Pitching your game to investors and publishers is a make or break moment for many teams, and building the business know-how you need to finesse a pitch isn’t easy for many new to the process. Aiming to help game makers develop their business acumen and beef up their pitching skills, Game Developer sat down with longtime funding advisor and GDC Pitch host Jason Della Rocca for a chat on exactly what devs need to know to successfully get their game in front of investors.
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“I’ve been in the game industry for 30 years now, and I would say the bulk of that has really been around developer success: helping developers—particularly indies and startups—to succeed in the game industry, and a big part of that is thinking through the business side of things,” says Della Rocca.
“Most game developers come to the craft from a position of passion and creativity; they want to build worlds and create experiences. They’re programmers and artists, designers and musicians, writers and all of these kinds of amazing creative roles. But rarely do they have the business acumen to really understand funding, pitching, marketing, and all of these things.”
“But you were not birthed into the world with a comprehension of C++ and a keyboard in your hand. These are all learned skills. The good news is that the business and marketing stuff like pitching are all learned skills. You can learn this and get good at it.”
First steps for developing your pitch
“You have to really understand what you [are] actually trying to achieve,” says Della Rocca. “When I’m working with startup studios, there is some sense that they’re building a business and trying to make a career of it and generate some revenue.”
“Publishers, investors, platforms… They’re not there to fund your hobby. They’re in business and they want to make money too,” says Della Rocca. “If [your answer is] ‘I’m building a game that I think has a chance to be successful’ or ‘I’m trying to build a studio and generate revenue’, then you need to find partners to make that a reality.”
After you know who you are and what your definition of success is, the first area you’ll want to focus on is product design.
“A lot of developers think that making a pitch deck is the goal, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff that happens before that, namely around the product and product strategy. What game are you building? Is it viable?”
“The whole thing around product design is actually, in many ways, the most important business decision you’ll make,” says Della Rocca. He offers an example through a hypothetical new studio that sets out to make a game in a genre that’s oversaturated like ‘puzzle platformers’.
“There’s one that does well every five years or so, but it’s not a healthy genre. So if I’m saying my definition of success is to pay my team, be profitable, and stay alive as a business, you’ve made the initial wrong business decision. You’ll be playing on super hard mode because your chance of achieving your definition of success with puzzle platformers is almost nil.”
Four tips for a successful pitch
Do Your Homework
Analysis and research are some of the most important things you can do to set yourself up for a successful pitch. Knowing what project to pitch relies on market analysis and competitive analysis, which helps to identify what types of games are viable and which aren’t. Della Rocca stresses that this research is critical to the entire pitching process: “Why am I going to give you money to make something everyone knows is not going to sell?”
“If you’re going to turn to people and say ‘give me money’, they’re expecting to make money in return. So if you chose a genre and didn’t do the market research, it’s a [non-starter]. No matter how slick your slides in your pitch deck are, the answer will always be no.”
Once you’re starting to book meetings, doing your homework becomes making sure that you have everything you need on hand and ready for that pitch. Have you cleaned up the social media pages for you, your game, and your studio? Do you have a second person coming to the meeting with you as a dedicated note taker? If you’re meeting in-person, do you have the files for your build, trailer, and pitch saved on a local device?
Nurture & show evidence of player interest
“More and more, the people with money want two things: They want to be able to play something and they want to see some evidence of player interest,” stresses Della Rocca. “Your build could be a proof of concept, a prototype, a vertical slice, a demo, or anything. The important part is that investors are able to play it and see [what makes your game stand out].”
“You have to ask yourself ‘is my build playable?’ Enough where I can hand it over to someone and they understand what the gameplay loop is, what the hook is, and that kind of stuff? Do I have a solid build and do I have some signal from the marketplace saying that players want it?’”
That second bit of information more and more investors are requesting, player interest, is your way of proving there’s an audience for your game that’s already somewhat engaged. That proof could come in the form of trailer views, Discord members, newsletter subscriptions, wishlists, viral tiktok posts, likes, comments, shares, and so on.
“If you walk in and you’re like ‘here’s the build, we’re already at 50,000 wishlists, and we’re running a playtest’, then all of a sudden the people with money perk up and the opportunity is much more real,” says Della Rocca. If you’re a developer and it’s time to pitch, you have to ask yourself if your build is playable and cool enough to be played.
Don’t just present your game
Della Rocca stresses that pitching your game is more than just ‘pitching your game’. You can land the pitch meeting of your dreams and spend the entire time talking about the game—its gameplay, the systems, the mechanics, its art, the pipeline, the characters—but when all is said and done, the publishers thank you and run to their next meeting.
This approach makes two key mistakes: it focuses on the game content over the game’s business case, and it uses the entire meeting time to present the game materials.
“You want to include some of the business and production elements,” says Della Rocca. “So here’s the game, this is the timeline, this is the budget. Here’s the team that’s making it, here’s the market analysis and sales projections.”
“The other mistake is taking up the whole time. Let’s say you have a 30 minute pitch meeting. The actual pitch itself should be like five or six minutes. The rest of the time is small talk; you’re getting to know each other, you’re asking them questions.”
He says that it’s critical to not leave that 30 minute appointment without deciding on the next step and action items from your pitch meeting. Those can range from sending a build after the meeting to setting up a follow-up call, but regardless “you should not leave that pitch meeting without having a clear sense of what happens next.
Participate in GDC Pitch!
Find and take advantage of the resources out in the wild that can help you sharpen your pitching skills. For those headed to the GDC Festival of Gaming, participating in programs like GDC Pitch can provide an invaluable opportunity to get feedback on your project and entire pitching approach without the added stress of your studio’s financial future hanging in the balance.
GDC Pitch is a pitching competition held live at GDC that gives developers a chance to pitch to a panel of judges from the investing and publishing world and get pre-pitch coaching as well as immediate feedback on how they can sharpen their presentation and materials. This year’s panel includes judges from Innersloth, Raw Fury, Kowloon Nights, Hooded Horse, Finji, MIX, and Humble.
Della Rocca, himself the longtime host of GDC Pitch, says that the coaching participants receive plus the added practice go a long way to make developers feel more confident and prepared for the real deal. He goes on to say that, even beyond the coaching and judging process, just getting your game pitch in front of a panel of investors—plus the 300-odd developers, publishers, and investors watching from the audience—can prove a worthwhile experience within itself. Della Rocca goes as far as to say that it’s not entirely unheard of for conversations to start right after leaving the GDC Pitch stage.
GDC Pitch is held on March 19 and March 20 at the GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco, CA. Those interested in participating in the 2026 edition of the competition can sign up right here. Submissions close February 6.
This article was written in partnership with GDC Festival of Gaming. Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa.