How to GDC as a new indie studio

I was sent to GDC 2018 to look for publishers and investors for my company. First time going to America, San Francisco, and of course GDC. I thought I would share some of the things I learned from a new indie studio perspective. These are only my opinions and my thoughts, so like everything else on gamasutra, take it with a grain of salt and only pick up on the things you think makes sense. First of, let me give a quick intro to my studio Loophole Interactive.

TL;DR Know why you’re going, know the limitations of the meeting apps you use, book early (parties, hotels and meetings), have a pitch ready.

Introducing Loophole Interactive

Loophole Interactive is a Swedish company that was started in june 2017. Yeah, I meant it when I said new. We have released one game on Steam called King of the Couch: Zoovival which was released in November 2017. After that we started working on a bigger project called Project Druids (working name). Project Druids was the main reason we went to GDC. We wanted to find publishers and/or investors. The game is a multiplayer boss fighter where you enter a 3D arena with up to 5 friends and try to kill a boss. The unique thing though is that the bosses are created by the community, making Project Druids a community driven boss fighter. During GDC we had been working on the project for 3 months and the only thing we brought to GDC was a trailer, showing the theme and art style we were going for.

Enough about Loophole Interactive, let’s start with what I learned and what I will do different if I ever go to GDC again. I won’t point out the obvious things like good hygiene or good manners, you’re an adult, you should know this. We used Game Connection and Meet to Match to book all of our meetings, look them up, they are good.

Have a clear goal with going

Before even considering going to GDC and before even reading this article you should have a good reason behind going to GDC. For us it was looking for a publisher/investor. It costs too much with living, travels, entry, food etc. to go if you have no reason behind going. Having a clear goal also helps with booking meetings and knowing which people to talk to. 

Have a pitch ready

This includes a pitch deck and of course someone, or hopefully multiple ones, on your team that can hold the pitch. When pitching you will hopefully never be able to do the complete pitch without interruptions and questions, but it is still important to know it by heart so you can answer said questions and skip the slides that have already been answered. Be flexible but have a pitch ready. If you need help with writing a pitch and don’t really know what to put in there you could take a look at my slimmed pitch deck to see the headings I put in. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ru-fQVGP3SYKoXw_mcvb3WmDREhqTFcOXhAtneJWwHE/edit?usp=sharing

You can probably find a bunch of other good examples of pitch decks as well.

Book meetings on few days

Here comes our first mistake, we spread out our meetings so we had some everyday, even though we easily could have fit them on 2-3 days. I know, sometimes it’s not up to you but the person you’re meeting but if you’re the one booking the meeting, try to put it in a spot that fits you and the few days “rule”. The reason behind doing this is mainly parties. If you have a meeting every morning at 10 you won’t be able to stay late at parties or go to after parties where the real networking happens. Even though it might seem tight to have meetings back to back it’s the common way. Most people you meet will understand if you say that you need to wrap up the meeting before the 30 minutes are done because you have another meeting, it will probably be the same for them. We managed to go between meetings in 5 minutes. As long as you know where your next meeting is there won’t be a problem. That is of course if the meeting is in the same venue.

Book meetings with companies that might bring you to your goal

When using Game Connection and Meet to Match there will be a lot of people sending you meeting requests. Look through them and decide if it is clear that they can bring you towards your goal. We were looking for publishers/investors and quickly declined marketing, localisation and developers that tried to book meetings with us. Sure, it might be interesting to listen to them but I promise you, you will be tired of meetings by the end of GDC. 

Book meetings early

We started booking meetings a week or so after the apps went live. If you don’t do this, alot of companies might be booked up. There is no reason to postpone booking meetings. When booking through Game Connection, be aware of the limitations. We messed up a bit and sent out meeting requests to a bunch of attendees and visitors. When two of them had accepted we could no longer decide which attendee we rather would meet with, meaning that some high value “targets” was swapped for some low value “targets”. If you run out of bookable meetings don’t hesitate to write to the attendee you wanted to meet and ask if you could both lock a spot and meet at one of the meeting spots. The worst thing that might happen is that they don’t respond.

