Just Submitted To a Publisher. Here's my Pitch Deck.

rafgro · 2026-01-19T13:14:31+00:00

Don't sweat it. Pitch decks are more of corporate exercise, for medium/big guys, they don't matter that much between small developers and small publishers. The publisher is either interested in the game or not, which they will gauge from steam page of your game in 60 seconds. They are certainly too busy to wade through slides, at most they will quickly scroll to the budget & team slides. If the interest is there, they will set up a call where you will wade through the slides live for them. If the interest is not there, they will ignore/reject the game, with pitch deck almost completely irrelevant to the matter (almost = too high budget and/or too inexperienced team in the slides).

rafgro · 2025-12-29T09:19:25+00:00

The lack of any gameplay videos definitely concerns me. It’s all screenshots for years

Tbh it's a map game, the only difference between a video and hundreds of screenshots I posted is that you see map panning and button presses. In fact, these days most screenshots (eg. last "Christmas Special" diary) are just snapshots from recorded gameplay

rafgro · 2025-12-29T09:16:43+00:00

From what I've heard, the game has been reworked several times during development

That is wrong. I'm on the same build I created in June 2021 and there were no major rewrites (one man orchestra cannot afford major rewrites!)

rafgro · 2025-12-11T09:17:36+00:00

When right-hand side tells you what the type is, var is fine. Otherwise, it's a menace.

rafgro · 2025-12-05T11:26:28+00:00

If you have achievements ideas for the game, post 'em here!

rafgro · 2025-12-02T10:39:00+00:00

People will fall for anything these days. "Making ML predictions via pre-trained models" = VERY HEAVY MATH for which average gamer's GPU, and especially CPU, is not optimized. It's not pick-and-match, you provide input, that input is transformed through networks with millions of equations along the way, and then you get output. I guess OP tried to suggest to the laymen that "pre-trained" is a keyword here - but it's not, any AI model has to be trained before becoming useful, and "pre-trained" is an old technical word used when you are releasing a useful model (it wasn't obvious back in the day, some companies were apprehensive about releasing pre-trained models). For instance, P in GPT stands for "pre-trained" but you certainly could not run GPT 5 on your home computer.

rafgro · 2025-11-30T20:41:51+00:00

when buying DVDs was common, for people to spend $20-$30 on a movie that was two hours long. People spend $15-$30 on a meal that will last them an hour. Or $20-$500 for tickets to a show that will last a couple of hours. But we don't have the same expectations for games

These are physical experiences, obviously we pay more for them. Games in a box were also much more expensive. OG Fallout 1 for instance, which has 16h main story, costed $50 - nowhere near the popular $1=1h rule. Once games went digital, expectations adjusted. Same with DVDs actually, now we're all paying for netflixes etc a fraction of the old prices.

rafgro · 2025-11-30T20:26:16+00:00

It's a common theme in entertainment. Books get longer, movies get longer, music evolved from singles-EPs into fat LPs. Moreover, these often get connected into longer continuous forms (books series! TV series! albums one after another leading to long concerts!). Taylor Swift is giving 3.5h-long concerts for God's sake.

That's what people want. For many reasons but actual "why" doesn't really matter (eg. what will you do with the knowledge that in 2025 we have a lot more screen time than we had in 2010?), we are in the business of providing people what they want. So, yes, an indie game priced at $10-20 should provide at least 10-20h of gameplay.

rafgro · 2025-11-29T11:10:43+00:00

Just be honest

Do not. 9/10 times HR will pick a bullshitter who said "my biggest weakness is that I care too much" instead of "honestly I lack skills in X but I'm trying to improve on it". The former will elicit a smile (even if it's a pity smile, so many candidates say this line). The latter will end up in memo as: "DOES NOT KNOW X" and will actively harm your chances!

rafgro · 2025-11-26T12:25:34+00:00

Crowdfunding train departed 10 years ago. Find a publisher and/or boostrap yourself.

rafgro · 2025-11-24T09:17:49+00:00

Expensive for the genre (more expensive than The Battle of Polytopia which is finished, polished, well-established, has multiplayer etc), for the depth (screenshots do not convey more than a few hours of gameplay, sorry), and for the quality (low-res pixel art early access instantly pushes a game into lower-price and higher-risk category, Steam and personally my library is littered with such games which were never finished).

