So far this series has mostly talked about different aspects of applying to the CMF for project funding. Today I want to talk about what happens after you’ve gotten a project accepted.
The (Not So Secret) Agent
When you submit an application to CMF, you are assigned an agent. That person is your go-between for the application, and my experience has been that they’re delightfully helpful. Every time I wasn’t sure about something, I could send a question to the CMF agent and they’d get back to me in a couple of days with helpful information.
Here’s an example: I didn’t have payroll set up for Perfect Minute when I was getting ready to start work for Conceptualization. Getting an employee agreement was going to cost me several hundred dollars and possibly a couple of weeks waiting on my lawyer for the agreement. I’d committed to a start date that came earlier than I could possibly get those details sorted out, and so I asked the agent if I could act as a contractor until I had my employment agreement figured out. They indicated that this was highly irregular and not recommended, but in the end they helped me figure out how to bridge that gap.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like much from the outside. But the contract you sign with CMF has a bunch of clauses that basically say if you do anything shady they’re going to pull your funding. That’s not unusual on its own – any business contract is likely to include language that allows either party to exit in certain circumstances – but if you’re not familiar with the other party, or if you’re relatively new to contracts at this level, it can add a lot of stress. Having someone to help you navigate is a big deal.
Program Phases
It’s also important to note that each CMF program is divided into two or more phases. For Conceptualization, the program has just the two phases – Phase I covers your initial estimated costs and plan, and Phase II is your final, actual costs and plan. There’s money riding on getting the documentation for each phase correct.
This gets more complicated when you’re doing one of the production programs; those use three or more phases, with a “beta” delivery in the late-middle part of the development schedule. It’s not so different from how publishers use milestones, but having dealt with a few milestones from both the dev trenches and the managerial towers, they’re tricky.
Things can change really fast in game development, and if what you deliver to someone for a milestone is not what they expected, you might forfeit an expected milestone payment. I haven’t had that experience with CMF, but I’ve had it in other circumstances, and it can be absolutely crushing. Project-killing, even.
It’s important, then, to communicate when changes happen. I asked for several schedule extensions during the course of our Conceptualization work, as it became obvious that certain assets just wouldn’t be ready, and as we realized that some of the early decisions we’d made weren’t working as well as we’d hoped, requiring significant rework and direction shifts. And to their credit, CMF accommodated. The agent eventually came back and said listen, you’ve committed to all documentation by July, so just make sure you’ve got it all in by then.
For me, July wasn’t really an option – I have a day job, after all, and I can’t indefinitely dedicate the 20+ hours a week I was spending over the last four months to a second job – but that took some pressure off all the same. We delivered our final docs a couple of weeks ago, and there’s been a little back and forth since then, but ultimately we were approved on Phase II.
About That Back and Forth
One of the things I personally was paranoid about when I was getting into the CMF’s orbit was my own lack of expertise in business. I was convinced that messing up documents and information would turn into an endless problem full of legal nightmares.
Nothing could have been further from the truth, however. Both during my applications and afterwards, I’ve been able to get detailed feedback on problems with my documents and information, submit amended versions, and see positive results.
I’m sure there’s a threshold below which the agent just can’t help, but thankfully ours was very ready to assist, and our documentation only needed a few changes to meet the requirements. It was encouraging to realize that this was how they do things.
Graduation
The other thing that I appreciated during all of this was that the CMF’s Experimental program portfolio is designed to feed forward. When you submit your final documentation for Conceptualization, for example, they ask if you’re applying for any other programs.
We are, of course. I’ve already talked about the application we submitted to the Innovation & Experimentation program, but it was nice to know that there’s a built-in way to tie the two together. I feel confident that what we submitted shows us in a good light. If we can put together what we did with $20,000, it’s natural to believe we could do a lot more with a larger investment.
I’m excited at the idea, though truth be told I have no idea where I’d come up with our 25% right now. I’d hoped to avail of traditional (debt) financing, but so far that’s coming up empty. There’s the possibility of a Kickstarter, but these days those require a level of readiness and polish that exceeds the grasp of the average unfunded developer who nonetheless has to pay mortgages and keep life and limb together.
Maybe we’ll figure it out. Given we don’t yet have a demo or an approved application, it’s somewhat moot at the moment. But it’s important to be prepared.
On that note…watch this space for news in the days and weeks to come. Our little Action-Painting-Strategy RPG still has some legs yet.
To date, I’ve talked mostly about the process involved with the CMF’s Conceptualization program. Conceptualization is the definition of seed money – low barrier to entry (though 2023-24’s changes make it a bit higher for us old white dudes, but I’m ok with that), low dollar value available, highly contingent on being the right person in the right place at the right time.
Prototyping I’ll leave for today; I haven’t actually gone through the application process for it, and so I can’t speak directly to either the work or the experience.
