Report from Games Finance Market London

Report from Games Finance Market London

From Wednesday to Friday, a Croatian delegation of representatives from the video game sector attended the Games Finance Market in London, consisting of Benjamin Noah Maričak from HAVC, Aleksandar Gavrilović from CGDA and HAVC’s artistic advisor Hrvoj Mitić.

The first meeting was with Olsberg related to the creation of a study to assess the effect of the cash rebate scheme in Croatia, based on a similar scheme in the United Kingdom, which we have already written about. Meeting in person was useful as a first step, but starting Wednesday at 11 a.m., all future meetings will be online in the form of a group of four domain experts from Olsberg and a representative of CGDA.

In addition, meetings were held with CNC (French HAVC) and BFI (British Film Institute) who also have a similar scheme, and with representatives of IIDEA (Italian CGDA) and SNJV (French CGDA) with whom we also discussed the advantages and disadvantages of their cash rebate schemes from the perspective of development studies.

In addition, we also spoke with Xbox who now (finally) have a dedicated person in charge of our region that started at the beginning of the month, and they asked us that any studios that have not yet received a response to their pitches from ID@Xbox to us send the names of the games because now we can speed up that process considerably. We wrote about submitting future and existing games to ID@Xbox programs previously.

The main part of the Games Finance Market, however, focused on trying to present domestic video games to foreign publishers and investors, about 15 of them who sent pitches.

We talked to the following publishers: Playstack, Paradox Interactive, PQube, Astra Logical, Reforged Studios, Kando Factory, NetEase, Alibi Games, Fireshine Games, Miniclip, Cult Games, Humble Games, Wired Productions, Super Rare Games.

It is important to note that many of them have started to re-sign video game publishing deals with studios. On the one hand, publishers like Miniclip are looking for casual and mid-core titles for mobile phones with existing monetization indicators, which is not something that our studios produce, but on the other hand, almost all publishers are now looking for system games (strategies, roguelikes and the like), and Astra Fund specifically looking for puzzle games, which are genres where we had a lot of titles to show. Publishers have mostly said that there is very little chance that they will sign titles without a playable demo (although we have specifically heard of three such signed contracts in the last year, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule), and we have agreed with most that we will continue the conversation on Reboot live and/or at a specially organized “pitching session” where each studio will be able to present their games to publishers over a longer period. We will organize these “pitching” sessions after the Reboot.

Almost all publishers are looking for titles that cost less than €1,000,000, or less than €500,000, which are amounts they can quickly secure at the moment. Many publishers are looking for games from 2025 onwards, but some publishers, due to the lack of investment in the past year, have a need for one title that could come out in 2024. No publishers were openly interested in blockchain-based games or games focused on children, but it is possible to submit those projects if they are refocused.

Also, studios like NetEase and Reforged are very interested in buying entire studios, and they are interested in buying entire studios (either in part or 100%) for figures at the level of approximately one million euros. If you’re interested, we’ll put you in touch with them directly, and we’ll send the publishers all the pitch decks of the games they’ve said they’re interested in, and we’ll wait for them to get back to us when a pitching session is convenient for them. That’s why it’s important that everyone sends us their pitch decks before the Reboot (we’ll get back to everyone if we need a pitch deck overhaul, but we’ll definitely need some kind of playable build as well).

Important things to learn for next time:

Only a few studios sent their pitch decks (presentations) on time, which makes it impossible for the delegation to prepare well for certain games, and many presentations were not at the level of quality that could be shown to publishers. Also, the time frames of such pitching events where you talk to one publisher for about 10 minutes are not receptive to much more than the first meeting, and it is not possible to go through a lot of details about a lot of games. Also, many pitch decks lacked the most important information of interest to publishers. In the future, the proposal is to make a template, according to which the studio will be able to make a pitch deck that will contain all relevant information such as the approximate release date of the game, the current stage of development (concept, demo, alpha, beta), the requested financial amount and the approximate genre.