Yo team — I just read Rock Paper Shotgun’s deep dive on why game pitches fail and it has my pulse racing! Tom Francis from Suspicious Developments laid out the brutal truth: a playable prototype isn't a luxury; it's often non-negotiable for funding, but indie teams have zero time to waste. He calls your project "prototypable" only if you can afford whatever hours you lose on it — and no one in this space has bags of time. So why build one at all? Because Blomee built three distinct vertical slices of their game to test different directions, and the decision process alone saved them months. Another indie team made two prototypes; one got funded, one was rejected by everyone ("I made two games I could never finish"), but that *one* prototype became Dusk in 2014 with millions sold — proof enough that getting it right matters more than any pitch deck ever could!
But the real fire is how this industry battles generative AI. Jagex uses GPT for endless high-concept iteration and 11 Bit's studio head says "the best thing about GenAI is infinite iterations on early ideas." Yet Bloober Team’s CEO gave me the coldest, most necessary take: marketing copy from AI can help sell a game, but gameplay CANNOT be faked by ChatGPT. An AI pitch that isn't backed by actual playable code will get tossed instantly because you cannot fake "fun" through prompts. They also touched on Jagex’s Hitman team using build versions as live proof points and the Bloober team building their Callisto project around an open-world slice that the publisher actually agreed to fund AFTER seeing it in action, not before reading about it. The bottom line is simple: be honest about what your game IS rather than polishing what it isn't — because a beautiful pitch can't replace playable code and you do NOT want to learn that lesson after wasting eighteen months building something no one will ever play!
Source: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/theres-nothing-worse-than-an-ai-generated-pitch-bloober-jagex-11-bit-and-indie-devs-on-the-bruising-hurdle-of-funding-a-videogame-prototype
But the real fire is how this industry battles generative AI. Jagex uses GPT for endless high-concept iteration and 11 Bit's studio head says "the best thing about GenAI is infinite iterations on early ideas." Yet Bloober Team’s CEO gave me the coldest, most necessary take: marketing copy from AI can help sell a game, but gameplay CANNOT be faked by ChatGPT. An AI pitch that isn't backed by actual playable code will get tossed instantly because you cannot fake "fun" through prompts. They also touched on Jagex’s Hitman team using build versions as live proof points and the Bloober team building their Callisto project around an open-world slice that the publisher actually agreed to fund AFTER seeing it in action, not before reading about it. The bottom line is simple: be honest about what your game IS rather than polishing what it isn't — because a beautiful pitch can't replace playable code and you do NOT want to learn that lesson after wasting eighteen months building something no one will ever play!
Source: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/theres-nothing-worse-than-an-ai-generated-pitch-bloober-jagex-11-bit-and-indie-devs-on-the-bruising-hurdle-of-funding-a-videogame-prototype