Instead, let’s at the other two, which I’ll collectively refer to as the “production” programs. First, let’s compare and contrast:
CPP
Caps out at $1.5M
Provides 75% of funding
Includes production, marketing, and promotion
Requires completed concept and prototype stages
Newly in 2023-24, requires a Narrative Positioning Statement
Uses a selective evaluation matrix
Funds projects with “a greater probability of commercial success”
I&E
Caps out at $1.5M
Provides 75% of funding
Includes production, marketing, and promotion
Requires completed concept and prototype stages
Newly in 2023-24, requires a Narrative Positioning Statement
Uses a selective evaluation matrix
Funds projects that are “innovative and leading-edge”
Not a lot of daylight between these two, huh? Point #7 differentiates between the two programs, and even there, at first glance, it feels like a distinction without a difference. But it becomes clearer once we consider the evaluation criteria from #6’s matrix:
CPP
Team (15%)
Experience individually & together (11%)
Diversity (2%)
Parity (2%)
Narrative Positioning Statement (5%)
Potential for Commercial Success (45%)
Content and Form (20%)
Financial Viability (25%)
Strategic Positioning & Marketing (35%)
I&E
Team (15%)
Experience individually & together (11%)
Diversity (2%)
Parity (2%)
Narrative Positioning Statement (5%)
Innovation, Creativity, and Advancement (60%)
Financial Viability (15%)
Strategic Positioning & Marketing (10%)
I actually find this to be a great breakdown, and I wish I’d realized much earlier just how different the percentages are between the two. I might have focused even more energy on which program to apply to and why.
So Which One Should I Apply To?
It depends on your project, obviously. For Paint By Monsters, despite channelling elements of half a dozen all-time banger hits, we’re taking a LOT of creative and commercial risks all at once, so we went for the Innovation & Experimentation program. If you’re doing something a bit safer but you have all your ducks in a row as to how you’re going to make money with it, Commercial Projects is likely your better bet.
The Paperwork, Dear God the Bloody Paperwork
The thing that I found most intimidating about CMF programs before I applied the first time was just how heavy the documentation requirements were. Even Conceptualization’s lightweight bucket of text felt like an overwhelming commitment.
But as it turns out, it’s just paperwork, and you’re going to have to do it at some point, so you may as well take a CMF application as a chance to practice.
Different folks will no doubt find different parts of the application difficult, but for me the most intimidating part was the budget. The CMF kindly provides template spreadsheets that guide you through filling out a complete program budget – and, in the case of CPP and I&E, a monthly cashflow statement – but it’s still a lot to behold.
In point of fact, I didn’t start with the CMF budget. I was in the first half of the Evolution program at Genesis here in St. John’s earlier this year, and they pointed me at the Futurpreneur Business Planner. The idea of writing a budget for a couple of hundred thousand dollars got very real, very quick at that point – I have to make a living, plus pay the Stellar Boar folks and our incredible sound artists, and I’d love to hire a few other folks along the way. Doing all that takes a whole lot of money.
Using the planner’s financials tool, I came up with a first cut at a 3-year financial plan. Some key things I’d like to highlight here:
I’d already decided that part of the plan was to give myself more than one kick at the can, so I have 3 different sources of revenue (Paint By Monsters, Business to Business services aka B2B, and Other Games)
I’ve listed $20,000 a month in wages. That sounds like a lot, maybe, but it’s really not. One senior programmer is half that, and if you want a senior artist to pair with them you could easily spend it all on 2 people. In my case it’s more like 3-5 total positions, but saying that just makes me aware that my budget is Really Tight.
There are a LOT of other fees to consider. Insurance, legal, accounting, of course, but for games you also have market fees and Unity’s cut and royalties and on and on it goes.
I’m cash-negative in year 3. That’s a huge red flag, and suggests that I should have built in a lot more work on games beyond Paint By Monsters.
I’m putting in my own cash. It’s not a lot of money – $5,000 against $345,000 in start-up costs – but it’s not zero. There are lots of games you can play to increase that number – computer equipment donated to the company, service-in-kind, etc – but there’s nothing quite like putting cash on the barrelhead to say “I think this has a good chance of success”.
The plan includes debt-funding a significant percentage of activities. This is dicey, and can easily backfire, particularly now that interest rates are back to something like normal. But in a pinch, it’s better to have 25% of your capital at a high interest rate and 75% at a low one than have 100% at a high interest rate. And frankly, it’s still better than most equity deals, at least as far as the long-term costs go.
In the worst case, all of the above sounds like every CFO you ever tuned out halfway through, but this is the exercise, folks. We have to be serious about the money, because the main thing we’re asking for is money.
