I want to make this clear before I start here: I do not have some amazing expertise in this field. I have sold basically zero games of my own. I do not have to deal with pitching them. Pitches are for marketers, and they’re a monstrous mess. I can’t tell you about how to do those.
I can tell you, however, how to pitch a game to me. Normally I focus on what people shouldn’t do in this regard, tell them off for a number of a long list of possible sins in advertising copy. What I want to do is underscore how you should start your ad copy in its most basic form:
“It’s a [broad anchor term][broad game type] where [the fantasy I can play out] by [the thing that you think is cool].”
The broad anchor term usually refers to something the player will experience regularly. Consider for example, groupings like stealth games, crafting games, exploration games. Then the game type, where it’s your primary method of interacting with the game – a point-and-click adventure, a first-person game. And then we hit the sticky point: What fantasy does this game let me experience? And then, how does the game make that experience cool?
In Escape Goat, the fantasy is of being a noble goat escaping from prison filled with traps and magical monsters, by jumping and heatbutting through elaborate, fast-iterating puzzles. In Far Cry 3 the fantasy is of experiencing a violent descent into righteous madness by learning the ways of a vast tropical death zone. In Dishonored, the fantasy is of playing the disgraced man who did nothing wrong as he rights these wrongs by means he chooses.
Don’t tell me it’s Minecraft Meets Dark Souls Meets Left 4 Dead Meets Castle Crashers. Don’t tell me about the other games you’ve played. Tell me why I should try your game – and if you can get this basic structure down, you can start working on improved variations.
This is just the most rudimentary structure. This is not how you have to do it – you can of course, when you’re comfortable hitting these beats in a conventionally explicable way, easily restructure this sentence. We nonetheless have a scope of conventional language, a spread of terms we’re used to, and eschewing those terms to try and re-invent the wheel is maddening to me.