The deck, slide by slide

Founders talk about 'the pitch deck' as if there is one. There are at least three, and they answer different questions for different rooms. An investor deck sells a share of the company: it wants market size, go-to-market, traction and the trust signals that say this team can build something worth owning. A publisher deck sells one finished game to a distribution partner: it wants precise gameplay, scope and schedule, and it does not try to teach the publisher their own business. A project deck sells the returns of a single title to someone who recoups from that title's revenue, so every slide answers one question: will this one game earn its money back.

Pick the artifact before you build a slide, then tailor it to the room in front of you. The fastest way to lose a room is to hand equity investors a gameplay walkthrough, or hand a publisher a scalability story they will never care about.

One difference is worth stating out loud, because it trips up founders who reuse one deck across rooms. An equity deck states the ask, and a publisher deck omits it. When you raise equity you name the number you need. When you go to a publisher, you do not price your own game on the slide, because the publisher sets the price, and naming it first only anchors you low. Same studio, same game, two decks that end on completely different slides.

This chapter is about what goes on each slide. How each slide should look, whether you build a lean talking deck or a self-contained reading deck, where the eye lands first, and why your title slide is doing marketing work, is its own subject. It lives in two decks and the visual hierarchy. Build the what here, then take it there to make it land.

Ten slides. Adjust them to your circumstances, but this order has survived hundreds of live pitches, and every slide answers a question investors ask in the order they ask it.

Company purpose is one sentence, plain enough for your mother. Problem and solution carry the pitch, and the story covers them in depth, so here is the compressed version: the problem must make the room nod, the bigger the pain the better and always from the customer's point of view, and the solution must answer exactly that problem, not tour your feature set. The market slide that follows is where a lot of decks quietly win or lose the room, so it gets its own section below.

The product slide has a two-word brief: show it. One screenshot or a few seconds of real gameplay beats any paragraph you could write about immersion. Keep it to one slide. If you are tempted to add a second, you are explaining mechanics, and mechanics belong in the demo or the Q&A. Focus wins here too: do not pitch five audiences and three platforms at once. You can always expand later.

The business model slide is missing from roughly a quarter of the decks we coach, and its absence is always louder than its content would have been. When it is missing, the investor has to ask "how do you actually make money?", and that question should never need asking. A back-of-the-napkin calculation beats a missing slide every time. Pre-revenue? Fine: price per user, an honest conversion estimate, the rough size of the audience you can reach. Nobody checks that math for decimal places. They check whether you have done it.

Traction, when you have it, needs receipts. Cite the source of every number, and show real review screenshots instead of adjectives: one genuine player quote on screen outweighs "overwhelmingly positive" in your speaker notes. And if a metric is weak and you cannot explain it well, leave it out and show a stronger one. Investors know numbers rarely run in a straight line. An unexplainable weak number hurts more than its absence.

Marketing is the slide founders treat as filler and investors use as a competence test. Concrete channels, concrete first steps, no 'we will go viral.' If marketing skill exists in your team, say so here and again on the team slide. The four slides that decide most equity pitches, competition, team, roadmap and the ask, each carry enough weight to earn their own treatment, so the rest of this chapter walks through them one at a time before turning to the project deck.

The market slide exists so an investor can dream, and it has to survive the second question. The most common way it dies is the census: "37% of the population plays games" is not a market, it is a census. Nobody sells to 37% of the population, and every investor in the room knows it. Name the segment you can actually reach, what it spends, and the slice you take first. Bigger is better, but "everyone" is not a target market, and every claim wants a source: store data, research, surveys.

Serious market slides come at the size from two directions. Top-down is the familiar funnel: TAM, the whole market that could exist; SAM, the part your kind of product actually serves; SOM, the share you can realistically win in the near term. The trick is honesty at both ends. The total should be large and visibly growing, big enough that a modest share is still a real business. The share assumption should be modest, a few percent, not a third. An investor trusts a slide that says "we need a small corner of a big room" far more than one that hands them the whole room.

Bottom-up builds the same number from the ground: how many real users or customers you can reach, what each one is worth in a year, and why. A thousand studios that each pay a few thousand a year is a sentence an investor can check. When your top-down dream and your bottom-up arithmetic land in roughly the same place, the slide reads as true. When they are wildly apart, the room believes the smaller number and quietly discounts you for the rest of the deck.

