for everyone new here a quick intro so if you’ve not been on a LinkedIn live before it’s like a twitch stream there’s

a chat we’re going to make you quite engaging for example where’s everyone from everyone can say hello I’m from

Cyprus Spas you’re based in Bangkok but originally where you from again I am good old Sweden and then Scandinavia

vensa nice thinking of going Stockholm in a couple weeks actually so that’ll be good times Amazing so everyone me pontis

he’s reviewed thousands of pitch decks personally invested in five plus businesses and a man on many boards multiple time founder used to be an expr

at h n oh my God what’s the game H her of new her I was like I know that

I know the acin like oh he’s not DOTA no and yeah um so true gamer so true of a

gamer that he founded an orts organization at 16 years old and he now helps PC and console companies valued up

to 100 million as the co-founder of Agora gaming Partners Global Investment Banking advisory for

games today we’re going to talk about the 2024 investment landscape dealing

with Publishers Rights and Wrongs as a man who’s seen many pitch decks you can actually know what actually gets through

and also what it takes to secure investment step by step amazing all righty so we’re going

to get straight into it there is going to be Q&A so whoever’s here come say

hello in the chat and get your questions in and we’ll collect them near the end I already see people tuning in lots of

familiar faces yep amazing we got zven Justin Zen Jason from Toronto ireena

from San Francisco I believe so we’ll get straight into it

so just wanted to ask you black 2024 investment landscape why do you think so many

companies are struggling in this specific year I have an idea but I think you have a better

idea I mean I think that’s the topic that could probably last for for several

hours and uh also there are a lot of subjective opinions uh but I’ll try and

also information that I quite frankly can’t share because of Insider information in a lot of companies but

maybe to backtrack a bit and I think a lot of people will agree on this is that covid was really um a really big problem

because the industry got bloated you know the sales were a lot higher all over the place people were staying at

their houses buying more games playing more games getting checks from the government to buy more games and so

forth depending on which country you were in and another issue was because remote work became the norm it was very

easy to leave your company and find another job and as somebody who has employed over 200 people now in my

career I saw this issue as well where salaries were extremely inflated uh now

I’m not saying that’s the same all over the world of course there are particular countries um where there was an even

bigger inflation but the the point is that ultimately it became really unsustainable making games um I’m

talking on a smaller scale of course larger scale I think you can all read the news all the shutdowns ETC and we

can talk forever about whether we agree or not with Microsoft’s decision of shutting down multiple Studios because I

personally don’t agree and I’m very happy that one of them recently got acquired by Crafton and they can actually keep making great games but

still um salaries got inflated which made it really hard to continue to make games and it was also you know massively

increased the amount of games being made so the competition was getting fiercer um so I think even though it’s it’s may

sound bad to say I think we’re in a situation where things will go back to normal levels again and it’s not fair to

a lot of people but I think at least we’re starting to come down from those eras of having ridiculous salaries and a

lot of people including management by the way not just talking about employees where you have to come down and actually

put a lot of your own sweat blood and your own cash to bring projects to a much staged them before um I can

continue going down our route but I think you guys are probably more interested in the actual game funding part of it so let me put it simply like

this if we take um the mobile gaming industry and we look at a track record

in the history of mobile games um it used to be in a case where you could get a paper pitch funded at any time you

know you had a cool resume you came to an investor you showed them a p paper pitch boom you got money that’s how

mobile games used to be right and then it became demo and then it became later stage demo and

then it became vertical slice and then it became data only and we’re still in that stage today where you can no longer

find money in mobile games pretty much unless you started a massive company that grew to billions of dollars you

have some specific kind of algorithm because people don’t care anymore they want to take as little risk as possible

which means you got to be as late in the process as possible which is why we don’t see a lot of mobile games on top

of that you know there are ulterior factors like Apple and Google cracking down on gdpr and other things but still

investors want to take less risk and then we come to the problem of okay but if I have to fund my game all the way

until the point where I have data for it why do I need you yeah because if I’ve already proven that my game is gonna

work why do I need an investor to give me had this conversation with my clients I’m very curious what the answer is yes

so I don’t have an answer on mobile I have an answer on PC but on mobile I still to this day and this is why we

don’t really do mobile deals because we don’t know how do I explain to a publisher that they need to make an

exception when they continue to find games that are willing to wait until that point that have all the data that

are willing to fund it there um I can’t you know I’ve been in situations where I

have seen incredible incredible mobile games and actually we did one in global

top rounds uh is it two years ago now I think maybe two two three years ago a

studio that not only had incredible rums had a great concept the demo was super fun they even had

split Studios so to lower cost that a studio in Thailand and they had a studio in Portugal so they were actually able

to lower their cost no inflated salaries no nothing and we co-invested with another VC out of Cyprus and uh the data

just wasn’t getting there and because the data wasn’t getting there we also didn’t want to invest right because

there are many more cases and we didn’t want to double down the other VC didn’t want to double down either and when we

pitch Publishers they’re like oh your day one retention is not good enough your day seven retention is not good enough and we’re back to this whole

story of wanting to get there but if you look at the track record of the studio um they should have easily with a year

or two more been able to do it but it doesn’t cut it anymore you need to get there with your own swe like your own

money in some way or form some crazy Angels or like in rk’s global top round we came in very early um and it just

makes it unsustainable for mobile games which is why a lot of VCS have that used

to be mobile first or mobile only is actually looking at PC now as well so that’s something that maybe a lot of

people don’t know but the VC mobile only are now starting to look at premium PC

console because there aren’t enough cases in Mobile and because they’re not willing to fund them in those first five

stages once they get here they can just find a publisher to finance the rest and

from what I’ve seen in most publishing deals that I’ve seen on papers not just rumors like actual deals on paper the

deal terms have also change to be to a point where most mobile Publishers cover all your burn rate they cover um x

amount of UA whatever that may be as a minimum guarantee and then they do this for as long as it’s viable so it’s quite

healthy once you get there right but the problem is how do you how do you get there and that I don’t know and that’s

why I don’t have any advice whatsoever on mobile and Frankly Speaking that’s why we we don’t really work with a lot

of mobile developers because it’s just not something I have an answer to and I don’t know how to fix the problem because I look at the VCS and say you

you don’t know why you’re not getting enough deal flow I mean your whole thesis is stupid you’re waiting until here and they don’t need money there so

that’s why you can’t find deals and from the Publishers I understand they want to lower their risk because they you know

tossed hundreds of millions of dollars into marketing tried lots of internal and external games they don’t want to do

that anymore so I think there is a really you know tough case for VC on

mobile in today’s market but I am not the right person here to talk about mobile and I’m sure there are way

smarter people than me that you can listen listen to about this but I wanted to give a comparison for this purpose um

PC console today right which again we can also talk about for several hours but yeah we are moving towards the

entertainment model is what I normally say so not not mobile but I wanted to give you an example of how a market kind

of goes up and down and eventually it’s now kind of peaked over here PC console is moving to a stage exactly like mobile

but also like entertainment where you need to find either with your own money or with angels or something else enough

money to build your pilot episode once you have your pilot episode and PC console vertical slice then you can go

out and find co-finance years whether that’s Publishers or investors or something else in the last three years

of my career I have closed deals anywhere from paper pitches to demo to Tech sorry to Tech demo all the way up

to Vertical slice and even pre-launch it was honestly never really a matter of how late you were in the process it was

how good was the quality of that smaller game or the later game and the only thing that changed was the deal terms

the later we were in the process the better terms we got in the last year and a half though this is no longer the case

and I’m sure every developer in this stream right now can basically tell you

that you know for those of you who don’t have a vertical slice I’m sure you’re getting 95% of the Publishers or BC

saying come back later and if you think about it is it unfair not really and let me go back to

co people were throwing money everywhere if you were to just use Google or your

network and you ask how many of these larger VC deals were successful during the covid years you’ll find that that

number is Tiny which means that most VCS most private investors most Publishers

have been bleeding money for two to three years now they can’t put that in their press releases and stuff like that

right doesn’t sound good on paper but that’s why we’re in this situation now where they bled and lost so many games

and deals that they cannot take that kind of risk anymore and now they want to get to this whole um entertainment

pilot vertical slice level to minimize that risk because they don’t have the luxury anymore of all that extra money

they gained from all their sales during covid and probably the management also wants them to take less risk so we’re

really moving towards this um and that’s why Frankly Speaking and we’ve said this

to people who pitched us that currently for Agora we’re a new company um we don’t have the luxury of taking on in

the developers without funding or without some sort of way to get towards that vertical slice if you have a way to

get there we can help you but otherwise it’s we’re not big enough to do it we hope in the future that we can help a

lot of you who don’t have funding or healthy businesses but at the moment we can’t for this reason alone that you

know our our entire business builds on the fact that we can make you business and we’re noticing that the whole

landscape wants to get to that vertical slice level and that’s why we only take six clients and why we focus on smaller

amount um and I know I’d been talking nonstop you can is good yeah I’m about

to no yes sirry finish the point yeah so uh

on on the again on the PC console side we are have noticed and I did a speaker session about this at Devcon where we

did a research on all Publishers we spoke to a lot of people we spoke to Publishers themselves we spoke to

developers we uh you know emailed a bunch of people to try to ga as much data as possible and obviously for NDA

purposes I can’t say what Publishers their names Etc but I can tell you this

that from two plus years ago where we had budgets all over from 500k to 100

million and like I said it really just came down to yeah the resumés and and the and the quality of the demo and the

pitch deck and that’s it um nowadays we heard that about 60% of the Publishers

can only finance 1 million and below that number used to be a lot smaller so

about 60% can only go below 1 million I should have had my slide in front of me because I don’t remember all the numbers

in my head now but 60 below one I think it was 20% up to two million and then

there was uh 10% kind of between the 2 million and 10 million and then of course the 10% that isn’t relevant for a

lot of you is the large AAA ablea space where you do a lot of codev and multiple

investors so the landscape has really change towards less than one million and

if there are like double A and triaa developers in this chat that’s not for you right it’s going to be really hard

for you to find a publisher because the list is so small because we’re not just talking about the 60 sorry the 100% of