The full list of paperwork that you need for the programs can be found in the relevant document package, but they all go roughly as follows:
Application In Dialogue
Brief description of the project
List of key people involved and their PERSONA-ID account numbers
Signed and Dated Budget and Cashflow
Financing Commitment Letters
Declaration of the Corporations Canadian Status and its Shareholders and Directors
Other corporate documents
Narrative Positioning statement & attestations
Team Description
CVs for all team members
IP history and ownership for the project
Market research and marketing plan
Project summary (short) and description (long). The short one is almost as hard to create as the long one.
A demo
Technically, video of your demo, but just as a professional courtesy: don’t fake it. If you don’t have a demo, apply for Conceptualization or Prototyping. It’ll have a lower barrier of entry, and will probably help you when the time comes to try for a production program
NB: Do NOT show a demo for conceptualization or prototyping. They won’t even accept you if you have something you’re calling a demo. Paint By Monsters had “Feature Demos”, which is luckily just far enough outside of that to qualify, but I feel like it was a near thing.
Partnering Up
As mentioned, I’m working with Stellar Boar Productions, and that means I’m lucky enough to have a mature, financially stable company alongside my fledgeling studio as well as a very involved and invested partner in this project, Curtis Rioux.
Curtis took on a bunch of the work for this application, and he’s my hero forever because of it. He’s the artist of the partnership, and he made the whole package look 10,000% better, plus he wrote essentially the entire marketing end of it. Highly recommend finding yourself a Curtis. Not my Curtis, obviously. He’s mine. But A Curtis.
All of this was complicated by the fact that over the course of the project our little team of two has expanded. At first it was just me, and then Curtis came onboard, and then his in-house artists. Midway through Conceptualization, we added our sound guys Chris and Adam. And as we head towards full production, we’ve realized we should commit to a few others – a couple of art specialists, a marketing & community resource, a junior programmer, maybe a couple of interns.
This means we have to employ or at least compensate a total of 11 or more people over the course of the project. Our individual studios are still quite small – I’m still one person, looking to add two more, and Curtis only has three plus an intern – but it’s obvious that we can move a lot faster by spreading work out more, and that feels like the right move.
It’s So Much Money
Yeah, it is. And then again, it’s really not.
When I rebooted Perfect Minute Games to focus on original projects, I had Megan Fox‘s words from while back on my mind – you should spend less than $50,000 making your game, because there’s a very high probability you’ll never make back more than that.
That vision is still appealing to me, but I have to recognize that it only goes so far. At some point, you decide whether to work fast or to work cheap, and if you believe – as I have come to believe – that the key to success is largely repeated execution of a good core concept, then you shouldn’t squeeze too hard.
The thing that keeps coming back to me about all that, though, is we really do need IDM funding that fits into the sub-$100k bucket. Teams should be able to build a demo of a good idea with support. Maybe not every team can have that, but it should at least exist.
Go Forth and Gamify
So. What else can I tell you? The paperwork is a stack, but you can do the easy version first. The scope is intimidating, but if you look around, it’s not far from what you’ll have to do for a publisher. None of it is game development, and that’s probably the really hard part – most of us just want to add features and do cool stuff and work with good teams.
That should be enough. It should. But it’s not, and I hope sharing my experiences with the process at least helps you get through the vegetables part of the business a bit quicker.
More business development, for those following the studio, but this time focused on Paint By Monsters and various (avoidable!) mistakes I’ve made along the way.
One of the things I took on when I started looking seriously at turning Perfect Minute Games into my full-time gig was an accelerator on-ramp program run by Genesis here in St. John’s.
VCs != Games
The program, which is called Evolution, is not new to me. I completed it a while back, along with another Genesis course, when I was focused on earlier iterations of PMG and some other ideas. Both courses were, at the time, aimed squarely at preparing pitch decks to present to VCs.
I had a problem with this approach in my previous encounters. VCs – particularly those in my neck of the woods – don’t really get into games all that much.
VCs like to bet on companies that will scale massively, for one thing. They make a lot of bets and pray one of them will grow their investment by 10x or better, paying for a whole cohort of failures. Game development doesn’t really scale like that, barring a few mega-dev/publishers (Zynga/Tencent, EA, a few other outliers).
They also like to bet on the company, not the project. Games are usually funded per-project, which is the way most creative work is funded. Ask any experienced grant writer how many times they’ve written a project proposal versus a company proposal, and you’re pretty likely to get a much bigger number for the former than the latter.
VCs also want company equity, and the number of game studios that actually develop a stock that’s worth owning is vanishingly small. Not to mention company equity usually means board seats, and hence some level of executive influence or even outright control. Very few VCs are equipped to exert non-destructive influence over a company making games, and that’s assuming they’re not the type of VC that will strip-mine the company for valuable IP and dump the carcass in an alley.
Now, Jason Della Rocca and Keith Katz did (do?) run a gamedev incubator of sorts , and there are a few other accelerator programs around the world that focus on game developers, but even there, the numbers are small, and the model is murky at best.