Competition is where decks lose credibility fastest, and almost always the same way: a feature table with green checkmarks in your column and red crosses for everyone else. The room reads that table as fabricated, because it is. You chose the rows after you knew the answers, and everyone watching knows you did. Build a two-axis positioning map instead. Pick two axes that genuinely matter in your market, place yourself and your competitors honestly, and claim the empty quadrant. The message is not "we are better," it is "they are good in their market, and we build where they are not even going." Never bash the big players either: "that platform is simply bad" convinces nobody. And there is always competition. Claiming none does not signal strength, it signals no market.

When the slide is about demand rather than rivals, the same instinct applies to proof. One long, glowing testimonial reads as cherry-picked. Ten short highlight cut-outs read as a pattern, and even a mixed one ("great, but add more content") signals a real player who wants more. Show the source of every number, and put real review screenshots on the slide instead of adjectives in your speaker notes.

The team slide is the one slide where bragging is the job. Logos of past employers, shipped titles, awards, press mentions, photos of real faces: all of it belongs here, stated plainly and without a blush. European teams undersell so reliably that we spend more coaching time adding achievements than cutting them. Write the takeaway as a claim, 'a team that has shipped and sold games before,' not a label like 'Team.' A label tells the room nothing. The claim closes the competence question in one line, which is exactly what you want, because it frees the investor to stop worrying about the team and lean forward for the rest. Two or three words can do the whole job on a stage: 'an experienced team that has shipped before' lets the investor tick the box and move on.

Four rules keep the bragging honest. Show filled positions only: a five-box org chart for a two-person company backfires the second an investor runs burn-rate math in their head. Put yourself last, because the room trusts you more when you are not first in line. List your advisors, since they are borrowed credibility. And match every credential to this project: ten years of mobile free-to-play experience is gold in a mobile pitch and noise in a console pitch. If a key role is missing, name the gap and put the hire in your use of funds. A named gap reads as planning. A hidden gap reads as a blind spot.

A solo founder reads as risk to a lot of investors, and the worry is rarely about your ability. It is structural: what happens to the company if something happens to you, and can one person really carry all of this. Do not pretend the question is absent, and do not lead with it either. The move that works is to answer it on the slide, in writing, before anyone has to ask. A mitigation that lives only in your head does nothing, because the investor scoring risk never hears it. The same mitigation printed on the team slide takes the risk off the table on sight.

There is also a reframe that turns the weakness into a claim. A small team is not only a gap to apologize for, it is a way of working you can own: deliberately lean, built AI-first, a lot done with little. Said with confidence, 'we are two founders running with a stack of digital assistants, and the money hires the people who work the market' sounds like efficiency, not fragility. The bias against small teams softens the moment you make the smallness look like a choice.

The roadmap slide faces forward, and it carries more psychology than founders expect. Two decks with the exact same facts can read as opposite stories depending on where you place the word "now." Never draw yourself at step one. Add an earlier phase, the concept, the prototype, the thing you already finished, and move the "now" marker past the middle of the line, so the slide says "most of the work is done, we are feature complete, we are preparing go-live" instead of "we are at the very beginning." Same project, same truth, and one version is fundable while the other is not.

Two more habits earn their keep here. Kill the dated, far-out roadmap: a slide promising specific quarters years out reads as fabricated, because everyone knows it is. Prefer an undated master plan where each phase visibly funds the next, so the story is "this money gets us to the milestone that unlocks the next money." And keep history off this slide. A long, still-running development timeline whispers "everyone else already said no," even when that is not true. History earns space only where it brags, on the team slide.

The financing slide, your ask, is one number. One. "We are raising 350,000 euros," in the currency the room in front of you thinks in. We coach decks every year that show four amounts at once: total round, primary target, commitments secured, runway achieved. The investor leaves remembering none of them. Every supporting detail can surface in the discussion. The slide carries the headline, and the headline is a single figure and what it buys.

Three ways of naming the number quietly cost you. "Six figures" sounds like you have not decided. "At least X" reads as no plan, and it invites the investor to watch the number keep climbing. A five-times-wide range like "100k to 500k" says you do not know what you want. Replace all three with one figure and the milestone it reaches: "we are raising 250,000 to get to launch and the first ten thousand players." Precise, owned, and easy to repeat to a partner who was not in the room.

Leave the valuation off the slide entirely. It gets set at the negotiating table, not announced on stage, and your ask already implies it: investors read an ask as roughly 20 to 25 percent of the valuation you have in mind. Writing the valuation out anchors the negotiation against you before it starts. The math behind that, and what investors actually check when they run your numbers, lives in the numbers.

