Hi,
If I ask a publisher for money, for example €200,000, do I have to pay taxes or duties on this sum that I will receive?
You should speak with your lawyer and accountant.
But most likely yes, as this is the income.
Oh so i should ask more that the estimated budget i need, bruh. 
It all depends on how taxes work in your country. Part of the taxes may be deducted if you have costs like a salary to the employees. Probably it’s a good thing to hire an accountant if you work with such money as mentioned above
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i think the publisher will be able to help you
Depends on the country you live in. In the UK corporation tax is only paid on profits, if you have no profit there is no corporation tax.
Speaking from past experience, getting money out of a publisher can be difficult and can lose you a significant percentage of your ownership of the title, and a lot of the time the company itself. A lot of publishers expect 30% just for the publishing side, as in without funding included. So expect a figure much higher than that, if you expect that level of funding in addition to everything else a publisher does.
My guy, my dude, my fella, you aren’t even gonna get $200,000. We have ** already been over this in your other thread. ** You’re like ten steps beyond putting the cart before the horse.
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Wow…okay I didnt realise how much delusions of granduer are at play here.
OP, So you want not only for a publisher to publish your game, but literally fund you setting up the team and the entire game, and you want them to commit to this when you have 0 experience and dont have a solid marketable demo?
Its simple: not going to happen. Get a demo together and then talk about funding.
Publishers do not fund indies with 0 experience to build a game, it just doesnt work that way. They also pretty much never fund a game fully, at most it will be last stage funding. Otherwise It would be such a high risk investment, and the games industry is already incredibly high risk.
You really need to do the bare minimum and you have not done that. Putting up pictures of a bunch of low poly assets, and asking for an entire team to be assembled in a forum thread, does not give anyone any confidence that this is a project worth getting on board of, let alone a publisher.
If I was a publisher and I asked you “how do you intend to make this game without a team yet?” what would you reply? Because that first question would be the end to your pitch right there (if they even bother to respond to your application, which is unlikely based on info provided). Saying to them “we are recruiting the team” is basically saying “we have no way to guarantee the completion of this game, and therefore no way to guarantee you can even release something for your 200k let alone make a profit on it”.
Also I hate to be that guy but…you honestly think even if you did all the above that you can get 200k funding for a low poly zombie survival game? Out of all the over saturated genres you could have picked, you picked that for funding?
I have a team. We also have some level design and gameplay mecanics, it is isn’t random picture.
Nope; noone taxes imaginary money.
Alright perfect, so can you list some of your team members experience on past commercially successful titles? Because you will get asked these type of questions, theres a difference between a team of amateurs and hobbyists vs experienced developers. Even just having 1 commercially successful title per team member would be enough to prove something.
If you have an experienced team then its going to be that much easier to get funding (once you have an almost finished game to pitch, at minimum a highly polished vertical slice that shows exact quality of the final product).
If not then, see all above replies.
Its possible to do it with an inexperienced team but again, you will need a polished vertical slice showing end product quality that has some sort of hook and a really good pitch. You also need to prove that you can maintain and keep the team throughout the project, meaning you need to prove what incentives the team has to stay if you have no funding of your own.
I’m currently with a group that started up a few years ago and developed a vertical slice. We presented it to a publisher then another. Finally after 50+ publishers were contacted we found someone willing to work with us.
Sounds like a great success story, right? A few months back we stopped development because they massively screwed us over. Be careful who you try to team up with. We’re likely going to have to throw out everything we made with that publisher. Over a year lost.
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Really sorry to hear that @Ryiah , I hope your luck is better in the future!
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What happen ?
We have no commercial success to show.
We are people with experience in another field and personal projects.
That’s why we apply ourselves to our pitch and why we’re not going to show random images but level design and gameplay mechanics. (If we will only have random images, this will already mean that we have created the scenes.)
Did you look at my project presentation before saying that I only have random images ?
The publisher asked us to develop a game for them. Once we reached the point that it was almost complete they started shifting the goal posts and used it as an excuse not to pay us properly. We went more than a year with no funding trying to come to an agreement.
Eventually they found an excuse to cancel the project but then they started demanding we turn everything over to them. Our lawyer came to the conclusion they were trying to take advantage of us. Likely from the very beginning with the goal of getting a mostly complete game to finish and publish themselves getting all the rewards.
Unfortunately this is why we were turned down by 50+ publishers and investors. Based on what I have seen of your game I have to conclude our vertical slice was much further along and it demoed our tech very well yet it wasn’t a complete game and that’s all they cared about.
If I look back on it the best thing we could have done would have been to make a complete game. It wouldn’t have had to be fancy either. A basic mobile game that a team can complete in a few months would have been sufficient in my opinion.
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Next step:
combine the prototype gameplay into some of your art scenes.
Work out any major bugs, polish the gameplay until it feels at least semi-decent. Put a play test on steam and get some strangers to play it.
Forget step 1,000,000,000,000 and focus on step 2.
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Yes I did, its mostly just a post of low poly images, many looking like assets from the asset store, and a very basic prototype of some shooting and building (and I mean very basic, its far from what you could ever show to a publisher). The description of the game and GDD are meaningless without a playable prototype and ample videos etc showing actual playable high quality, end product quality gameplay.
By the way, Are the assets from the asset store or did you make them all yourselves? That would also be an influencing factor in whether you get published, a publisher (especially those with 200k to give to a project) will not be enticed if they know you are just cobbling together stuff from the asset store mostly. So lets start there first before focusing on funding - are all the pictures you posted containing like at least 90% art you created yourself/ your team created ,or is it from the asset store? Creating a scene from assets from the asset store is very different to creating your own art, then using that to create scenes… I say this because they look like assets made by Synty - are they?
As said above, focus on whats next not many steps down the line. You are far away from fundable right now. Without an almost if not complete game, or at least seriously polished vertical slice AND pitch, good luck getting any funding at all let alone a publisher.
Your best chance based on all the above will be do to a kickstarter, but again you are far away from ready for that based on whats visible on your project presentation so far. $200k is a lot for a kickstarter too, expect more like $50k target at most for initial funding.
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@Pytchoun whatever you got so far, it shows you started game making, with wrong end of the stick.
You started focusing on visuals, before having any proper mechanics in place. You need to show gameplay. Because literally everyone can grab random assets, put them together to look decent, make some screen shots and pretend they got a game. You are not the first one here, to try this approach. Usual leads to nowhere, until start focusing on mechanics and building prototypes.
If you’re trying to start a company, and you don’t have anyone in the company that can answer this question, you’re in way over your head.
People in this thread are focusing on how hard it is to get funding without a proper pitch. What’s getting skipped is how insanely bad of an idea it is to take on an investment of 200k euros if you don’t know the basics of how money and such works for a company.
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