Seed Funding and Games
I recently decided to withdraw from the Evolution program. I realized that the problems I’d encountered in my previous run-through were still there, and that I was stressing myself out trying to balance the time demanded by the program – which are MUCH heavier than they were the last time around – against the time required to actually work on things that apply to a game development business.
It doesn’t help, of course, that every investor I’ve ever talked to about games has, to put it politely, laughed me out of their office. There is an overwhelming negative signal from such folks towards game developers trying to establish a studio. One of the problems with the Evolution program is how focused it is on exciting these folks, who are all but openly hostile to the business segment I’m in.
So how do we fund startup studios? There’s certainly lots of advice on the subject.
“Don’t quit your day job” is offered as a very literal prescription from all corners. This is, of course, good advice for individuals, but an astonishingly bad foundation for business development.
The omnipresent “Friends and Family Round” is commonly suggested. I sometimes wonder if this round works if and only if you come from a wealthy social background; certainly I know of very few people with friends or family who would invest more than a pittance into their business.
Folks outside of Canada often look at the CMF with envy, since it provides at least some kind of ab initio on-ramp for the budding developer. But even on a (bargain-basement-priced) $100,000 development budget, CMF still insists you come up with $25,000, and that’s not nothing.
I don’t want to suggest these problems are unique to game developers. But I do think they’re more imposing for us, as a rule. There are far fewer resources suited to the challenges of our business. Even those challenges that are otherwise generic – think building a working business model, analyzing market trends, making revenue predictions, establishing business relationships, and so on – don’t map cleanly to their game development incarnations.
Meanwhile, the dominant “traditional” modes of game funding – publishers and hardware incentive programs – fall outside the expertise of most business development resources. Even those resources focused on the tech sector as a whole don’t know enough about the game business to be helpful. They don’t adjust well to a business that operates, as mentioned previously, much more akin to arts funding.
There are resources that can help, though. The IGDA exists, for one, and there are mentors out there who will, for a reasonable fee, offer their hard-earned insights. There are half a dozen commercial market analytics services that can offer insight into how games make money. Some of them aren’t even crushingly expensive!
But it’s been my experience, thus far, that the average founder in this business is going to need to pick up bizdev in a hurry. So let’s talk about what to look for.
Obviously, if you’re in Canada, look at the CMF programs. There are people who will laugh at this option or tell you this will cripple you, and hey, maybe they’re right. But these programs are incredibly generous when set next to the average investor or publisher contract.
Look at your local business development options, particularly those more suited to brick and mortar. There are things you won’t necessarily know about – cheap accountants and lawyers, subsidized business consultants, business plan writing courses – that will help you develop as a business executive, and saving time, especially in the early stages, is critical, because you need all the time you can harness to develop a product.
If you have access to low-interest credit products, you can self-fund. It’s a bad option, but you’ll get some return on it, maybe, someday. Think about how to bake that investment into your company, though. Get advice on the best approach.
You can also sometimes access business funding programs by backing the debt with a personal guarantee. This is a bad option, too, because even if you incorporate you’re liable for these debts – but the interest rates may be low enough to make it better than other debt-funded options.
Look for programs from large-scale business development agencies. They won’t all directly provide money with which you can pay yourself – the latter, in particular, is a rare beast indeed – but they can often provide other means to that end. Hiring a junior under a recent grad incentive may allow you to take on extra work, or get a product to market faster, or have a resource for a set of tasks you would otherwise need to handle yourself – marketing, hiring, design, the list is endless
Build small games in quick succession, and get them out there. This serves many purposes, but for now let’s focus on two key ones:
It provides some kind of revenue stream that can feed into the general operating coffers
It provides proof of “traction”, which is a term business development folks like to use when they don’t want to say Show Me The Money, Jerry. Traction is essentially how you prove you know what you’re doing. And when it comes to traction, there’s just no substitute for products that are already earning revenue.
Approach publishers early and often. There are a number of resources to help with this, including a big list maintained by the some of the folks behind the Indie Game Business channel, and a much smaller but more curated list from Beamable. There are also specialists out there in the world who offer their expertise in this area as a paid service, and there are lots of networking events that will accelerate the process (again, for. a fee).
Look at companies servicing game developers like Beamable and Xsolla, as well as more general-purpose startup folks like F6S.
Get whatever data you can from market insight services like VGInsights and data.ai. Some market insight services offer a very affordable price to indies, though these tend to also be limited in ways that can be quite inconvenient. Nonetheless, they’re sufficient to get started on building a business plan.