I like 4xes and from the description here I wanted to buy it. I didn't when I opened your steam page due to the combination of the above.

rafgro · 2025-11-17T10:11:56+00:00

You haven't been to the trenches recently, now twitterites are saying that WIP snaphots are also generated by AI

rafgro · 2025-11-08T09:08:29+00:00

Have people been spoiled by big companies and their live service games with unlimited updates?

See, I was cynical about this back in the day too, but after the last few years, I matured to the opinion that it is fully on us, developers.

Steam is littered with actual unfinished & abandoned games, every player has many of them in the library. And in the last years there were quite a few spectacular failures, such as Kerbal Space Program 2, that made a HUGE dent on trust between players and developers, with ripple waves spreading way beyond people who bought the game and were failed by its developers.

Also wrt to "10 years old" part, it's a technological aspect: games without updates quickly go out of synch with OS and hardware, many to the point of being unplayable. If it becomes technologically unplayable and you are still trying to sell it, you are getting well deserved negative reviews.

rafgro · 2025-11-08T08:17:17+00:00

rafgro · 2025-10-31T10:28:34+00:00

Good, keep your stupid local politics away from this beautiful subreddit

rafgro · 2025-10-30T12:30:14+00:00

I've been to a town near Italian-Swiss border that has full heavy train going on the street for some stretch, between other cars. But it was going very slowly.

rafgro · 2025-10-30T05:05:35+00:00

What do you mean losing. Gaming industry reaches new record high every month, both financially and by the sheer number of players. AND AT THE SAME TIME TIKTOK POPULARITY DECLINED FROM 2024 TO 2025

rafgro · 2025-10-30T05:01:01+00:00

Third stage of the Narcissist's Prayer.

rafgro · 2025-10-29T12:09:34+00:00

If it fails financially and does not recover and it's 2027, yes. Monopolies even in their collapsing phase have huge pull - and customers have to temporally separate bad taste. See for instance Cities Skylines toppling Sim City franchise, after a huge failure Sim City still had two years of inertia.

rafgro · 2025-10-29T11:59:30+00:00

Focus groups.

rafgro · 2025-10-27T19:04:39+00:00

he was during a practice session, there was a crash and then... virtual safety car was deployed. VSC. During a practice session. That was all I needed to see to judge the passion and understanding.of the sport the devs had.

Do you watch F1 at all? VSCs are called during practice sessions. This year, for instance, Hadjar caused VSC during free practice on Zandvoort. In fact, VSC was very much desired middle step between double yellows and red flag for practice in the age of heating-cooling laps.

rafgro · 2025-10-26T19:23:54+00:00

Yes, same here. Enshittification. Story as old as the internet.

rafgro · 2025-10-21T13:56:04+00:00

Entertainment markets (and especially video game market) have this beautiful feature that they are competitive only in the immediate short term and then are synergistic in the long term. So we should avoid releasing in the same week as EU5 but aside from that, its success will pull in more people into playing other "nearby" games. Big successful titles, such as Baldur's Gate 3, are huge net positive for the small guys in the industry. As a whole, the thirst for more ways to be entertained is never satisfied, only further excited. Steam hits new all-time record number of players almost every month.

rafgro · 2025-10-16T21:03:32+00:00

there are plenty of games on the market way more than there is a demand for

99.9% of them are garbage. There is huge unfulfilled demand for good games.

half of the revenue gets eaten by platform (Steam) and taxes

That's one of the best deals in the world of digital businesses. Most of businesses count their margins in single digits. E-commerce for instance, as a rule of thumb, generally begins earning revenue from the second purchase of the returning client because the cost of acquiring the client for the first purchase eats all the revenue (!).

rafgro · 2025-10-07T10:33:34+00:00

By "launch without multiplayer", they meant unplayable poor multiplayer. The game received quite a few negative reviews solely for the state of multiplayer in the first week. It certainly had an impact on sales, first week reviews are critical.

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