Publishers it’s also the amount in each genre so in FBS right there are a lot of

Publishers who does FBS but if you’re a strategy simil simulation game there aren’t a lot you know there’s let’s say

hooded horse modern wolf data lick uh and stuff like that but if you then continue searching on the simulation

genre out of those let’s say 15 to 20 Publishers that does that genre maybe

only two can fund over two million so really when you look at the

whole list from two to three years ago it’s only maybe five to 10 that will fit

you above 1 million USD in funding and that’s why so many developers are stuck because that number used to be a lot

higher people would sign more games they would sign a lot of different genres which they don’t really do anymore

either um and they would have two or three times the team because there’s

been a lot of layoffs and a publisher doesn’t want to oversign because then they can’t put the right amount of effort into the

game so again I can continue but that’s basically from the mobile we learned in

the last couple of years that it wasn’t sustainable and that’s why they’re now at this larger stage I want data we I

don’t think we’ll ever get to that point in PC console because getting data and PC of console isn’t as easy as doing a Facebook ad in testing retention but

data is getting important in PC of console too we’re having a lot of Publishers ask us for market research or

like play testing data or stuff like that which used to not be the case um but still that happened to mobile and

we’re entering the same face with PC console so the takeaway here is that if you’re watching this and you’re sitting

on a tech demo or a demo and you’re spending thousands or 10 thousands of dollars of traveling to events and doing

business development your chances are down by 80% compared to a year or two years

ago you should try to get as far as you can without funding or with personal

connections or Angels or family money before you start or you risk wasting your time now on the positive note I want to

add one final thing there um this also means that there eventually there’s going to be a gap because all the

Publishers have kpis to sign x amount of games in their so-called slate so let’s say five games 24 five games 25 five

games 26 and if they’re not signing games right now what do you think is going to happen when their leaders come and tell them a year from now that hey

why are games for 25 and 26 and because developers are dying over

and over like flies because nobody’s funding them there’s going to be a shortage of games so what’s going to

happen then are we going to be in another C like two three years ago where everything gets signed just on a paper pitch just to hit those kpis or have

people learned their lesson and maybe a couple months from now they’ll start taking more risks again I don’t have a

crystal ball but that’s a good question here’s a good question I think that was lovely because we set the scene there a

little bit and we’ve actually got some good questions in the chat so this is the podcast are thinking out loud I want

to make this quite flexible I’ve got topics to cover but there’s an important question there which was relative on

what you said so someone from the chat it doesn’t say the name but I would love to understand

from your point of view the difference between a publisher and a VC today it was apparent a few years ago and you used them in different parts of your

kind of setting the scene there so like if I’m looking for money full stop how

should I view a publisher how should I VC like as of today and has that changed yeah so I mean when you’re looking at a

VC you have to understand that uh a VC has a mandate of doing certain things

and that could mean you know like mobile only as I mentioned earlier and because they ran into issues they had to change that

mandate and talk to their LPS and you know kind of move things around but a VC is looking for unicorns they’re looking

for 10 like 100 X’s that will pay back the whole Min

10x yes minimum 10x nothing less I mean like really like there is unless you’re

a preed VC that has a thesis Target of like coming out with a three to 5x on

the whole fund you need a 10 exra higher because think about this guys that 90 well 80 to 90% of the Investments that

happen will die always so you need that 10 to 20% that you do to actually pay

back all of them and if you only do a three to fourx per company that’s not going to pay back the whole fund so from

a VC standpoint they want a minimum 10x and they want something that they called that I’m sure you’ve heard VC investable

and what does that really what does that really mean well that means yeah if you’re doing a premium game that has and

we just talked about genres and stuff let’s say that you’re making a city Builder game and to put an average kind

of audience there I would say that your limit is probably one or two million copies as a smaller studio and that’s a

really good case you’re like very very excited now if you’re on an indie budget level you’re probably selling your game

at1 19999 $24.99 remember you have to take off 50% refunds chargebacks uh the steam fee

taxes whatever it may be so if you sell 20 million gross uh you have 10 million net in your bank right that’s what you

have after all the general fees and then you have your personal taxes in the countries and blah blah blah well let’s assume that it’s 10 million net if you

if it took you three to four years to make this game and you now have $10 million in net revenue let’s assume that

the production budget to that then it’s probably four to five that means that your actual profit on this game is only4

to five million and now you have to make your next game which takes another two to four years in what equation can a VC

sell you for 50 or100 million in this scenario zero because you’re basically

making a premium game every two to four years and it’s just not sustainable

that’s why a lot of these premium Studios end up acquiring IA and buying other companies buying Cod EV and stuff

to bump up all their other regular numbers to guaranteed recurring revenue and then if you’re lucky you build an IP

that takes off right like if you take Warhammer they live off their IPs nowadays right they just license it out people make games they make a buttload

of money so really even at a one million copies sold in a city builder at $20

like U SRP per copy you have 10 million Nets and then you take into all the production you’ve done and the next game

it’s not VC investable so you have to have something that could really bump You by either having multiple

Productions two three four pipelines at the same time where maybe you have like a AAA or AAA is wrong in this case let’s

say a double A or Triple A whatever you want to call it as your big budget games five to 10 million and then you have a

couple of these crazy ideas to you spend one to two million on and then maybe an indie darling where you do experiments

and that budget is 500k to to 1 million that means you have multiple potential revenue streams you’re probably

launching one game a year and there is a big chance here for a breakout success but how many of you can afford

that none of you so you’re going to a VC asking them for a$2 to five million doll check that you’ll use to spend the next

three to four years to build a game that even at 1 million copies Nets you 10 million that does not work and that’s

why 80 to 90% of all the VCS invest in games as a service companies

they need they need that recurring Revenue like what you said like the codep to me is like ah sweet recurring

Revenue which makes the gambling kind of more morally okay like the big premium here yeah they want like they want free

to play they want live Ops they want like recurring Revenue if you find the Right audience you continue to scale you

do a really good job on it um and it also goes when you take VC money guys you also have to remember that you need

to pay them back you know even if they own us portion of your company even if they own 10 20 30% of your company your

job is to pay them back first and some of the contracts will even have preferred shares and stuff like this or

even a preferred dividend if you’re going to pay out dividends and there are many things that you give up by taking VC money which is why we uh normally

advise most of our Indie clients or the budgets below two to four million to

work with Publishers first figure out what you want to do you know like really nail into the genre or the type or the

type of or the type of mechanics that really is going to be your expertise that you can perfect it and eventually you self-publish because I just gave you

an example of self-publishing game now imagine we take that one million copy case and we toss a publisher into the

mix that 10 million net is maybe now five million net yeah there really isn’t a lot of

money available and that’s also a great scenario as well like the one to two million copies so exactly just to yeah I

need to answer the VC part of the question I guess Sarah sorry so you mentioned the difference between publisher and VCS so VC 10 to 100x

that’s what they’re targeting um now on the publisher side they’re only looking for a

3X but and that includes all of their internal cost so that’s something that a lot of developers that we talk to I mean

nowadays we we work mostly with season developers but at GTR right we had a lot of Indie we did over 60 Investments so

you know I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count when they think that the publisher is being unreasonable

and then you see all these Reddit threads and the LinkedIn threads about Publishers being the worst and screwing me over and blah blah blah I hear it

first hand at the events as well remember guys so let’s do some simple

math again five 500k investment from the publisher let’s say right that’s what they’re going to give you for your game

because that’s the money you’re looking for and uh for Simplicity let’s assume you’re an indie darling and that’s your whole budget so they fund your whole

game in this case they found your whole game that’s 500k now they have their own salaries to pay for your your game is

probably going to take two years to produce there’s going to be a producer assigned to you marketing manager brand manager Etc over the first year and a

half probably not a lot of internal cost but then stacking up towards the release date when you have everybody involved in

all the Departments you have all the QA localization and the whole thing we’re probably talking let’s say $300,000

$400,000 of internal investment costs depending on the game if it’s a simple Indie darling it’s a lot less but just

for Simplicity that’s 900,000 USD invested by the publisher to the state they want the 3x right now remember that

50% of the revenue instantly disappears through Steam so if we sell $2 million

and assuming the publisher recoups 100 Z which is bad terms for you tried not to sign that but let’s assume they take 100