You may be able to avail of specialty funding. Check out the city, state, and federal organizations for arts and technology. Look for project development grants, digital media tax credits, innovation funding, and SRED-like programs, just for a start. These aren’t just for the specialists! Ideally, games are such a tight mix of innovative technology and art that funding opportunities can be found on all sides. Of course, the cold truth is that many programs – foolishly, in my admittedly biased opinion – on both sides exclude games
I’m sure there are many, many other tools out there I’m missing, and I’d love to hear what you’re using. My goal isn’t to provide infallible expertise so much as it is to provide a starting point for someone who might find themself in my shoes. It can be grueling, and if you’re a dev as well as a bizdev, the time and effort required can leave you feeling stretched and exhausted.
But if we’re going to do this for a living, it’s critical work. I wish you luck.
I’m pleased to announce that Paint By Monsters was accepted for the 2022 CMF Conceptualization program, and has now been approved for funding by the CMF.
I’m also pleased to say the fine folks at Stellar Boar have agreed to work with me to lend their amazing artistic talents to the game.
It’s been a long road to get here, and at times I wasn’t certain things would work out. I’ve had to reflect on my goals for Perfect Minute Games itself while trying to work this project out.
The Aforementioned Long Road
In the intervening time I lost my day job, which has been rough in a bunch of different ways. But it also invites the alluring possibility of going full-time with game development.
I haven’t come to any hard decisions there, but I have come up with a kind of vision of what I think that would look like. I also had to incorporate the company, which means I’m the President and sole shareholder of the newly-minted Perfect Minute Games Inc. In other words, meet the new gamedev: same as the old gamedev.
But I’ve also got a diagnosis to think about, and its consequences have implications for me as the President of said company and its hypothetical evolution into a much more ambitious full-time pursuit.
I’m talking to some folks about further possibilities – people I want to work with, projects I want to plan for, funding I might need to execute on such a plan – and while all of that has been interesting, it’s a whole lot of work. Given I haven’t committed to this idea, that means I’m still mostly doing Perfect Minute stuff once I’ve gotten “real stuff” (job searching, grocery-getting, snow shoveling, dog entertaining, etc) accomplished each day. So for now, it’s mostly vision.
Bizzy Devvy
One of the skillsets that actually might help with turning that vision into something more, however, is bizdev. And as it turns out, I’ve actually done enough of that at this point, via various startup projects and events and communities (Oh My!), to feel minimally competent at it. I even made some slides for your entertainment, gentle player.
A pitch deck isn’t the most comfortable exercise to do for this company, not least because company decks tend to be used to attract equity investors – folks who want a piece of not just the project but the entire business. Those folks sometimes insist on conditions that can become onerous or even dangerous to the people in the company.
But the deck was still a useful exercise. It was created primarily as a preface to a conversation with the local tech accelerator, which has incubated at least two or three other studios over the past 20 years. In that context, creating a deck forced me to look at things with fresh eyes. I had to think about where I might be able to do something new-ish, something that would give folks a reason to believe that the company is worth investing in.
All of the “opportunities” I’ve identified in the deck are operational ones, which means they’re both easy to copy and extremely difficult to get right. That’s not what anyone who’s considering investing in a business wants to hear, but then again, every investor in my neck of the woods has already laughed me out of their office as soon as I mentioned game development.
Plus, there are a few companies I would say have already gotten this operational model right – PopCap, back in their early days, but also Brace Yourself and Supergiant. Those are intimidating competitors, but they’re also incredible company. One of the nice things about creative work is that nobody is really your direct competitor.
So sure, BYG are making Phantom Brigade, which is probably the best SF game you haven’t played yet, and sure, Powered A(r)mour is, in part, an appeal to all the mech game lovers out there. But that audience is far from being inundated with more great mech games than they could ever wish for. There’s even a case to be made that these two games, were they to coexist (and I hope they do someday!) would be seen as part of a larger revival of mechs in games. That’s a dream I could hang onto.
Moreover, while the examples I’ve listed are certainly worth some attention, they’re kind of exceptional. A lot of studios – especially indies – aren’t formed with a vision of company-building. They’re built around a single project, or maybe even just a group of folks making games together.
Don’t get me wrong, those are absolutely fine ways to approach things. But if you’re in my position and you suddenly need to think about what’s required to create a sustainable business, you need to think bigger.
Building For Years, Not Games
When I reached out to the accelerator folks and to the tech and business community more generally, two important questions arose immediately:
What’s your revenue model?
What’s your path to $1M annual recurring revenue (ARR)?
$1M ARR is a kind of survival benchmark. If you can get to that level of revenue (without burning through millions of dollars in the process), so some folks will tell you, you’ve survived the part of the curve that kills off more than half of all startups.
It’s not quite that simple, of course – startup failure statistics vary drastically by industry, for one thing – but as big a number as it might seem, $1M ARR should just about pay for 10 people and some (limited, carefully controlled) business expenses. 10 people isn’t a huge studio, but it’s over a third the size of Supergiant or BYG, both of which I’d tend to consider successful, stable entities, and neither of which is all that much older than Perfect Minute in absolute terms.