The project deck sells one game, not the company. The investor recoups from this title's revenue, so every slide answers one underlying question: will this game earn its money back?

The concept slide answers "what is this game and why should anyone care" in one breath. The genre-reference technique from the story shines here: "Civilization meets chess" orients a listener faster than any feature list.

Gameplay: best features first, fast. If the game already exists, a bit of everything works. If it is early, show only the important bits, because a thin vertical slice presented with confidence beats a broad one presented with apologies. Do not drift into mechanics lectures. The pitch names what makes the game unique; the details wait for the demo and the Q&A.

The audience slide names who plays this game, and how you know. Genre communities, comparable playerbases, wishlist data if you have it. "Everyone" is not an audience, for games any more than for startups.

Market analysis for a game means similar works: titles in your genre and scope, with their real performance. Include the worst-selling comparable, not just the hits: one honest flop on the slide buys credibility for every other number. Show worst, average and best-selling comparables, and where you realistically land between them. Public data makes this a research task, not a guessing game: gamedatacrunch.com, games-stats.com and vginsights.com all give sales estimates good enough for a pitch. Size it the same two ways as the equity market slide, top down and bottom up, and it holds up under questioning. A founder who compares their game only to genre-defining hits loses the room's trust for the rest of the slide, and usually for the rest of the deck.

The timeline slide is a schedule you can defend under questioning: current status, next milestones, release window. The same forward-facing rule as the equity roadmap applies, and doubly so here. A four-year development history on this slide reads as risk, not as dedication.

Marketing weighs more in a project deck than anywhere else, because in a project deal you keep distribution and marketing control, which means you execute this plan yourself. Concrete beats aspirational: which channels, which beats, what it costs. And the team slide closes with the same bragging rules as the equity deck, sharpened to one question: has this team shipped a game like this before? Genre, platform, scope. That is the credential that matters here.

Project investors want to see the game, and the deck and the demo are two halves of one argument: the deck is a promise and sets expectations, the demo is proof of your ability to deliver. Keep them in sync. A deck that promises more than the demo shows does not sound like ambition, it sounds like a warning.

How you show the game, screenshots, a short looping clip, a cut-down video or a live build, is a format question with real failure modes, and it belongs with the rest of the look-and-feel decisions in two decks and the visual hierarchy. What matters for this chapter is the argument underneath: the deck promises, the demo proves, and the two must tell the same story.

And lead with your proof, do not save it. Traction arriving late is a wasted hook. If you have numbers, a live product, players who pay and stay, put them early, because a room that has already seen proof scores every later slide more generously. What that proof does inside an investor's head, and why it shrinks your team, market and product risk all at once, is the whole of what investors hear.

Game budgets have three buckets: recurring costs (salaries, rent, bills), commissioned work (trailers, music, voice acting, copy) and licenses or royalties (engines, middleware, assets). Build the slide from those three and be transparent about all of them.

Two truths make founders nervous, and neither should. First: salaries will dominate your budget, and that is exactly what an honest budget looks like. Games are made by people. A budget pretending otherwise reads as naive, not as lean. Second: pad the total by 20 to 30 percent as contingency, openly. These projects never finish early, investors know it, and a budget with no buffer tells the room you have never shipped one.

Show the big picture on the slide and keep the details in your head, because the questions will come: burn rate, cash flow, what happens if the release slips a quarter. The slide proves you planned. Your answers prove you understand the plan.

A tight main deck and a fat appendix are a sign of discipline, not of missing work. Deep tech, the full competitor matrix, complete financials, acquisition cost and cohort curves, the granular market analysis: none of that belongs in the main run. Push it to hidden appendix slides and jump to one only when a question calls for it. Producing exactly the right slide on demand does more for your credibility than front-loading all of it ever could.

How do you decide what stays in the main deck and what drops to the appendix? Run one test on every number: would a higher or lower value change the investor's decision? If it would, it earns a place up front. If it would not, it is appendix material. Most of the detail founders agonize over fails that test, which is good news, because it means the main deck gets shorter.

One more move from the experienced pitchers: leave a question you know is coming deliberately open, so an investor asks it and you land the answer you had ready. Steer the room toward the ground you are strong on, and the harder questions run out of time. For everything provable, a proper data room holds the documents an interested investor will want in due diligence. The deck earns the meeting, the data room survives the scrutiny.

Deck built? Two chapters sharpen it. Go back to the story if the narrative underneath still wobbles, and run the whole thing past the ten mistakes we watch decks like yours make every season.