Z then they’re break even at that two million uh Revenue basically from gross

revenue 2 million they are now Break Even Now 2 million for an indie darling again because most of your pitches I see

in my inbox are 1499 games 19 99 games that still means that you have to sell

100,000 plus copies now at the bare minimum and if you look at the steam charts not a lot of games get that far

so so many of you when you pitch people like myself or Publishers do not understand simple math I’m not trying to

be mean you need to really and there are three three models online by the ways you can actually Google forecasting

templates you can I if I had one in my head right now i’ just post in the chat but there are a lot of models you can

look at where if you take your uh budget you estimate let’s say 25% of your

budget is how I normally calculate would be the Publishers internal cost on top

and then they want to make a 3X on it and you want revenue from day one you don’t want the 100 zero that’s not fair right I mean it’s your game too so

that’s say 8020 for the sake of it you may need 150 170 200,000 copies for the

publisher to break even and they want to make a 3X now we’re looking at 500 600,000 copies this is why it’s so hard

for most of you to to get deals because you don’t consider the fact that taxes chargebacks refunds uh internal cost

from the publisher and then you all go and [ __ ] talk to Publishers publicly and don’t get me wrong there are a lot of

bad ones but the beautiful thing about this industry I think is that you can talk to people like myself Harry and

many others for free and simply ask have you heard about this publisher have you worked with them what’s your feedback go

on their steam page talk to some developers that they’ve signed before talk to both the ones that they did a

good job job with so the games that sold a lot and talk to the ones that didn’t sell well get both sides of the story

right so you can really understand if this is a good publisher to work with super super important um going back to

uh to the Rev share now if we were to remove all emotions from from the entire equation don’t you think it’s fair that

a publisher that funds 100% of your game technically in theory gets 100 Zer

they’re taking all the risk they’re paying your you know your food your rent all your salaries and worst case

scenario the market tanks you go ahead and you live your day the publisher loses $600,000 to $1 million in the game

that sounds fair from my side apart from the fact that you’re selling the IP I guess if the idea is so good yes so

again I I would say never sign a 100 Z but my point here is that if you think about it logically all emotions away if

you were to ask the bank to fund something 100% you have to put up collateral right you have to put your

house you have to put your car you have to put any other assets you have and if you don’t pay back the loan poof all

your shit’s gone with a publishing deal you lose nothing all the risk there is

on them if the game fails so I just want you guys to remember that when you negotiate now back to my rev share point

I still don’t think it’s fair for 100 zero because you know if you look at the steam payout and all these things you

still need to pay yourself post launch no matter how much money the game makes so it’s never fair for a publisher to

have 100 zero I think personally but I want you to remove the emotions when you think about both the VC and Publishing

side of things dumb it down to numbers then you can add emotions after that right really understanding how these

deals work and why it’s hard for you to close so if we quickly jump back again

to my tiers of 1 million two million and two million and above you should also think that okay so the more money I ask

for the more money I have to sell my game for because that means that it’s more

sorry faster to recoup for both of you but your game also has to fit that level

of graphical quality or the level of mechanics you know you can’t sell like a tiny top down pixel game that you spend

500k on for $40 a copy it’s not going to work so all of these things come into

account when you build your pitch deck and when you pitch somebody so yeah that’s the difference between Publishers and VCS they they

have all this risk that you don’t consider and they also take all that risk in most cases most pitches I get

the developer ask for 100% nowadays I’m seeing quite a lot of people you know um

talking about 30 20 to 30% investing of their own cash which is great you know

it’s getting better on my side I’m seeing a lot of developers saying this is how much cash I’m putting up and of course they’re asking for better terms

because they’re putting their own cash into the into the pile um but yeah maybe

I just saw a comment here from Jason sorry but I I’ll find the forecast model later and by the way Agora we’re working

on a template ourselves that we’re going to give to the public for free so well come out with our own when we have time

we just launched a free pitch deck the other day I think I don’t remember and we’re going to do this for everything

including forecast models in the future it’s a good idea yeah all right I hope I

answered your question LinkedIn user he seems to be anous came up Anonymous for some reason

Lely um just for the chat guys I’ve collected everyone’s questions so we will get to them I just have a few Harry

Fu questions so the example you gave where they make the premium game for 20 bucks this doesn’t

include stuff that people can buy after the game so we have

like does every game have to be free to play and then have those kind of I’m

just putting myself in the shoes of an indie developer like I want to spend 500k on a game like you said I

appreciate where the Publishers are at we need to make money so why don’t I make a premium game and then quote

unquote Bank on microtransactions of some kind whether it be like a premium DLC that comes later is that something

that’s included in pitches or should I just stop and just do a different genre no I mean that that’s of course also

included in pitches but it’s still not VC investable it sounds more like a publisher case or a product Finance case because that’s something we didn’t talk

about there is also the product Finance part or the direct project investment that you can find from many different

places or if you have good cash flow you could get some depbt financing from a bank like I talked about yes you have to

put up collateral but still if you don’t like to work work with Publishers and if you’re not VC investable you can find

money in other ways too um but microtransactions is something that you

know players really don’t like they like to support their game you know their favorite games with skins and stuff and

DLCs of course but it’s still not something that’s going to give your company a valuation of aund million do

you know it really isn’t so it’s super tough to reach that points um are we

saying wait a minute sorry the fortnite of the world in my head of skins but are

we saying that that likelihood is so low that we shouldn’t count it as an example no I mean fortnite I think is in

my opinion the the best design game of all time when it comes to liveops they

nailed it in every way or form it’s free to play it has hundred of different game modes it has ugc it has licenses it has

Partnerships with every single IP that you can find basically yeah so whatever you

personally think about the gameplay or if you don’t like fortnite or if you think it’s annoying it’s for kids or whatever you’re wrong it’s a incredibly

smart design game period and they’ve done everything right and it’s also

extremely hard to replicate because one of the things about humanity is that we’re we’re flock animals right we like

to follow the trends so because fortnite’s so popular even if another

game comes out it’s highly likely they’ll come back to fortnite again anyway until there ultimately is

somebody who de them but yes if you have microtransactions if you have skins if

you have all that kind of stuff that’s fine I think the one thing people dislike and I don’t have data for this and I could be wrong is of course pay to

win elements outside of Asia mle least over here we love pay to win give me some pay to win over here i’ say mobile

games as well like I don’t know like I see Diablo Immortal I don’t know how much money they make in America but that

is a mobile game that’s mobile game I guess yeah no I’m not sure um

but no so premium I mean I I’m a huge fan of Premium gains so I just want to be clear here and say that I’m not saying you guys shouldn’t make premium

gains that’s my bread and butter like you know that’s mostly what we work with premium games but uh it’s also why we’re

not really working with VCS at the moment because it’s so hard to find um there is probably I can probably count

on my two hands the amount of preed investors at the moment that are institutional meaning that they’re a

licensed fund or they’re a private Equity smaller company that could do investments in preced um or or

accelerators and actually there’s one in the chat right now from Gregory bortnik uh who I’ve known for some time now

they’re an accelerator who could do a preed check you can type it yourself Gregory but uh yeah there’re they’re are

good people good company and there are some people that could give you checks between 50 to 300K is um that are

institutional in a way or form but it’s not a lot but again those guys get involved in evaluation so early that

they still have that potential of a 10x or more because most accelerator prent investors

come in at a valuation below five and premium game companies if you look on get just a public market a lot of them

get acquired between the valuation of 20 and 50 they really the really successful ones get acquired around there but V and

also guys VC funding does not mean success I don’t really want to call something out but it’s public information so if you look at

Singularity six and a game called I’m gold it yeah so Singularity six or a

game called this is a great example and it’s not a bad game so I’m sorry developers if any of you are here I apologize I’m not calling you out but

they got 49 million in um VC funding if I’m not mistaken I will have to Google

myself now uh let me see I think yeah $49 million over three rounds and I hope

I don’t give any I hope this is not under NDA I think they’re acquisition public

right this is live so I won’t push you to say anything yeah there we go Daybreak acquired oh my

God I thought I messed up there uh is the price public I’m looking on crunch bace now

okay the price is not public so thank God I Google it first oh my Lord what is the takeway

what is the takeway for us the takeaway is that even if you have a lot of VC funding it doesn’t necessarily mean that

you’re going to exit at hundreds of millions of dollars would be super successful yeah sometimes I need to keep

check of my we just get excited so they raise a lot of

money ra 49 million what happened with and yeah the game did not uh was not an

instant success uh Daybreak who acquired them has done a really good job I think of Reviving it and in my opinion it’s a

really good game but it definitely is not you know at the 49 million or above

and it hasn’t done that well to date but again going back to VC funding

guys 49 million I mean I don’t know if they’re Valu are public and even if they weren’t I don’t know what valuations

people invested in them at but since 49 million was the total investment we would assume that they’re worth over 100

million or they would have lost a lot of their company so in total they reached that level where VCS are looking for but

in the end all of them got you know lost a little bit of money in that case yeah

okay I’m going to bring this to do yeah because I feel like we’ve set

the scene a but I want to go into as you mentioned Rights and Wrongs a little bit

but I want to just talk about step one so I appreciate we’re talking about investment but from the sound of it

there’s not much VC activity actually going to happen for most people here right um yeah so we’ve dealing with

Publishers you mentioned you see you get a lot of pitches I’m guessing you can’t reply to all of them and some people

just don’t know what they don’t know so what is the number one mistake that you’re seeing right

now right if you don’t mind I just want to jump back to a previous comment if that’s okay go for it and then we come

back to this yeah because uh one one of the audience did not understand my my question here I think and he asked I

don’t understand how the publisher is paying developers bills when they’re only cutting checks for almost complete games can you clarify what Publishers

fund today uh I think you misunderstood me um basically the Publishers are

looking at later stages that doesn’t mean they’re just funding finishing games I’m talking about with about two

to three of production uh two to three years of production left so we’re still talking about a very long production

cycle I’m not saying three months from launch most games in the budgets below five million when a publisher gets

involved at a vertical slice stage is still a larger investment so it’s still like a really long period where they’re

paying most of your bills but of course if you got to the vertical slice you’ve already invested some money which brings me back to what I said earlier about you

having better terms the more money and the more effort you put in into your Build The Better you can negotiate with

a with a publisher so that’s uh that’s what I meant uh I’m not if the publisher

comes in at the absolute end if you give out 8020 I’ll be very angry with you

yeah you know come on man if you so there is a misconception maybe between a

Distribution Company and a publisher which for you guys might be the same but a distributor is somebody who manages

all of your stores all of your campaigns maybe puts in some marketing Etc but basically is your effective uh manager

to make as much money as possible on your stores but they don’t run your game usually a Distribution Company takes

between 10 and 20% they don’t like in total overall they don’t take the 50 or

the 80 or the 100 that funding marketing did you say funding marketing depending on a Distribution Company but we’re

talking Small Checks I recently closed a distribution deal actually um where I believe they’re putting in 100K in

marketing and even during recoup it’s like 50/50 and then it goes down to a low number nice

so yeah so um I mean distribution companies that come in at the end for

example we have plug-in digital we have uh ripples Asia in Singapore uh we have

whisper games in China just as three examples where they can be the full publisher they can do the full

publishing model or they can just do the distribution part where they take a much smaller R share um now again for the

Publishers if they come in at the end it all comes down to negotiation so again if we remove a motion go to the paper if

you put in a million dollars and they’re coming in at the end only putting in let’s say 500k of course I think it’s

still fair to give them like a higher rev share of recoup so they get to recoup first because they’re still

getting you to that Finish Line they’re bringing in all the expertise Etc but in the end the Rev share should be skewed in your favor right because you actually

put in more money than them and you got the game there so sorry can you re ask your question now no good to clarify so

the question is you get all those pies and I’d imagine you can’t reply to every single one of them so I just want to

start with the number one mistake you see in the majority that hopefully we can nip in the bud for some people in a

pitch yeah I mean that’s really tough because I think it’s super subjective and what I say is not going to be

accurate with a lot of people but for me it really comes down to the budgeting uh

how you like built it all out so um what I mean by that is a normal red flag for

me is too much money or too little money you now I’m not an investor anymore I

guess per state but I’ll speak from behalf of an investor publisher not knowing how much money

your but like your game requires is a really big red flag so um if you’re coming into coming to me with a budget

of let’s say 500k and I instantly can see that this is impossible it means that you maybe don’t have the right

producer on your team or you’re missing some major capacity for me to actually give you any type of money and I’ll give you two examples

first one was a studio in GTR called Point Blank games that we invested in a couple years ago uh five five six years

ago um they came to us with that really small budget and they said hey guys you know we’re making this Soul SL or action

RPG game and 500k and I looked at them and I was like no not happening so how

did you know that instantly by playing the demo and looking at the road map and I’m not a producer even but you know I just looked

at this and I knew instantly that this is wrong and then of course I had advisers it wasn’t just my my opinion it

was our inter internal team and the whole thing but instantly just by myself I was like No And then I want to validate my opinion because I’m not a

producer I’m not going to pretend that I know what I’m talking about in that regard so it’s always important to validate um and I told them and I asked

him sorry I didn’t tell them why did you put the budget this way and that’s when the red flag disappeared because they said we tried to pitch it over one

million nobody wanted to give us money because we’re in new indie Studio we tried to pitch it around 750k everybody

still thought it was expensive and at 500k we got some offers so then I said okay well the problem is that you know

your your whole deck your whole case you’re you’re building out it’s not showing confidence you don’t have any

advisors you’re complete fresh on the market so we gave them some money to improve the demo and then we went out to

Publishers with them new pitch decks new budgets and everything oh interesting these these G these guys are absolutely

amazing you know it’s one of my favorite people in the industry still to date um but they uh we pitched on Publishers and

basically the publisher said uh come back to us with a vertical slice and I was so certain that this game was of

high quality even though it was you know a new indie Studio that I told our management let’s double down let’s bring

in some angels so we raised 300K and then we got some matching money from the government I think from Germany and we

went back to the Publishers and we got signed in two weeks with the vertical slice and we I can tell you I can’t say

the number but it was a very large seven digigit number that we ended up getting for the studio and that was because uh

once they had you know gotten into the groove once the whole production plan had been revamped and once once they actually put in the game they wanted to

make you know we got to the real number which was a lot higher and was fair and

doable so for them it wasn’t a red flag based on the answers that they had so

it’s good you know always be honest the thing is if you speak to a publisher an investor lying or not being honest it’s

going to set you back completely either you won’t be talked to at all or you’re just going to lose the deal on the spot

so just always be honest so red flag too little money red flag also too much money I I hate when I see especially

countries guys I mean everybody knows that there are certain let’s say call it average salaries in each country and of

we want you guys to have living wages so never ever and that’s why I talk about

too little money put yourself at a wage that isn’t livable if I see a Swedish person put in a $2,000 salary in their

budget I’m like nope not touching that not investing because you can’t live on that type of money in Sweden but on the

flip side if I see a person putting in$ 15 to $20,000 I’m like you’re making it IND the game it’s a little bit too high

or in the case that I wanted to mention in Malaysia where we found a game that we really loved they had put in an average salary of 8,000 USD per person

and the average salary in Malaysia is 1.5 to2 so it’s clear that they just wanted to make money on margin so that

when they launched the game they already would have made three to four times the actual production budget of the game

super big red flag in General on the number side and that brings me to it’s not a red flag because sometimes you

just don’t know so at the beginning of this podcast we talked about um uh how much Break Even copies you

need and the publisher investment and all this kind of stuff if you weren’t aware before I would highly advise you

to listen to what I said at the beginning of this talk and go back and look at your pitch deex and be like okay remember cut 50% off whatever my SRP is

look at the publisher investment whatever it may be now you have your real number it’s not just the money you’re asking for it’s on top of the

invest sorry the publisher investment and also the fact that the copies are going to be % Less in net revenue and

you’re going to have a very big different number in your deck now if you have all this nailed down you’re talking

about right and Wrongs I love to see it when we see decks where they’ve clearly done their research they clearly

understand their risk they know what they’re asking for and they know what the fair terms are this is great so if

you’re an indie developer with not a lot of experience there are a lot of people who give you advice for free there are a lot of guides a lot of talks that you

can listen to to get better at it and honestly you could probably send your pitch deck as a test so I’d like to say

this is not a right or wrong this is a cheat code and what I like to say is if

if you’re pitching a publisher or an investor build a tier one tier two tier three list tier three is the ones that

you are not certain about maybe there’s not enough information whatever you’re gonna reach out you send them the pitch

deck first and whatever they find whatever red flags whatever Q&A they have everybody else will find too that

means you can now identify most of the issues that you have and then you can clean them up before you go to your tier

two and your tier one list tier one meaning the ones that you really really want to work with and that goes into the

right tab when you come to well I’ll have to go back to Global top round when you came to Global top round and you

said why you wanted to work with us and you showed because you do this you provide this you provide that instant

green flag love it same thing forers and investors if you tell a particular VC oh I saw you invested in these two

companies that fits me I need the same kind of advice I need a production help or you have a co-working space can use

we need an office whatever information you can add in this tier one list will increase you your so-called green flags

and give you a higher chance of being signed and on the publisher side that would mean a um what do you call it the

crossover audience right so an easy example is you have a game similar to manner Lords you want to work with

hooded horse because you think that hooded horse can transfer Their audience to your game add one or two slides on

that right these are some little right it shows you’ve done your homework and people like that I’m guessing

but of course you can’t do this for everybody if you did 50 individual pitches you would spend all your time building decks so usually tier one is 5

to 10 and then tier two is all the ones that you would love to work with but you know you simply don’t have the time and

you’ll have to send them a generic pitch this is a good way of structuring your your pitch times um so get your budget

right get your risk right it really comes down to risk like I said the gaming industry is moving towards entertainment industry which means a

mutual risk I’m not sure if you guys are familiar but when you see a Netflix original do you think Netflix funded that whole movie themselves no you think

they funded a whole TV series themselves no always co-investors right so the entertainment industry is usually

somebody funds the pilot and gets it going and then comes another investor on top and then comes to produce her

company and everything else and boom all together you form 100% of the budget you launch it you share the revenue the

gaming industry is moving in a similar fashion where you can no longer get free money you can no longer do St stupid

pitches is the wrong word but you get what I mean you can put in minimal effort you really had to show what you’re capable of and I know it’s not

fair you know I I wish a hundred more games would be signed every day but this is what you’re dealing with this is the

facts this is not my opinion this is what we’ve been speaking the current landscape exactly I think especially

when you looking at 10 pictures or ah the green screen went down amazing this

is no green screen here I think thank thanks for reflexing on me that you have an actual background where I’m in my

bedroom um the because yeah like you said it’s just competition right like we would go for

you if you had no choice but we have choice so you have to be the best of those choices yes um yeah so I guess right

right and wrong both comes down to budget I think there are many Rights and Wrongs that we could talk about but I would say the number one thing is

understanding risk management and that comes down to your production as well like it’s okay to have delays it’s okay

to have buffer you know honesty really is the key in every

industry but especially in games where you need to let people know what’s going

on before during and about to launch we’re talking the whole Spectrum while

pitching while in the middle of developments and I actually had one of my developers the other day which I’m

very actually not related to aora one of my private Investments they messaged me two days ago asking hey we don’t think

we’re gonna hit the Milestones with the publisher on time what do we do great question and I haven’t answered them yet

