你一周后才发送财务模式（因为你们原先就没有准备好这些内容），我们就不得怀疑你是否能在预算范围内及时交付游戏成品。

虽然发行商通常不会对最后通牒（比如“你最好在这周给出答复，不然我们会寻求别家帮忙”）作出良好反应，但是你可以通过假定自己的产品极其抢手，并获得多种投资渠道，因此可以加速获取投资的机会。我们同喜欢跟风的青少年差不多，所以开发者最好营造一个竞拍环境提升自己的感知价值，因为我们清楚出色的团队很快就会被抢购。

6.说服发行商中的相关人士

推广工作进行顺利。运营人员喜欢你的创意，强烈要求获取更多相关信息。现在，你的责任是确保自己备好各种信息，去说服他们的同事。

运营人员无法单独进行交易。我们必须获得所有赞助者的认可方能继续前进。有些技术专家可能会判断创意的可行性，一些产品专家会猜测员工数增长问题。财务人员、律师、市场专员以及高级经理都会参与其中。

对你而言，这些评判可能是无形的，但是对于一个投资上百万美元的项目，其他许多人应对此表示同意。

这时你的职责是保证推广稿件的多样性，而运营人员的思想及个性各式各样。他们通常是外向型，关注项目前景的人士，他们可能会从全局消化所有信息，而你可能无法说服所有人。

有些人要求提供关于这个项目的花边新闻或社会认同的证明（例如“这就是Cryptic团队体验数小时后的感受！”）有些人要求获得系统设计细节，还有些人要求高效率的工作状态（“我们团队周二前就能交付所有内容”）。几乎所有人都喜爱图像，所以，出色的概念艺术非常有价值。有些人要求提供具体事项（“游戏中设有8个职业，7个族群、60道关卡、12个区域……”），而有些人看中的是过往项目案例（“我们先前的项目销量为X份，DAU是……，CCU是……”）。

你的职责是吸引所有类型的人们，甚至是你不想看到的人。你要把针对各种类型人们的说辞都列入自己的推广方案中。

7.提高自信心及确定性

反复迭代找到游戏中的趣味点，使用敏捷方法可以做出比使用严谨的瀑布式方法更好的产品，开发者应先制作样本，等一切准备就绪时发行产品，但这对开发者而言具有难度和一定的不确定性。

但是当你承认这种不确定性，并且拒绝承担具体后果时，我们可以想象一年后那决定性的一刻，我们为一个300万美元的项目投资了400万美元，因为事情已发展到这一地步，我们必须决定是否继续赞助你的项目，或者为了减少损失而提前宣布失败。我们害怕那天的到来，我们害怕自己的投资落得如此后果。我们想尽可能避免那种现象。

所以我们最想听到的是——你会说到做到（因为我们得对自己的CEO有个交代，我们把宝押在你的项目成功上）。你要指出你团队与众不同。不会发生意外事件。团队的专业性能够提前预见所有问题，尽管对未来发展充满未知，你们仍能发行一款获利产品，因为你们比我们更加明智。

我们喜欢这样，因为这表示你们将承担所有风险！然而如果你告知我们所有的不确定性，那就会迫使我们去承担那些风险。我们确实不想这样。

有些开发者听后问道：“所以你是让我们撒谎了？”答案并非如此。我们已保守地估计你们按时发行的可能性，并且考虑到可能需要增加投资。但是如果我们认为你对自己计划从事的项目缺乏信心，我们会减少投资，那样你的项目更具风险。

这可能就是商业的等价原则——“这些牛仔裤会显得我的臀部很大吗？”对此只有一个答案。那就是迎合提问者的需求。

自信起来。我们就吃这一套。

8.无需100%的原创性

可能你们对此说法存在异议，但是大多数的玩家会选择相似体验的游戏。大多数的发行商都是从改良的FPS、MMORPG或植入固定风格的游戏中获利。有时，开发者追求原创，而发行商和融资者认为这存在极大的风险。

出资者难以信任实验型游戏的效应。最好是让我们相信你是在一些已经确定可行的东西上添加突破性的创新功能，但不要过于偏离那些可行的做法。

如果你曾做过类似事情，发行商和VC会更加信任你的能力，因为作品中包含80%已获得的“重复因素”和20%的新视角。如果你完全原创并重新定义了所有事物，我们可能会认为你很聪明……但并不会对你投资，你的明智之举不会获得赞美。