Still, a path to $1M ARR feels…intimidating. If I look at Vampire Survivors, at its $6 price point, and considering that something like $2 of that price will go to Steam and payment processing, it would be necessary to sell TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND copies to reach that target. And not just one time – that number, every year, for as long as the company operates.
Now, Vampire Survivors is a breakout hit. I’m sure poncle has long since topped the million-dollar mark. But it has spawned an endless stream of imitators, and very few of those will have the same luck. You can’t bet on hits. You have to plan as if you’re going to be really, really average. Or better yet, really incredibly median.
The thing that’s required here is Market Research. I’ve been looking for publicly available game-specific market research resources for years now, and so it’s simultaneously gratifying and vaguely irritating to only just now happen upon VGInsights’ Steam Analytics and Top Charts data, not to mention their excellent indie game price analysis.
Applying the Data
Taken together, these resources offer enough information to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations about sales figures and revenue. I threw this data into the finance section of Futurpreneur’s excellent Business Plan Writer tool and exported the data to a spreadsheet that I could point to for reference when talking about revenue projections.
I’m sure someone will point out that these figures are hopelessly optimistic, that the median revenue for indie games is vanishingly small, that even planning for the median requires some big assumptions. And I won’t argue those points. This is where the rest of the vision I outlined in the pitch deck come in.
Of course, you can have all the vision in the world and it’ll do no good unless you can execute. If, for example, your business model relies on launching 4 games a year, you can’t half-ass it. But that’s what project plans are for.
It’s hard to look at that plan and not think of all the ways it could go off the rails. But you don’t necessarily have to execute any plan perfectly and to the smallest detail. Nor do revenues have to track exactly with projections. Luck plays a part. The point is to give ourselves the best statistical chance we can.
Is It Realistic?
While I was working on all this, I found a bunch of gnarly issues with my plans.
Taking out a massive operating loan at 7% interest, for example, could cripple the company. The interest and principal payments could throttle cash flow long before revenue can grow enough to compensate. Better, then, to acknowledge that a smaller loan is a better option, even if it requires extra work to seek other funding options.
Ditto piling 2 years or more of non-monetized post-release work on half a dozen games on top of the effort required to actually build the next game. It’s critical to control the amount of work in flight at any given time. Putting the numbers into a spreadsheet I discovered exactly how hard this vision would be to execute successfully. But I also confirmed that it is doable, at least on paper.
Just as importantly, I believe that having a plan, however starry-eyed it may be, is a necessary first step towards success. I don’t know what the next step will be, or whether I’ll take it once I do know.
For now, though, I’ll just say:
I did this, so you can do this. Take whatever value you find in what I’ve written here. I hope it helps you figure out some important bits of your own starry-eyed vision.
I put up a ko-fi page recently, and a friend was kind enough to be the first person to put some gas in the tank. So thanks Samwise!
I am so grateful, and I hope I can find a suitably exciting spot for your in-game cameo! How do you feel about being the first villager against the wall when the revolution comes? No? Ok, we’ll workshop it!
If you’re a Canadian media maker, you probably know about the Canada Media Fund, a pretty great institution and one which causes some folks from other parts of the world to express their undisguised envy.
I found the application process quite intimidating at first, but having been through most of it, I’m at least somewhat more comfortable. I figured maybe folks might appreciate a slightly simplified treatment of the process.
What makes the CMF so great?
Let’s assume, for a moment, that you don’t know about the CMF, or perhaps you’ve heard of it but you’ve never really looked into it in any detail.
“What makes the CMF programs so great?” is one of the first questions I asked when I started looking at funding. There are a few different answers, ranging from “they’re pretty unique in their setup” to “FREE MONEY!”, but the really important thing for someone focused on funding a game in development is the specific way they approach funding.
The CMF, see, isn’t like a regular investor. They don’t buy equity in your company. They don’t offer you a long-term loan. They directly invest in the project under development, and they recoup their investment when and if that project starts to receive revenue. But that’s not all!
They also have a time limit on how long they lay claim to those revenues. With CMF you’re never in danger of having some dude show up at your door with a sledgehammer and an unsettling familiarity with the anatomy of the human knee. After several years, if they have not yet recouped their investment, they basically relinquish their claim to further residuals.
All of that sounds amazing to me, so I should put the one big caveat down for balance: The one thing they don’t do is provide 100% funding. Different programs, projects, and yearly cohorts will have different conditions, but in 2022 CMF limits their investment to roughly 75% of expenses, including labour and assets. They also have total investment caps, which tend for the early-stage programs to run well short of the full “runway” budget for a game,
So this isn’t years-of-runway money. But it’s a substantial stake with generous terms, and every Canadian media creative should at least have some familiarity with the program.