I need to do that um but my answer them is going to be very simple the fact that you’re even asking me this question

shows exactly the level of honesty that’s required you’re going to make a report exactly why you’re not able to

deliver on time how much extra time you need extra money if necessary and of

course ask the the the not very good question how will this impact my rev share or is there any cut back from this

I’m guessing this is quite common as well for people to remember very and I think it’s also I mean I have Intel it’s

like some people leave it very last minute because they think they can save it then they don’t so like to your point

I think this shouldn’t be that super scary right no and I think that I’ve been in the situation in my past career

probably eight or nine times now with the investment we made and I I would say

all of them in the first time they asked for money because I’ve been in a couple cases where they didn’t happen

once uh but all of them the first time had no reductions in their rev share No penalties no nothing

the Publishers super happy about the transparency and they agreed and we pushed the launch date and all this kind of stuff everything is great as long as

you’re transparent and you give heads up and you always deliver uh real reports your investors will be happy this goes

for investors too your Publishers will be happy and so forth so when we’re talking about dealing with people

honesty is key when if you’re running out of cash tell people now six months before nine months before not three

months before you always got to look ahead and risk manage we can continue on the right and wrong is up to you or you

I want to I want to do before we go into some quick fire on the Q&A because I’ve collected a few questions um on the you

told an interesting story where you found a game you liked they they Mis

budgeted the game but you had confidence in the game then you invested a small amount to get them to the vertical slice

and then went got the publisher okay well I’ve met I go and play Test games

at Gamescom I think a lot of those people were in that sit situation but I don’t know if they’re actively thinking

oh let me raise money to get the vertical slice to then go to a publisher is that still a possibility today like

can someone have that as their goal I still think there are a lot of angels so I I mean I’ve been getting a

couple recently so I want to make it very clear guys it says angel investor on my profile but I’m really poor right now I put all my money in aora okay so I

cannot I have no money at the moment but no um there are a lot of people like me

uh actually I used to run an angel group uh with about 87 of us uh in the group I

haven’t had time to nurture that group or provide any deal flow in a very long time and it was not a business model just straight up deal sharing yeah and

sorry no problem and a couple of those people were uh were co-investors in that particular case that I just mentioned um

but there are a lot of us there are a lot of angels willing to put in 10 to 20 to 30k tickets maybe even up to 100 and

there are a couple of accelerator preced investors that could come in with that 100 250k and and unless you live in San

Francisco or LA or anything of this sort most of you can survive on quote unquote

normal salaries which means that the money of let’s say if you raise half a million to one million can bring you to

that vertical slice level that is still very much doable and you’re probably wondering what P you said it’s not VC

investable blah blah blah absolutely not the same case for me as an angel investor I have done uh seven seven to

date I may have more I think it’s seven uh it’s either no sorry yes I’ve done

nine two are dead seven so seven alive today um I invested in my first one in

2018 so that’s almost six years ago there is still no news of any exit I don’t care because my job I’m not a VC

I’m not looking for a 100x this studio has given me so many other things access to new network uh I’ve learned a lot

I’ve been part of the production recently actually I helped being part of the design of one of their games as a

kind of hobby kind of thing because I enjoyed it it’s it’s giving me a lot of of happiness I guess is the right word

it maybe a bit cringe whatever yeah satisfaction it’s the right word and I don’t need to exit in you know five to

six years or whatever it would be nice and the day they get sold I’m going to hopefully be a very happy man if they die then you know [ __ ] happens we’re

investing right but out of those seven three of them have already gotten buyout offers and it’s not big multiples one of

them I think was a 5x uh one of them was a 20x but I put in

a tiny amount of money it was a it’s a very long story for another time um so

of course a 20x I would be great with but these two would pay back all my angel Investments right so for me I’m

I’m okay with it and all my angels in that group are the same way like we do this as a hobby we think it’s fun we get

to meet really cool people we don’t put in obnoxious amount of money like I put in between uh I think my my average sex

size was 10 to 50 you know it’s not big money in the end right can I ask some questions here I’m very curious about

few things so yeah this seems like a whole strategy then if I’m looking for half of me or less MH first of all let’s

say we take the example I don’t know if this is true but if that even is appropriate if I have a game that I want

to make with less than half a million let’s say that is appropriate then I should not be talking to Publishers I should just be looking for Angel

Investors right is that how we’re looking at it no so now we get now we

get into the complicated matter of even though I say that I have this attitude that doesn’t mean every angel has this

attitude right we’re all different some people may want to exit in five years or or chase you down or follow you make do

your due diligence and the angels too but I mean I ultimately want to make money right that’s still why I invest of

course what I’m getting at is it would be better return on time if you targeted the Angels because they don’t have as

strict of a policy as the Publishers currently do yes but now me and all

these angels right let’s take uh one of the cases without mentioning the name where we own 12% of the company if this

company gets sold for $10 million that’s still you know 1 two Mill I said 12 yeah

12 1.2 million dollars that the founder loses and also over time if there are

dividends and other payments or votes where we have access to actually voting that could impact you know the structure

of the studio so remember your job is still to pay back the investor regardless of a publisher VC or an angel

now a publisher aren’t allowed to make decisions inside your company they don’t

take equity which means if you have a really really solid launch and you have

a good strategy of your company and you sign with a publisher that’s non-diluted capital meaning you still own 100% of it

with you and your co-founders you haven’t given out a single piece which means if you eventually want to

fundraise and you have a studio that either fits the VC model or you have other investors you have a lot of equity

to play with and that also means you can race multiple rounds because the more you race in the early stage the less

rounds you can make in the future because if you sell let’s say 20% uh as an angel and then you get a seed

investor for another 10 15% you don’t have a lot of space left until you reach that 51% of a

controlling stake in the company so it’s not all positive right you’re still giving out a share of your business so

as you said yeah you could go for the full Angel ticket but what is your valuation if you’ve never launched a

game before again example uh you don’t have a publishing deal you have no personal cash investment I’m speaking

about the general pitches that I get in my inbox um you’re not worth a lot to me

and I’m definitely not going to give you half a million dollars with my friends if you have nothing so you still have to

be at a certain level where you know you come in so me and my angels normally invested around three four million

valuation and always had a playable so that means you could raise 500k because that’s like 15% right um but still going

back remember you’re giving out Equity make sure you also have good contracts make sure you don’t give them deciding

votes I mean if you should always have all the power with you and make sure

that they don’t have too much control that early it’s a really big hassle sending out reports to your investors

updating them about everything involving them in every process and decisions and all this kind of stuff all of this can

be resolved legally speaking by doing good contracts and agreeing with your investors but still it’s not all you

know good there are bad angels too I I just happen to have accepted the fact that this is what I was happy to do and

uh yeah I don’t know if all my co-investors I don’t I don’t speak to them on a weekly or monthly basis are as

happy as I but you know I just wanted to highlight that because it was probably something that so I go to these

specifically the Indie Studios when I speak to them at the gaming conferences and they always go for the big half

million to a million a year um sorry million budget and they only targeting Publishers I’m like I don’t know if

you’re there that with this type of game right so just wanted to highlight that it’s an option but from the sound of it

yeah doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with the pros and cons I mean a great I actually so in my devcom talk I don’t

know if they’re going to allow me to upload it but I actually have a two slides where I talk about how to build a company from scratch using the angel

model where I even show a cap table um where I basically show that this is your ideal percentage in your angel round

ideal percentage in your seed round the ideal percentage in your series a and my model guarantees that you still own 51%

are they obvious numbers can you wrap them off or no no it’s too too late it’s

11: p.m. too late in theing my job is to ask the question no but I I I’m pretty sure I

can share the devcom one and if I can’t I’m gonna do that speaker session again I was very happy with it so it will come

out in some way or form and again we we wanna with Agora we want to upload as many free templates as possible in the

future so definitely worth doing like the amount of people who are asking for it is crazy yeah but you really have to

think about Equity guys like the you know longterm taking too much taking too many investors in the early stage will

hurt you in the long run because most VCS if you go to VC route they usually want a 20% stake in a board seat not all

of them not all of them at all so I know some VCS might be like hey what are you talking about but 10 I I haven’t seen a

single VC asking for less than 10% in an early round so it’s they’re still going to have a significant chunk and most of

them ask for board seats and if they don’t they want some sort of utter control or input into your budgets or

something else that you need all righty we’ve hit an hour mark

so I’m about to do something so I’m happy to continue it’s your show so we we will continue it’s just before we

kind of basically we’re going to move into rapid fire Q&A because I find that to be the most fun but before we do that