One thing that we also did when booking through Game Connection was to send our short pitch to their mail if we could find it and otherwise to a contact mail of their company. The short pitch was just a sales pitch of our game to get them excited about meeting us. Click through this link to see the shell of it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14gGOghJbZiznujHrZVlkvB4Tarc-Oa9tj0O2QvTjDaA/edit?usp=sharing

The reason behind doing this was that Game Connection removed all formatting when sending a meeting request, making our fairly long pitch impossible to read. When sending the meeting request we simple said that we would like to meet and that we sent a more detailed mail to *whatever mail we sent to*. 

I’m going to write a quick comparison on the two different meeting apps we used for GDC, something I wish someone would have done before we went in the direction we did.

Comparing Game Connection with Meet to Match

Starting with Game Connection which is a fairly expensive meeting system that has its own dedicated venue, you can say that we did a bit of a mistake. We ordered two different attendee passes which lets you book two meetings with other attendees and an infinite amount with premium pass holders. It’s worth going to Game Connection as it’s close to GDC and if you’re going to GDC you might as well go to Game Connection. You don’t need to have more than one pass though. If you fill your quota of booked meetings you can write to the persons you want to meet and hopefully they’ll respond and you can lock a slot and say a spot to meet up at. If you want to send two people to Game Connection, which I recommend, the other person can go as a visitor which I think is free. Since we didn’t sign up for a premium pass with booth I can’t really tell you if that would be worth it. If you have a demo that requires a booth then sure, go for that, but if you can manage without a booth I would recommend going without one as they are quite expensive. Game Connection also uses an automatic system that books the time slot of your meeting for both you and the one you’re meeting. If you want to change a set time you can do it but the one you’re meeting has to agree to the new time slot. This makes it harder to follow the rule of booking meetings on few days.

Meet to Match on the other hand is very different from Game Connection. Meet to Match is a lot cheaper and they don’t have dedicated venues. Instead they let you decide where to meet up. Most of our booked meetings were inside GDC but a few were in hotel lobbies and 1 were at a street corner. With this app you also lock your own time slots and can manage your schedule on you own. This app felt more professionally handled than Game Connection and was a lot easier to use.

My recommendation would be to get both apps. Remember to look up the rules for Game Connection before purchasing to many accounts. Don’t count on every publisher and investor to have a premium pass. With Meet to Match you only really need one account.

Double book parties and go to parties

Everyone does this, and none of the parties you sign up to expect you to come. It’s better to have loads of options if a party suck. You should also book parties early and as soon as the events go live, otherwise you risk a chance of tickets running out. Think long and hard before paying to go to a party. The parties I paid for was not worth the money according to me and I could have gone to free parties for the same networking value instead. This is up to you though, if you find a party that costs that you really want to go to, don’t hesitate to pay for it, the amount will be nothing compared to going to GDC. If you’re not in the facebook group already, join “the Fellowship of GDC parties”, most of the information I got about parties came from that group.

Book hotel/living early!!!

We booked the hotel in November 2017, a good 4 months before the event. This meant that we got a cheap hotel near the center of SF. We lived at “SF Plaza Hotel”, which is located right next to Dragons Gate and chinatown. A good thing about that hotel was that they had a free cancellation policy, so we booked it before even deciding to go to GDC.

Don’t walk, Uber

If you’re going somewhere far away (20 minute walk) take a Uber or Lyft. Your feet will be dead by the end of GDC anyway, don’t kill them more than you need to. We did the mistake of walking between Fisherman's Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge the first day we were in San Francisco, a good hour walk. Although we saw a lot of the city our feet were aching for the rest of the event. Uber/Lyft works great in SF and is cheap.

That’s all I can think of for now, probably learned a bunch of other things as well but since I don’t recall them, they can’t be that important. Hope this helped in some way!