Finding contacts, making plays

Following on from my first two pieces on [1] finding business opportunities amongst the current fracturing of the games industry, and then as those new studios form from the fragmentation of their larger forebears, to remember to [2] focus on a return that's greater than your initial investment; this week I’m going to talk about the sorts of discussions any developer needs to have and how potentially difficult that dialogue might prove to be…?

Firstly, you're going to want to reach out to the format sponsors. There's help there - it can be financial or marketing or technical assistance, but sometimes it's a minefield of trial and error before you find nuggets of information relevant to your plight.

I'd like to say that reaching out to all platform sponsors is simplicity itself, but it isn't. PlayStation were an absolute joy in the 90s and noughties under Chris Deering and David Reeves. They were a fabulous partner but as they've grown to dominate the landscape, being small isn't necessarily agile where Sony are concerned these days.

Speaking to Xbox comparatively, is easy - they're a really positive news story in our industry, you can be a 'one man band'?and still get your share of the Xbox bandwidth with ID@Xbox. You don't need to necessarily know someone before you reach out – although it helps, and they are generally lovely approachable people.

Nintendo are Nintendo - you get out what you put in, [sometimes] - but if you don't put anything in, you definitely won't get anything out. You can usually find someone to talk to, but Switch can be a discoverability nightmare and figuring out how to get your title listed in their eShops is only the beginning of the story...

There is unfortunately an idea that anyone can fulfil the bus dev role with a little application. An owner of a former employer of mine described a huge commercial success in business development as a 'lucky accident'... I can assure you that there's no such thing - if you're doing your job right as Seneca once said, 'luck is simply the juncture of opportunity and preparation.'?As business development we work extraordinarily hard to get ourselves in a position where luck plays no part whatsoever…

Therefore, no matter how good you are at your dev specialism, that alone won't make your business a success! There must be a focus on how your IP can be exploited; whether it's an existing internal resource or using a 3rd party consulting contractor whose sole objective is to exploit your IP and the deals open to it...

After approaching the platform holders, there's portals and stores and funds and projects and co-dev and Work for Hire and prototypes and all manner and plethora of opportunity that someone with a commercial bent must seek out, analyse, bond with & make sure you're on the horizon of before any deal can be eeked out or prized free. Sometimes, and sadly those deals are often completed because of the strength of a relationship rather than the strength of an IP...?Because as famed sports management consultant Mark McCormack once said 'all things being equal, you'll buy off your friend, and all things being unequal, you'll still buy off your friend' - relationships take time to forge and then longer to grow, and that has never been more true than in the games industry today.

I started in freelance business development manager in 2004. Oddly enough, they say the best free climbers are all dead and you could argue the same for business development in the games industry - the endless travelling, unsociable hours, terrible diet, lack of regular exercise is fine in your 30’s but incompatible with middle age. There is a better way of doing it, and that's planning which events make commercial sense to attend, and which you might get someone else to attend on your behalf.

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If it’s not an external bus dev you look to work with, then look for a solicitor or a management consultant - I sat with such a person at Pocket Gamer - and if one of put out a plea for a solicitor recommendation in this industry, I reckon 75% of us would recommend the same person, me included. You can't get his experience without being at all these events, without being in the bar with a lemonade, without talking to people, building and managing your contacts, maintaining and exchanging information, finding opportunities and using those relationships to put your company in a position to at least pitch your resource.?

I've been lucky enough in the last 5 months to start work on a new project with Rudolf Kremers and the small but brilliant team at Omni Systems Publishing. There's Rudolf, there's Jack on community & juice, Chiara on marketing and me talking to people. We've a couple of titles slated for 2024 in BioFrame and Eufloria RPG, plus several others that we'll be looking for additional funding or commercial opportunities in Q3 and beyond into 2025.

So what does a new project involve, how does that bus dev or other consultant find opportunities and revenues and partnerships?

In essence we talk, we ask advice, we travel, we introduce, we talk, we sell, we build relationships, we ask advice, we ask for introductions - these days we trawl LinkedIn, we find the person we want, we find someone who knows them that we know quite well, and we ask them to make the introduction.?

That's the same if it's Namco Bandai, Devolver, Netflix or Xbox. You find a common contact and hopefully because you've worked really hard on that contact for several years, and he or she is your friend you can bask in the reflected glow of some quality by association.?

The studio still has to deliver though - that brilliant bus dev person puts their reputation on the line each and every time our company doesn't deliver. It's quite easy to find yourself in the position where you don't want to put your company forward because you know you'll let down this friend you've worked with for decades - I know, it's bad that isn't it! You try to find a way around it, but ultimately we all survive on our reputations, so doing what you said you were going to do is vital if you plan to go back to the same source again in the future.

Another advantage of having an experienced industry 'veteran' on board in a commercial role or possibly as a non-exec - is that sometimes they've seen these things happen before, and they can help, offering a steadying hand or a wise word about a pot hole in the path around the next corner because experience tells them it might've happened before and they're still here to tell the tale...

I'll leave it here for now but next week plan to look at the sorts of strategies bus dev might adopt when preparing the groundwork for selling what might or might not be the next big thing - because not everything is great, but it still needs to recover its investment and this is where your bus dev person often comes into their own...