I’m going to give pontis the floor a little bit as we’re at Peak viewers now so if anyone’s watching can you just

give me a few call to action like what should people do they want to either learn more about you what are you

looking for right now that maybe someone can help you with uh okay yes I’m not good at talking

short sentences let me let me think about this no but um so for those of you who know me from before you’ve probably

seen my face during my Global top run era if you’re unfamiliar I left them in April that was a preed accelerator

company we did 64 Investments you know still talk to some of the studios today still friends with the founders Etc um I

left to start my own company with my co-founder jock benry um who’s an ex- Banker very different background for

myself uh we’re basically an investment Bank advisory we do m&a publishing fundraising and we have a license to do

this as well um and we are currently not really looking for anything so we again

trying to keep it short we we wanted to be different we wanted to work with a very small amount of Studios there’s a

lot of you know Banks agents Services out there and a lot lot of them sign a

lot of clients we wanted to do it differently in only signing a very small amount so a maximum of three to myself

three to jock and potentially another partner in the future right now we have songin who a couple of you have met and

know who is who also has his own clients on the Indie side and that’s our maximum

we wanted to cap it we work on all clients together by the way but the point here is that you know there’s a lead assign but we all work together we

wanted to really work side by side and close with all the clients that we work with and provide you know top-notch

services and help you scale in order to do that we had to cap it which is why even though I get amazing pictures into

my inbox every day we simply are at capacity uh as I mentioned we did close

a deal at 3: am. this morning so technically we would have room for maybe an indie game to help out with and that

client was an indie game so when we started a Gora very Frankly Speaking we weren’t going to work with Indie uh I’ve

worked with Indie my whole career I I love indie games but I wanted to help the the doublea developers that were

struggling because there are so many doua developers struggling and you’re seeing a new one close down every day

nowadays pretty much uh what I learned is that uh nobody’s signing doua developers at M so it’s really tough to

find Publishers giving you five million checks 10 million checks 15 million checks and of course me who was supposed

to help you grow your business if I can’t do that what am I going to do for you right so we still work with doublea

but on a longer Spectrum where you know we it may not be day-to-day interactions but we’re working a lot of strategy Corp

Dev stuff like that where we’re really building the future of the company um but we have decided to work with a

couple of Indies anyway and I’m saying this because I know some of you because I can see some names here that actually saw my talk in reboot in April and I

mentioned how we were going to focus on able a well it’s changed a bit we we are okay with Indie as well we’re happy to

help if it’s a kickass game sounds great to me um we are going to have a new

website very soon where everything’s going to be public our Feast how work so it’s going to be fully transparent you

know for those of you have seen me speak I I speak very bluntly and almost leaked some stuff earlier so our our company is

going to be the same our fees are the way we work everything will be public on our website when we have time to get to

it but if you email us and you’re like how does it work it will all be transparent so it’s going to be a very

clean cut yeah maybe one in the game um we are working on something really really cool that I told Harry before the

uh the podcast but I can’t tell you about yet but there’s going to be another initiative that a lot of you in here are going to be very interested and

you’re going to post about it on LinkedIn so the call to action to that is follow pontis yes follow me because

from The Sound there’s a lot of cool stuff happening relatively not too long away there you go that’s my way of

saying that okay so yeah yes yeah but no that that’s that’s aora

and you can find me on you know LinkedIn I use Twitter a lot not anymore after Elon Musk acquired but uh I still follow

all the game devs I still use the screenshot Saturday all this kind of stuff um so I’m still on Twitter a lot

so if you DM me there I’ll be there so LinkedIn and Twitter is where I live I don’t use any other platforms except email of course and uh yeah if you want

to pitch us anything you send an email to scouting Agora gaming partners.com

and we but I’m gonna preface this and say we’re five people any pitches you

send we do not have time to provide feedback straight up we we do not because we have to work with our current clients so one of two things going to

happen if we really like it we’ll ask you for a call and if not you’re going to get a copy paste thing saying we don’t have time and we sadly cannot

provide you feedback at Global top round we always provide a feedback at Agora I wanted to do it but we’re not big enough

we don’t have time so I want to say that right away you do see them we do see

them we see all of them we look at everything there you go hey if you if you type something like you know urgent

or important in the uh in the email where you need help with a reviewing a publisher agreement uh getting some

advice based on recoup shares investment terms without ndas like just like no

names happy to do it for free we will always do that um sweet that’s a nice offer I thought you were about to say

don’t do that then you said do that oh sweet no I mean like for if you need any sort of help in in that regard uh and if

it’s urgent and you have deals on the table happy to provide like free tips that’s something we will always do

because industry growing industry getting better is better for all of us so ni absolutely no problem minutes I’m

not good at saying a short give me one minute elevator pitch but no there’s a lot of good stuff there

so the email to repeat scouting at aor gaming partners.com

yeah nice I’ll put that and if yeah if you have a game and you are 15 months

from launch you should pay extra attention and send me something really nice there there you go I’ll tell you

something more in a couple of weeks I mean that’s pretty much as much info as everyone here and whoever’s watching

that on replay um should know cool amazing and before we go into Q&A this

is Harry’s turn to flex um anyone who’s joined halfway through the recap will

come on Saturday if you on the newsletter called gaming rally I’m going to swap places and put my finger there

if you scan that it will take you to a landing page but basically Weekly Newsletter where me and my good partner

Ali FAA will share what we’ve learned just about building a better of gaming life and also all these podcast Recaps

go to people who are subscribed so you go to gaming r.net you get it and my

10-second pitch my day job is yes I have this podcast every week but I also ghost WR for gaming CEOs so if you’re a CEO

and you want your LinkedIn done for you you can also hit me up in the DMS and I can tell you more about that so I’ll

leave that QR code there I see three four people scanning which is lovely and then we’ll go straight into Q&A all

righty got some questions from about 40 minutes ago so we’re going to just bash through them and then we’re going to go

through the questions I see in the chat if anyone’s got a question that they asked a while ago feel free to just say

it again um it will just give me more chances of looking at it but um pontis in the conscious of time let’s say we

have 20 minutes let’s do these um quick fire I will try it’s right so this is from Jad who

I’ve played his game actually um from Gamescom so his question is aren’t Publishers missing out on great game

projects by only being interested down the line we’re out of Co now there’s been some time to

recruit exactly and I don’t know if you heard my full answer but that’s what I’m saying that they’re all missing out but

that’s you know at the end of the day it’s a corporate they get their decisions from above they get their budgets from above most of them anyway

except the Indie ones but since most of you are looking for one to three million based on my inbox you know you’re

talking about the ones who sent a lot of money um they have their specific rules

so if you come and Pitch them one million now and they don’t have that money this year they can’t sign you next

year they might have a million and they might want you and then they missed out on the opportunity and that’s why I am 90% certain that’s a big statement that

maybe a year year and a half from now we’re going to be in a situation where Publishers don’t have enough games signed for their slates and there’s

going to be a signing spree so yes they miss games all the time so did I by the way I missed a lot of games

so okay so there’s hope and there’s caution in that answer but I like it all

righty question from Alex Caruso do you think VR games could be a new investment area for VC and Publishers in the near

future I have thoughts on this but I’m woring I’m wondering what’s yours I used to work a little bit with

HTC a couple years ago and you know I knew the tech wasn’t ready I’ll say the same thing I always say that the Tech’s

too expensive you know there’s not enough games and the Tech’s too expensive and the problem is until there

are more games uh it’s going to be a problem and until it gets you know cheaper it’s going to be a problem so how do you get there we have the chicken

and egg problem again just like in the mobile industry that we talked about briefly um so I would say that the model

nowadays if you’re a studio is to find half your funding from meta or some other company because they’re very

frugal about giving you money to develop games I think I personally love VR games but I would never touch it with a stick

on the investment side sorry to say it’s not a good business model because the market is too small um but I I I love VR

games AR I have no what I’ve seen one time was just table top game where you could move pieces in AR yeah I saw that

really really cool but that’s what board games are for I’d rather play my board game so yeah yeah you know I’m not I’m

not a good uh answer answerer to this question I guess I mean I just saw end dreams they’ve done a bunch of layoffs a

biger VR studio so um I would Echo those points it’s basically bankrolled by meta

and apple I believe yes all right you can be beab right but it’s very uh saber

is super hot those are my two examples of like oh they actually made money on their own the rest weird um all righty

from Manny Hashi how does one become an indie darling is it networking

alone oh good question um how do we I I guess it depends on

what your definition of Indie darling is but I think um the manords developer is

a great example like interacting with your like clearly okay maybe now now I’m judging but I believe that the developer

is introvert it seems so because they don’t show up on a lot of interviews and they don’t do a lot of camera stuff but

they’re TW and all the time engages with the community so just by the fact that he’s

engaging with the community on Twitter or Discord all over the place practically makes him an indie darling because there’s a lot of introverts in

the gaming space like a lot right so engaging talking feedbacking with your

community is one great way if you’re talking about the B2B side again I have to come down and say that honesty is

still key don’t be an [ __ ] like really it’s easy not to be an [ __ ] in

my opinion and as long as you’re a good person that tries to help people behind the scenes eventually you’ll find

somebody like me or other Publishers and investors that can vouch for you and that gets you into the right room where

you get the chance to pitch your game and that can get you somewhere um so B2B side is really just don’t be an [ __ ]

do your best uh be honest um send your game any opportunity possible uh where

you can and there there are so many good people and they don’t get enough credit like Eve from Focus entertainment is one

of my favorite people in the world and he’s always so friendly with you know developers and and answering everybody

and there are so many you know not as good as Eve of course Eve but good enough that you can find on

in the industry there you go so Network yes and be engaged with the community is

definitely a plus yes all righty this is a very open question from Martin and I

think it’s true but I don’t know how much more to add isn’t the market already saturated with live service

games 100% it has been oversaturated for years but you still see games like Space