Choosing a Program
Now let’s imagine that you’re going to ask them for money someday soon. Like, say, September 6th.
You’re very quickly going to notice there’s a bit of a problem: They have a lot of programs. Which ones even apply to what you’re making?
The big divide is between more “traditional” media, mostly covered under the Convergent stream, and “new” media, which is the focus of the Experimental stream.
If, like me, you’re a game maker, you will thus want to focus most of your energies on the Experimental Stream. There are still a bunch of programs to consider, but this cuts out more than half of the information CMF provides in its very ample documentation.
The key programs for 2022-23 in the Experimental Stream are:
Conceptualization
Prototyping
Production, which is now broken down into two separate programs
Commercial Projects
Innovation & Experimentation
Accelerator Partnership
If you’re just starting out with CMF and/or a new studio, it’s likely that you’ll want to focus on one of the first two.
Conceptualization is targeted at extremely early-stage projects which don’t yet even have a working demo. The funding cap ($15,000) and pool for this program are fairly limited, and a significant portion of the pool is reserved for Diverse Community applicants. If your team meets one or more of the DC category criteria this should be helpful, but otherwise you’ll want to get your application in early, as the program is first-come, first-served. Conceptualization is also usually framed as a way to get your project ready for a more significant investment via the Prototyping program.
Prototyping is meant to help companies build a full-scale working demo of their project. This won’t be a full game, most likely, but it should be enough to attract attention from other investors. There are still diversity targets to consider – there’s an evaluation matrix that takes into account most of the same factors as Conceptualization – but the pool of money available is a little more forgiving, and the funding cap is much higher ($250,000 [but remember – 75%!]).
I mean, also, it’s. probably just a good idea all around to work with diverse groups, but I say that as an Old Cisstraight(ish) White Guy Working Alone, so I’m not about to give anyone a hard time about it. Just trying to help you present your team and/or project to the CMF in the best possible light!
Applying to the Conceptualization Program (2022-23)
My intention this year is to apply to the Conceptualization program. I have a few different projects on the back burner, and it would be great to be able to be able to offer folks some money to start making art and composing sound for one of them. The funding in this program is limited to $15,000 (remember, this means I’m on the hook for other funding up to $5,000), so it won’t be a LOT of either, but it will be a start.
Theoretically I could make everything myself – theoretically – but I wouldn’t be even slightly comfortable sharing the results with the public. I’d much rather work with other folks, folks who bring great skills in those areas, and I’d be very happy to see them paid for their work.
The timing is tight at this point – as I hinted above, the Conceptualization opening date for this year is September 6th:
Finding these dates is possibly the easiest part of the entire process.
Also, before you even start filling things out, you need to sign up for PERSONA-ID. The TL;DR of it is, Persona-ID allows you to disclose possibly sensitive details of your team’s personal lives and identity in a way that protects their privacy. This seems, to me (admittedly a relatively naïve soul in the area) to be a reasonably elegant solution to the problem of wanting to incentivize diverse creators without putting them at risk unnecessarily.
You can find out which of your team members need a PERSONA-ID account by checking the “Who should participate in PERSONA-ID?” and “Can other roles or key personnel sign-up to PERSONA-ID?” sections on the main PERSONA-ID reference page.
Once you have your id(s), there are a few basic things that you should check with respect to your project.
The project needs to be Canadian, which means the majority of the team is Canadian, most of the spending is in Canada, and creative control resides in Canada.
You’re ready to incorporate. You don’t actually have to incorporate to apply – this is a common misconception, apparently – but you do have to incorporate to sign an agreement.
You’re working on something that’s recognizably a game and that’s intended to eventually reach the market.
These are brief distillations of some key considerations from the full Conceptualization Program Guidelines. If you decide to go ahead with an application, you should definitely spend some time reviewing the program guidelines.
Beyond the basic eligibility criteria above, there are other factors that can play into an application’s success or failure – graphic content is a big one – but these folks work with media creators all the time, so there’s some flexibility there, and those considerations are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind.
Application Documents
You could be forgiven if you got tripped up here for way too long. I know I did. The first mention of documents on the Conceptualization Program page is the hot-pink-highlighted Guidelines and References section. Here you’ll find a link to the Conceptualization Program Guidelines mentioned previously as well as the download link for Reference Documents. The Reference Documents download is a zip file containing two appendices and a number of important-sounding-but-definitely-not-an-application-form PDFs.