9.突出个性

这听起来不大可能，然而大多数的业务开发人士普遍这样认为——看下LinkedIn上你认识的人。虽然套装会让团队显得格外庄重，但是发行商偏爱风格独特的开发者。不要隐藏你的个性！大胆地展示出来！突出个性有两大优势：首先，这会显示出你的创意。我们需要创新型人才！比如穿鼻或者独特个性能够表明你对这个世界有着与众不同的看法，这就是我们想要的元素。

与众不同能帮助我们记住你。每天，我们会在巡回宣传中会见3个开发团队，或者在大型的会议上遇到6个团队。然而三天后，我们很难想起谁是谁。我们欣赏有趣的家伙、超级热情的女孩、或者胡须男。他们确实与众不同。

10.扮演自己的角色

当每个推荐者有自己固定的角色时，推广工作才能进展得更加稳妥。一个担任领导者，一个把握项目愿景，一个作为技术精英等。你需让我们记住，你们团队如同A级团队，拥有一切获胜的元素。同时，我们也更容易相信你们在某一领域的专业性，并且明了你们是同其它领域的专家并肩作战。

现实世界认可多面手的能力，然而推广工作中要避免出现全才。我们偶尔会出席会议，且会察看商业名片，然后我们想：“这不是Brad吗？卡片上写他是CTO。但为何他谈论环境设计？也许他是个美工……”你应该不希望我们有此想法；我们想让你获胜，但以我们的经验看来，一个人很难同时掌握多项技能。

总结

记住，我们发自内心地希望你能成功。我们参加会议，就是希望能挖掘到像你们这般出色的团队，我们永远欢迎那些在其他地方碰壁的人才，我们可以一起享受巨大的成功，通过友好的合作扩大我们公司的影响力。我们可以想象20年后，我们坐在快艇上，享受着马丁尼酒，嘲笑着过去的时日。我们真心希望你能同我们一起享受。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

What Publishers Want: 10 Tips for Getting Your Game Funded

by John Young

In such a competitive landscape, how does a developer possibly stand out when trying to land a deal a game publisher? Perfect World’s VP of business development John Young shares what he looks for in a pitch.

As a developer, you’re only in the market to find a publisher every few years, but publishers are courting developers constantly. How do you stand out? What goes on after you leave the room? How specific should you be, when you don’t really know yet what you have? What can you do to be the “must-do deal”?

Of course, you need a great game and a great team. But you’ve already got that, right? So, what can you do to avoid common mistakes, make a lasting impression and convince us to work with you? We started talking internally after meeting with hundreds of developers through the years, and a top 10 list was born. Here’s what publishers would love developers to know:

1. LinkedIn is for Seduction Only

Let’s start at the beginning — the request for a meeting.

We get plenty of LinkedIn requests, and what works best is a short, pointed message that moves the conversation to regular email. What we’d love to see is: “Hi. We have an action RPG made by Will Wright, with a $3 million budget. If you send me your work email, I’d love to send more details.” (I’d feel really happy if I got this email, as I did in my dream last night.)

However, far too often we see a long and twisty essay, the point of which is often never found. The worst part about these pudding-like requests is they are embedded into the LinkedIn invitation. This means if we want to accept you as a contact, we lose the essay. It turns out, unsurprisingly, to be much easier to ignore the whole request.

Use LinkedIn for initial seduction only. Send a tantalizing but to-the-point message and keep the courtship to meetings and Outlook.

2. Make Friends and Influence People

Another great way to get noticed by publishers and financiers is to come at us from someone we trust. We like it when we’ve made money with someone before and can speak freely with them and trust their judgment on new contacts.

If you don’t have such a relationship with the person you want to pitch to, find someone who does. There are a number of networking events, meetups, and conferences developers can take advantage of in order to meet others in the industry.

Or consider getting an agent. DDM, CAA, ISM, UTA — these intermediaries make our lives easier by bringing extensive knowledge of the industry to bear on the courtship process. Having your own personal Ari Gold can be very helpful at breaking through and getting noticed.