Marines 2 which is an incredible game by the way buy it if you haven’t I I played the whole campaign last Sunday because I

had Early Access with my team did you invest in it one day I I wish but no

it’s a Focus right so it was Focus saber and uh oh wow yeah but yeah so either

way I play 10 days ago yeah this is I

absolutely loved it anyone just like me who doesn’t know it’s got 60,000 reviews

nine out of 10 on Steam that’s crazy I mean really this is a good

example of this is not really the traditional live service games it’s not free to play but it does have DLCs so

that’s up to up upcoming season passes I mean this is basically a premium life service game right and same as hell

divers if you look at Hell divers numbers they went massively up yeah I saw they crashed yep but now they did a

patch that the community really loved and their CCU went up almost three times so if you do a good life service game

there’s room for you and you don’t need to you know service the game for the next 10 20 years it’s going to be really

hard for you to compete with the blizzards and Etc right but I think there’s always room for a good life

service game but of course these two are bad examples in the way that these are both $20 million plus budgets most

likely I don’t know the exact budget of of either game but they’re definitely in the higher end so of course if you are a

so-called Indie darling it’s not going to be as easy for you but even manl Lords is going to probably be an early

access for maybe three years or so you know it’s going to have continuous updates and the player base is going to

go up and it’s going to go to [ __ ] so to speak lack of a better word and it’s going to go up again I mean that’s the

story of any life service so I like it just don’t to you know pay

to win if you’re targeting primarily a western audience that’s something I don’t think will ever work yeah agreed you know all righty

next question so

is interesting question what’s your take on VR AR web 3

so we’ll tackle the web 3 part of this question you think about the prospects of the US region where costs are huge

and what are your thoughts on the prospects of Asia and Southeast Asia regarding d2p games since it’s quickfire this is

almost impossible to quickfire but um I mean we talked about VR and AR briefly yep um web

three I I’m be honest ptis uh yeah but there are

things you should say and shouldn’t say on streams um I I have uh invested in

Two web three companies myself I owned salana for a very long time I owned Bitcoin but I would never touch it with

a stick outside of my personal Investments because it was just diversification you know I have Angel investments in video games I own uranium

and other nuclear energy I own some other traditional stocks in Medtech and I bought some web three stuff so I like

to diversify my money because that’s just how I am as an investor um other than that the only thing that I can say

is that the idea of a you know Tri like a currency outside of the government’s

grasp so to speak is really cool I’ll just leave it there you know if it gets proven if it becomes that great Bitcoin

being digital gold sounds good to me you know that’s cool and all if we speak about games 99.9% of them are all scams

and this is a comment I probably shouldn’t say on streams but I swear I lose IQ 50% of the time speaking to

people from web 3 because they have no idea what a video game is how to produce one what it entails or anything

whatsoever the under 50% I speak to very smart people like in any industry but I’ve never been in an industry with so

many scammers and people who have no clue what they’re talking about like web 3 it’s really sad um I think it’s

getting a lot a lot better I think a lot of the scammers have been outed I think that a lot of the studios are shutting down a lot of rugs as the web3 people

like to say rug puls um Y and I think we’re going to keep getting better and better but I mean the thing is the

investors has made money most of them because they got in really early at a very small scent on the dollar per coin

the word comes to mind when I yeah they dumped it on all of you retail investors and you know the investors are happy the

studios took their money and they left and then nothing else sad sad scam yes I

really believe in the idea of web three technology and its future but the way it’s being utilized their Innovations

they talk about have been in the industry for 20 plus years like when I I think I heard somebody two or three

years ago explaining to me how the trading system works and when I told him that this existed in the World of Warcraft auction house like 20 years ago

he just got stumped and was like no no no no no but we’re using layer 3 technology blah blah blah this this this that and I was like exactly my point we

did it without blockchain technology why do you need it but there are tons of cool stuff in

web3 so let me leave it there uh I’m just uh I hate when the General market

gets taken advantage of and loses money but you can’t pull them all over but you can put them all over one line there are

many really really smart people in we three just less yeah I just I like the

way you answer that I put that there putting me on the spot with you now I’m gonna get a bunch of haters hey hey this

is Q&A pontis you decide the answers I’m just giving questions um Chris Gibson

can I get the record of this please you can if you haven’t already scan that and also this is a podcast it’s available on

Spotify apple and YouTube and I posted the link in the chat just H Fu please

enjoy that is my two second off selling amazing okay

so if I got a question from Dean hey ponter so say that we have a prototype

for a game that is just a $350,000 I’m guessing dollar budget sorry that may have may not just

landed in your inbox follow up so what is a VC out of the question here so I’ve

seen your pitch deex right and I still owe you an answer Dean from your email from like three months ago so again I

already told you by email sorry about that uh and I did see your new deck it’s right now with song bin I think so for

those of you unaware our head of games is his title he always looks at everything first but usually I take a sneak peek anyway but what he needs to

pass him first so I know that he’s looking at it as for the second part of your question yeah a VC investing a 350k

budget I mean we’re talking preed investors and Angels here not a VC but your question doesn’t ask me

whether or not you’re talking Equity or prodct Finance here I mean there are prodct Finance VCS that could do it because it’s a very small budget I mean

c Knights is a great one prod finance company uh but if you’re talking about

doing a VC round the way you should look at it is the VC rounds are normally two million and above that’s when you can

talk talk to the Venture Capital you have to think about it this way again a [ __ ] now I’m continuing to talk over but

when you have a 50 to100 million doll fund and you need to return all that money times several times over you don’t

have the time for a small check even if it 10 20 ex’s it’s not enough money

that’s my simple answer which is not accurate but a it’s a logistical answer it’s just Logistics yeah like all the DD

the legal everything and then in the end it only makes you yeah $3 million which

sounds good but not for a VC who needs to return you know 300 that makes sense

all righty we got a question from borislav if you want to work with a publisher is

having a steamed page a double edge sort should you get visibility pre vertical slice I’m guessing in terms of wish list

here or just now that demo I it’s a very subjective um answer

so I the answer is I don’t know and I’m not saying that because I don’t know I’m saying that because the Publishers don’t

know because half of them say if you don’t have a steam page and wish list I don’t want to talk to you and half of

them are like wait you started a steam page without me what am I gonna do really and I’m not kidding yes this is

the conversations that I’ve been having with Publishers so my opinion which is

countering that fact of a 50/50 is that steam page and wish list is always good but if your steam page has been live for

a year and you have 2,000 wish lists that’s bad so you know it really depends on how

you do it yeah um so yeah nail the demo nail the demo nail the vertical slice

that’s all you should care about because in the end that’s what matters I can say that if you remember my percentage scale

on the budget I if I this again could be inaccurate because I don’t have the slide in front of me but about 10% or it could have

been 15 out of those 100% Publishers is looking for uh what they call engagement

criteria now as well so steam followers Twitter engagements YouTube views steamed wish list Etc is becoming a

criteria that’s slowly coming back to the publisher DD process but so far between 10 and 15% so not a lot more

than that in at least my discussions all righty I add my two cents here um I have

coached someone who does Tik Tok end to end for Indie developers and the funnel is he makes Clips gets them into Discord

and then wish list so out of the box thinking if you’re worried about this get people in a Discord that is kind of

halfway into a wish list in some sense and you don’t then you can hopefully please both so just something to think

about if you can get people interested pop them in the Discord maybe right

um Aaron cell my former colleague can you share tips on securing Partnerships or sponsorship deals in gaming uh not

anymore uh I could have uh my my career used to be in Esports so I did a lot of sponsorship deals in my career I

actually got my first sponsorship at the age of 13 I walked up to the Logitech manager at dream hack and I said hello I

have 100 CCU I want some gear please and it turns out that that guy was the head

of Europe and within two weeks I had a contract and then they gave me uh 10

20 Logitech devices per month for me to give out to my stream Jokes Aside my last sponsorship

deal that I did was probably actually oh it was quite recent uh I I still have a

couple of hundred thousand followers so I did one I think four years ago but I wouldn’t count it as a sponsorship deal but basically I got a free MSI laptop

and then I reviewed it on my channel ni so really I’m am not uh cannot advise

you at this time I could tell you everything about how good I was seven years ago but the industry is nothing

like that anymore Esports has changed drastically I’m assuming you’re speaking Esports by the way since you said