It took me way too long to realize that if you move down the page to the very next section you’ll find the blue-highlighted Application Documents. Here you’ll find another download link. This one also downloads a zip file, and it’s in this zip file that you’ll find the three key PDFs:
List of Required Documents
Budget (template)
Declaration of the Corporation’s Canadian status, and its Shareholders and Directors
Again, don’t panic about #3 just yet. In fact, don’t even panic about #2 just yet. Focus completely on that first PDF, because it will tell you all about the application itself, and in particular what you actually need to write and submit to apply for funding. There are several items listed here, and for 2022, these are as follows:
Team Description (1 page)
CVs (<= 3 pages each)
Concept Description (<= 3 pages)
History (1 page)
Budget (template provided)
Financing commitment letters or agreements
Let’s remind ourselves, first, that #6 is to be expected since CMF doesn’t do 100% funding. #5, as mentioned, is part of this zipped package.
#1, Team Description, has a fairly rigid structure, and we’ll get back to it in a sec.
The others, however, are relatively free-form. You’ll want to actually read through the descriptions, but you’ll notice that there really isn’t much guidance provided. Some of the Reference Documents may help here, but in reality these documents are an opportunity – your team should work to come up with the best possible version of each document using clear, evocative language.
You may even benefit from hiring someone to review your documents or even to help write them. Don’t look at me, I’m new to this too. But I understand there are folks who can help. Check your local gamedev community!
Now let’s return to document #1 in the list, the Team Description. This is one of the places (along with the budget) where you need to make sure you include any and all factors that might qualify your team for consideration under the Diversity Criteria.
Critically, you need to make sure anyone who is in one of the roles listed on the PERSONA-ID page has signed up and that their ID is included in this document and in the budget. You also need to make certain the people and IDs listed here and in the budget match.
When filling in the application in the Telefilm Canada Dialogue system, you’ll notice that there are several places to list folks as well. I’m not completely clear, yet, why the application page isn’t an acceptable Team Description, but I suspect the Team Description gives a chance to “sell” your team a little more than the Key Personnel and Directors and Shareholders sections of the application.
To be honest, it’s a little frustrating and nerve-wracking to have to cross-check three places (TD, Budget, application), but, again, this program is pretty generous, so the hoops seem worth it.
For me, though, the team description is likely to be something like:
Mike Murphy-Burton is the founder and sole developer behind Perfect Minute Games, a game development studio in St. John’s, NL. Since the founding of the company, Mike has worked with numerous independent developers on a variety of projects, including Disastrophe, a ROBLOX game released by Orange Slip Studios in 2019.
He is the Director and Senior Programmer for Powered A(r)mour.
It’s not exactly impressive, I guess? I’m not sure how to evaluate that. But it gets the point across. Part of the goal here is to find the best version of things to present to the folks at CMF, but that still means presenting reality.
Plus, I’ve been assured by folks at CMF that they do, in fact, consider projects from humble teams, so I’ll try to remain optimistic as long as I can.
Now that I’ve written the Team Description, I feel like I should at least take a first crack at the Concept Description as well.
Powered A(r)mour is a playful take on romance, shop management, and tactical RPG gameplay.
The game puts the player in the role of the owner and operator of a mechanic shop specializing in the pseudonymous powered armour suits. In the course of running the shop, players are tasked with hiring mechanics and attracting clientele, and helping the two groups navigate relationships between mechanic, pilot…and armour!
Powered A(r)mour’s romance elements attempt to tackle subject matter around gender and sexual orientation through a science fictional lens. Using such a lens has been suggested to provide a level of distance that allows people to avoid habitual or socially programmed responses to uncomfortable ideas. By presenting relationships through the shop mechanics rather than the player’s own character, the game ensures another level of distance. Using this framing also allows the player to watch multiple relationships of different types to develop, progress, and conclude throughout the game.
By immersing the player in a setting where relationships impact other gameplay elements, Powered A(r)mour tries to encourage players to invest in and explore aspects of identity that may not be part of their everyday experience.
Conclusion
So, that’s the process, more or less. There’s an application inside Telefilm Canada’s Dialogue system that you’ll need to fill out, as I mentioned, but it’s mostly information you’ll already have at hand.
I’d love to hear about who else is working on an application and for what, as well as whether you thought this guide was helpful.
I listen to a lot of broadcasts about game development, and in particular to bizdev talks and interviews and whatnot that feature Jason della Rocca. I’ve listened to so many of his talks, and seen the same points made in my local startup community so often, that I have a mental checklist at this point.
The founding team: Art, Tech, Business. No more, no less
The track record: More games shipped is better, more money earned is WAY better.
The roadmap: 3-5 games, not just 1
The market slice: No mobile premium games, please (this is della Rocca’s mantra, I think)
The pre-funding funding climb: You, your family, your local funding community, and only then the bigger fish.
There could almost be a drinking game with these, except they’re pretty spot on. I hate to think that, because most of them don’t apply to Perfect Minute right now or in the foreseeable future, but the absolute best candidates will have all or almost all of the above, and those are the folks that deserve investors’ attention.
Love to hear from other folks – which of these do you have in place? What is missing in this checklist? What are you doing differently and having success with?