3. Timing is Everything

Part of our sense of well-being — and some days our apparent purpose in life — is to clear out our email inboxes. We really do want to give a timely response to every request that comes in, especially considering that it may contain the opportunity to discover the next Portal or League of Legends.

But when we go to a conference or a developer roadshow, our ability to check email is practically nonexistent. When we look at our inboxes afterward, it’s like sedimentary layers of encrusted history, with fossils of things we don’t need anymore. Your awesome pitch might be somewhere down there.

You may think your idea is so great that anyone hearing about it would come back from vacation to fund it, but the reality is that you should track when industry events take place, not only so you can attend and network, but so you can be aware that any emails sent during that time are most likely getting lost.

Having spent plenty of time on the “buy side”, it’s clear that the publisher/financier mindset is much more receptive when your pitch comes at a less busy time.

4. Simple Phrases for Simple People

Convoluted pitches make life more difficult for us, as most business development people are often fairly simple. We haven’t spent as much time with your baby as you have. We might not have read your deck completely. We sometimes key in on details that are not the essence of what you want to sell.

So when you come at us with a complex pitch for a genre-busting game that transforms the way players relate to each other, we might not understand what you’re really trying to build. Or worse, we imagine what we want to hear, not what you’re trying to convey.

So a simple catchphrase is really helpful at the start of your pitch. When you tell us that you want to make “Gears of War meets Tribes”, we can understand the rest of your pitch easier.

Try this at home: Can you imagine “League of Legends meets NBA Street”? How about “Hero Academy with deck-building”? or “Neverwinter Nights meets FarmVille”? These are slightly disguised versions of pitches we’ve received recently at Perfect World. Such phrases sound trite and don’t do justice to the subtleties of your design, but they really, really help us to get a sense of what you want to build.

Remember, we’re simple people. You can fill us in on the details later, after you have our interest.

5. Create an Auction Mentality by Being Prepared

Let’s say your pitch went great. The money guy on the other side of the table loves it and wants to fast-track things. We ask for production schedules, headcount builds, cash burn projections, team bios, design docs, art looks and feel details and a server network architecture overview. Are you ready to send all this over? You better be!

Having these details ready makes us feel you are ready to go with or without us. Done right, you create the impression that you’re spending the week talking to us and all our competitors, and I’d better move quickly because you’re ready to hire up and build. When you have everything we want on demand, you appear reassuringly structured and capable to execute on your plan.

By contrast, if it takes a week to send the team bios, it makes us think that perhaps the team is not fully gelled. Maybe the reason it takes a week to send the financial model is because it was never created in the first place, making us wonder if you can really deliver on time and on budget.

While publishers usually won’t react well to ultimatums (“You better fund us this week or we’re going elsewhere”), you can help your chances of being fast-tracked by creating a perception of a hot deal that will get funded one way or another. We’re not all that different from teenagers who only want to go to the dance if other cool people are going, so fostering an auction-type environment where your perceived value is higher works, because we know the best teams get snapped up fast.

6. Help Me Persuade My Colleagues

Things went well in the pitch. The biz dev person loved it and is clamoring for info. Now your job is to make sure you are equipping them with everything they need to convince their colleagues.

The biz dev person cannot do a deal solo. All sorts of constituencies must sign off before we can move forward. Some tech expert is probably going to vet your idea for feasibility, and some production expert will second-guess your headcount growth. Finance people, lawyers, marketers, and senior management all weigh in. This part may be invisible to you, but for a multimillion-dollar investment, many other people need to say “yes”.

Your job at this point is to make sure your pitch deck, and the mind of the biz dev person, is equipped to appeal to all sorts of personality types. Biz dev types are often extroverted, visionary types (or want to think they are) and may consume information in big picture swaths, but not everyone gets convinced that way.

Some people want anecdotes or social proof (“It’s what the team at Cryptic is playing after hours!”) Others want system design details (“We will encourage social grouping without a class-based holy trinity by…”) Others want clever efficiency (“Our team can deliver everything by Tuesday”). Almost everyone loves pictures, so good concept art is worth its weight in gold.

Some people want facts (“Eight classes, seven races, 60 levels, 12 zones…”), while others want historical proof (“Our team did X units/DAU/CCU on our previous projects”).

Your job is to appeal to all types of people, even ones you don’t see. Put bits of each type of persuasion into your pitch.