Partnerships and sponsorships if you’re speaking more podcasts like for example this podcast uh and things like that I

also do not know uh I would assume that the model that indie game business do J

Powell where you have like this large um developer newsletter the large publisher

newsletter and in Harris’s case I assume more SE Su Etc um you would need to find

sponsors that fit that criteria right but yeah yeah I’m not your guy anymore long time ago but it was a good story um

and yeah just Dean day coming in by saying it’s a new new deck just to make you oh new new deck oh God I’m gonna

open my superum here and I see it I’ll look at it later

there you go I mean hey Dean you’re welcome huh I’ve given you direct access to the man here um Aaron Campo again um

this is actually a good one like we didn’t actually touch it like when it comes to negotiating a better deal especially when we’re introverts I guess

what do people I’m going to frame the question is like what do people get wrong usually when it comes to

negotia oh uh but it looks of it this is one of the last questions so I can go a bit longer I assume yeah you know what

yeah final question yeah so um being an introvert is not a not not a problem um

but it will be a problem if you’re looking to work with VCS and you want to raise several rounds because again speaking on the VC case you’re looking

at doing a seed round and then you would want to do a serious a to scale and you want to make larger and larger games and

if you’re an introvert and that you’re not capable of sitting in a room with a board and a lot of investors the chances

are you’re not the right person for the job so why I’m bringing this up even though investors is not part of your question it’s just to go back to that um

the whole Space when it comes to investors this is important you need to be a VC

CEO so to speak not initially you can learn that over time but that’s why you

see a lot of Studios where when the company is Raising more money eventually the original CEO gets replaced by

somebody who’s more PR approachable and who can manage all the investors and deal with all the trouble and admin and

accounting and then the person who created the company can focus on the games very very on the investor side

with the Publishers that doesn’t matter what they care about is making a return on the game if you’re introvert or not is irrelevant because most introverts

are really good at many other things like analysis or come backing up their arguments or explaining the game design

whether orally or in a document so it doesn’t really matter on the personality side for Publishers and platforms from

what I’ve said from what I’ve seen sorry um so what tips do I have in general would be that I mean the the obvious one

the later stage your game the better terms you get it’s a very simple cut one the more money you put in the better the

more research you have the more wish list you have like all the regular boring stuff the later you are the more

data you have the better deal you get this is for platforms for Publishers um

the other part would be digging into that risk showing them that you’ve done proper risk management based on your

cash flow your production risks based on the investment from the partner and why you think these terms are there it’s

always going to be a back and forward between the publisher and you but you need to explain if you want a higher cut

rev share this is why and for example I’ve done some deals where there is either a bonus based on x

amount of copies or there is a higher increase in rev share over time and then I would have to back that up with data

that for example technically the addressable Market is like say 500,000 units and that’s what you’re investing

in but what if you reach one million units you know I still made the game I want to make more money so then I would negotiate additional steps here right

because if we reach above the Publishers 3x and their uh forecast and we reach

above our own I want to be paid more you should think about the long tale as well long tail is very important most

publisher Agreements are seven years long five or five five s 10 try to go

for as low as possible of course where it usually Auto renew based on a certain

amount of Revenue make sure that revenue is substantial meaning that if you can do a better job yourself you’re not

happy so that number should probably be at a minimum of 100 Grand a year bare minimum if it’s below that I’m pretty

sure if you sat on your ass and did nothing and You’ made a discount every now and then you’d make more money than the effort the publisher would put in

there a lot of these finer details that you forget in the publishing agreement and the platform agreements that you cannot do in the end um so to Pivot over

to platforms most of them is a short-term exclusivity on just subscription platforms if you’re talking

about Game Pass and PlayStation Plus and all this kind of thing which is fine but remember if you put yourself on Game

Pass most of those people are using steam that is a very very large market so that juicy check of a million dollars

or whatever might look really nice but what if you get a million players activating Game Pass and to flip back to

a simple math 100,000 copies at $20 SRP would then be basically the same amount

of money is that worth it so when you’re looking at platforms what I tend to say

to to our clients and in general is if you’re going to sign a platform deal make sure it covers 100% of the whole

budgets so your break even day one and then you’re making money and then usually with the platforms you can

renegotiate when there’s an expiration for additional cash as well so after the six or the 12 month period you can ask

for Renewal and more money if you want to or of course you can you can terminate but if you for example take a

platform deal that only covers 30% of your whole budget but your addressable Market is two three four million people

you’re losing a lot of cash it’s it’s good on paper yay I got a million in my

bank today but a million in my bank today or four million in my bank a year from now what would you

take the risk averse option I’m hearing yes my my colleague Jack loves to do the

example where he asks the interviewer or the Q&A person would you have $100 for $15 to day or 110 or 120 and eventually

the the interviewer will always say oh yeah 130 next year sounds good that’s a 30% yearly you know increase in money

that’s a big increase if you look at a regular stock portfolio 30% is great

think about platforms the exact same way I like that $100 in your pocket today or

do you want $130 next year which is a 30% increase this could be a 4X mle so

it’s like 400% potentially could be 400% could be a lot more and most in most cases with Game Pass and these different

companies we are talking about either a failure and you’re very happy you got the Game Pass money thank you please

yeah one where you’re like oh my God all my players are on platforms what do I do now um but I have to say that I think

what what Microsoft and Game Pass did was part of the reason why we got so many awesome games in the last couple

years without Game Pass and these things we would have seen way less games in the market so I think it was really good

timing Microsoft and I think they helped a lot of developers make their games dreams come true so just want to mention

that that I think they did a good job and a lot of the games that I worked with as well I don’t remember how many

Game Pass deals we had but probably seven or eight um was very helpful yeah

and yeah I’ve spoken to we’ve recruited for a couple as well and like without it it wouldn’t they wouldn’t have existed

those studos just put it that way um yeah Al righty um we have come to time

exactly I was gonna say I can continue but I think we’ve yeah we’ve come to time you’ve generously given 90 minutes

I have a cheeky question from Lim I’m going to give him it it’s a very it’s a quick one um we’re presenting play test

data in our pitch deck simple scoring for visual gameplay Etc to a publisher what’s a good sample size for it to be

considered trustable so this a good example I’ve known Lim for a very long time I’m

pretty sure it’s you right your picture is too small that I can’t see Liang yeah that’s you yeah so you know

Lim is one of those people who I’ve seen him pitch me every year for four years

and every year he gets better and he does not give up which is great you know keep going Lim you know every year I see

an updated pitch and every year I see you building something better so you know just keep keep at it and I’ll be in

Malaysia in two weeks so I guess I’ll see you there most likely at level up um but to answer your question

um uh I guess I can let me answer it Flip Flip Side um less than 100 people

is not a good enough data set I can’t tell you what a good data set is because

the answer is as much as possible but I can’t tell you that less than 100 is a bad sample size if you do an interview

or a survey with 10 people you’re not going to get good enough answers or data to have a qualified guess so bare

minimum 100 ideally 300 well 200 to 500 maybe and of course depending on your

target markets so I want to we haven’t talked about this in today’s podcast but remember you only have to be successful

in one single country in the world to make millions of dollars in video games you do not have to Target every single

country in the world you know just a Southeast Asian country for example 10% of that market is $10 million so with

that in mind when you’re doing this data set a 100 people from 100 different countries won’t help you

either right so what is your addressable Market in regards to genre and

demographics that’s where your data set should be I don’t want to see 40 players from from India on a simulation strategy

game because they don’t play simulation strategy games on PC so it’s very important that you have the right countries and demographics for your data

set as well um and I know there was a question earlier about markets so I just wanted to mention that that um you do

not need to be successful across the globe Focus instead on a limited amount of countries and hyperfocus in

those love that answer amazing pontis thank you so much this was really fun hope you enjoyed it how was how was it

for you no great I mean I uh I almost messed up there earlier so hopefully we can cut that out in editing uh um no it

was good uh I mean a lot of questions which I’m always very happy to to see so hopefully I I help a lot of you it’s

always really hard when you know we talk about a lot of topics because I also talk too much so it’s it’s tough to dig

super deep but hopefully it was good enough in in some ways um as someone

who’s done this before it was very very good and there was some nice insights I’ve even got a couple thank you DMS

which is always a good sign so there you go um so lovely um final kind of call to

action we still got a lot of people who started are still here so everyone please follow contest for more to come

and if you are new to me follow me yeah like LinkedIn Twitter email and I’ll be

at level up K in two weeks I’m going to speak there apparently I was just confirmed yesterday so now I’m going to K so I’ll be there um otherwise I will

see some of you at games come Asia as well I’ll be there too so that’s my next two events in case you want to say hi

face to face amazing fontis thank you so much thank you har for inviting me was a

pleasure my my pleasure