The deck, slide by slide

Count the seconds your deck is on screen while nobody is talking. Your first slide stands alone for ten to twenty seconds while the moderator announces you and you walk to position. Your last slide stays up through the entire Q&A, sometimes for several minutes. That is more silent screen time than most slides get speaking time, and almost every deck we coach wastes it on a bare logo or a "Thank you!".

Treat both slides as paid ad space, because that is what they are. The first slide wants your logo, a short claim that makes people curious, and a URL. Not a QR code: nobody scans in a ten-second window, and a phone pointed at the screen is a listener you lost. The QR code earns its place on the last slide, where it sits through the whole Q&A and people finally have time to point a camera at it.

One production note that saves pitches every year: use a subtle animated GIF instead of an embedded video on the first slide. GIFs run reliably in cloud presentation tools, need no sound and no clicking, and still make the slide feel alive. Keep it quiet and a little mysterious. Save the explosions for later slides.

A deck you email travels alone. Nobody stands next to it to explain, so it needs full sentences and more text. A deck you present live has the opposite job: the less text, the better, because an audience either reads your slide or listens to you, and it never does both well.

The best decks work as a hybrid. The core message of each slide is big, high-contrast, impossible to miss from the back row. The supporting detail is small, readable only up close, there for the investor who studies the PDF later but quiet enough to stay out of your way on stage. One deck, two reading distances.

When in doubt, build a separate, leaner deck for pitch competitions. The deck that survives an hour-long partner meeting has too much in it for three minutes on a stage.

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; chapter 4 covers them in depth, so here is the compressed version: the problem must make the room nod (the bigger the pain, the better, always from the customer's point of view), and the solution must answer exactly that problem, not tour your feature set.

The product slide has a two-word brief: show it. One screenshot or a short GIF 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 market slide exists so an investor can dream. It needs a number big enough to matter and honest enough to survive a second question. "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. Back every claim with a source: store data, research, surveys, testimonials.

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.

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. 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". The message is "they are good in their market; 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.

The team slide is the one slide where bragging is the job. Logos of past employers, shipped titles, awards, press mentions: all of it belongs here, stated plainly and without a blush. European teams undersell here so reliably that we spend more coaching time adding achievements than removing them.

Four rules keep the bragging honest. Show filled positions only: a five-headed org chart for a two-person company backfires the moment an investor runs burn-rate math in their head. Put yourself last; the room trusts you more when you are not first in line. List your advisors, because 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 comes across as a blind spot.

The roadmap slide faces forward. Status quo plus the next milestones, and that is all. Development timelines reaching years into the past are one of our most frequent coaching cuts, because a long, still-running history whispers "everyone else already said no". Show history only where it brags, on the team slide, never as a chronicle.

The financing slide, your ask, is one number. One. "We are raising 350,000 euros." In euros or dollars, whichever 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 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 it out anchors the negotiation against you.

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 chapter 4 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. 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 how you show it is a real decision. 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. The room hears a warning.

The format follows the time you have. Little time: screenshots, because they never fail. A few minutes: a short gameplay video, cut to the best moments. A live demo is the strongest proof there is, and the riskiest: builds crash, wifi dies, controllers unpair, always in front of the person who matters. If you demo live, carry the video as a fallback, and know the exact moment you will switch to it.

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.

Deck built? Two chapters sharpen it. Chapter 4, if the story underneath still wobbles. Chapter 6, for the ten mistakes we watch decks like yours make every single year.