7. Confidence, Milestones, and Certainty

It may be hard-fought reality that a team needs to iterate to find the fun in a game, that an agile approach to making the product is better than rigid waterfall planning, and that developers should prototype first and ship when the product is ready to ship. (You learned the folly of predicting the precise arrival date of something so unknown as “fun” years ago in your career, right?)

But when you acknowledge the uncertainties and refuse to commit to specific deliverables, we imagine that fateful day, a year from now, when we’re $4 million into a $3 million project and we have to decide whether to keep funding you because things are “almost there”, or cut our losses and declare failure. We dread that day, and it scares us that our investment might turn out that way. We want to avoid that feeling whenever possible.

So what we really want to hear — what we really need to believe in order to stand up to our CEO and swear that we’ll stake our career on your success — is that you’re going to do what you say. Your team will be different. Your team will have no surprises. Your team is expert enough to see all the problems in advance and can ship a profitable product despite the unknowns, because you are smarter than us.

We love that feeling, because it means you’re taking the risk! Whereas if you tell us all your uncertainties, you’re forcing us to take the risk. And we really want you to do it.

Some developers hear this, and say, “So you’re asking me to lie?” Not at all. We already discount your chances of shipping on time, and consider that we might have to fund you more. But if we think that you’re unsure of what you’re about to do, we discount more and your project looks riskier.

This may be the business equivalent of “does my butt look big in these pants?” There is only one response to such questions. A sure, swift answer with what you know the questioner wants to hear.

Be confident. We eat that stuff up.

8. Don’t Be 100 Percent Original

It’s not popular to say this, but most gamers choose to play something at least vaguely similar to what they’ve played before. And most publishers make money from a better FPS, a better MMORPG, or a better insert-your-established-genre here. Sometimes developers want to be too original, with the result that publishers and financiers perceive too much risk.

There is a role for experimental games, but it’s a lot harder to be trusted by the money people. What we really want to believe is that you’re adding a breakthrough new feature to something proven. Stay one degree of difference away from what works, not three.

Publishers and VC types feel more confident if you’ve done it before, and will achieve your success because of 80 percent hard-fought “repeater” wisdom and 20 percent new insight. When you are super-original and redefine everything, we might think you are brilliant… but you’re out for funding, not compliments on your brilliance, right?

9. Stand Out

This will sound ridiculous, but most BD people generally look the same — look at any of the ones you may know on LinkedIn. While it may be okay for the suit on your team to look and act like he or she was stamped from central casting, publishers like it when developers look and act distinctly and memorably. Don’t hide your personality! Embrace and accentuate it!

Standing out benefits you in two ways: First, it shows you are “all in” to being creative. We need you to be creative! That mohawk, nose piercing or distinctive personality tells us that you think differently about the world, which is what we want (as long as things stay on time and on budget; yes, we do want it both ways).

But in a more pedestrian way, standing out helps us remember you. We might meet three developer teams per day on a roadshow, or six a day at a big conference. Remembering who is who after three days can be challenging. We love funny guy, super-enthusiastic girl, and beard guy. They really stand out!

10. Play Your Role

Pitches work better when each presenter has a defined role. One person should be the leader type, another might be the vision-holder, a third the tech genius, and so on. The impression you want to create is that you are a team with everything needed to succeed. You want to be like the A-Team. It’s easier to convince us you are an expert at one thing, and that you’re working side-by-side with a few other experts who can lead their respective discipline to success.

Generalists may be great in reality, but in a pitch, hold back the appearance of everyone being able to do everything. We’ve occasionally been in meetings where we keep checking business cards, thinking, “Wasn’t that guy Brad? Says on the card that he’s the CTO. But why is he talking about environment design? Maybe he’s the art guy…” You don’t want us thinking that; we want you to succeed, and in our experience it’s hard to be good at multiple things at once.

Putting it All Together

Remember, we really, really want you to succeed. We take the meeting and hope that you are the perfect team so we can discover you, green-light you where everyone else failed to see your brilliance, enjoy huge success together and bring our companies to greatness in wonderful partnership. We imagine clinking martinis on our yachts in 20 years, laughing about the early days.

We really hope you’ll be the one.(source:gamasutra)