How to get investment for your video game in 2026

GamesIndustry.biz hosted a panel during Game Republic’s Investment Summit at MCM Comic Con in London on October 23, where editorial director Jon Hicks talked to Lirui Ding (principal at Transcend Fund), Nick Cavander (senior portfolio manager at Creative UK), and Cassia Curran (founder of Curran Games Agency) about the current state of investment in the games industry.

The panel gave advice on a number of questions facing developers in 2026, namely: where is the money, what are investors looking for, what should you put in a pitch, and how important are wishlists?

Where is the money?

The money for making games is still there, said Ding, even if it’s harder to access now than it was in the past. He recommended trying a mix and match approach, looking for pots of funding from different sources, like Kickstarter or government grants – an approach that Spilt Milk’s Nicholas Lovell used to great effect for the development of Trash Goblin.

Cavander agreed: “There’s just bits everywhere,” he said, pointing towards government pots like the BFI Global Screen Fund and the UK Games Content Fund, as well as angel investors and informal investment groups formed of high-net-worth individuals or families. Piecing together funding like this might offer a more attractive alternative to going all in with a publisher. “A lot of what we’re hearing is that people are trying to avoid publishers and move to self-publishing where they can, because the terms aren’t so great right now.”

Cavander also had another recommendation: “Barclays has Eagle Labs – it’s sort of an incubator for creative and media companies – and it’s a great place to network and run into people who may be looking to invest.”

Curran noted that venture capital (VC) firms are worth looking at for funding opportunities, given the recent shift towards project financing. “More than one VC that I know of that was focusing on equity funding has pivoted or is pivoting to do project finance instead, which can make a lot more sense considering the sort of exits that are now possible in this market.”

Beyond VCs, Curran recommended contacting successful independent game developers “who have an excess amount of money and don’t know what to do with it,” pointing towards Outersloth and Evil Landfall as examples. She noted that people in the indie scene tend to be friendly and eager to help each other. “If one of your friends makes it big, then by all means see if they’d like to invest in your game,” she said.

What are investors looking for?

Discussing trends among publishers, Curran said we’re now seeing more of a focus on specific genres from different publishing houses, rather than all of them chasing the genre of the moment. That said, she pointed towards incremental idle games and tidy-up games as current hot trends. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should run out and make an idle game,” she said.

“I think one slightly depressing trend is publishers being most attracted to games that have already got some traction in marketing or player base, and only investing then,” she continued. “The thing is, your average publisher will get about 2,000 or so pitches a year, and then they’ll publish maybe 10 games a year, so they can afford to be picky. It just means that it’s just really hard for indie game developers to find a publisher, because there’s just so much competition.”

In terms of courting equity investment from VCs, Ding said that the most important thing to bear in mind is that the VC will be looking for the potential for a 10x return within around ten years. “If you think about the economics of how it works in venture capital, the whole business model is VCs would receive money from LPs – limited partners – and normally a fund would exist for about seven to 10 years. At the end of that fund’s lifetime, they need to return the money to the LPs. So that means if you are pitching the studio to VCs, you probably want to think, if I were the investor, how can I get the money back at the end of the lifetime of the fund?

“If you tell them, ‘I’m going to build a franchise, the first game will be in five years’ time, the second game in 10 years’ time, and the third game will really hit big in 15 years’ time’, lots of the VCs will be turned off by that. They’ll be like, ‘Well, that payback period will be way too long’.”

He said in this case, companies need to think about ways to offer some kind of recouping mechanism to offer a way to return the money sooner, rather than them having to wait for a “liquidation event”, such as the company being acquired, merged, or launched on the stock market.

But Curran pointed towards the growing trend for project financing among VCs, like the $100 million fund launched by Griffin Gaming Partners. Given the slowdown in mergers and acquisitions in the games industry in the past few years, project-based financing is becoming more attractive to VCs than equity investment, since if there is little chance for a company to be sold or floated on the stock market, there is less chance of them seeing a return on their investment.

What to put in a pitch

Pitching for an equity investment requires pitching your team, not the project, said Curran, but pitching for project financing requires focusing on the specifics of selling the game. “You will be wanting to put a lot of detail about how you’re planning to go to market,” she said. “So your marketing strategy, for example, which platforms you’re planning to release on, and the price. You have to demonstrate your experience in being able to bring things to market.”

In this case, pitching for project financing differs from pitching to a publisher, because publishers will want to work out their own go-to-market strategy. For a publisher pitch, Curran said you should think about things like what platforms to target, “but you should not put in a whole marketing strategy segment – that would actually be really off-putting.”

“It’s a really bad idea to say you’re going to take over the world in three years”

For both project-financing and publisher pitches, Curran said that the quality of the vertical slice and demo is the most important thing, but they will also look at whether the game already has traction with players. “A lot of publishers prefer it if you have announced and you’ve shown that you already have a certain audience. Sometimes I think, why do these people need a publisher? Project finance is maybe better for those kind of developers.”

As senior investment and portfolio manager for Creative UK, Cavander had a different take on what developers need to emphasise in a pitch. His firm offers venture debt financing – essentially long-term loans – which means that first of all, they’re looking at the ability of the business to stay solvent.

Beyond that, the team is the most important thing. “We’re looking at the people to get confidence in who we’re investing in,” Cavander said. “Then we look at the project. We look for reasonable forecasts and projections. I think it’s a really bad idea to say you’re going to take over the world in three years. It just doesn’t sound credible. It’s better to be more realistic, maybe a little bit more conservative.”

“It’s good to be confident and it’s good to be ambitious, but just blend that with some realism and practicality.”

Cavander said the final thing is a plan that shows how your company will deliver a return on the investment. “The kind of return that the investors want is going to vary. In our case, it’s repay the loan. For VCs, it’s 10x.”

In terms of pitching to VCs, Ding said that hard evidence or metrics aren’t always necessary when it comes to a project in the very early stages. “Normally, just two things will be sufficient,” he said. “The first one is the team, and then the second is the idea of the game.” But he warned that companies are unlikely to be able to raise a huge amount of money for an early-stage project.

For projects a bit further along, things like wishlist numbers, Discord communities, YouTube followers, and playtime metrics become more important. Investors might even want to see how the wishlists have evolved over time, and what has caused wishlist spikes, such as viral videos. “People may even say, I want you to show a geographic breakdown of your wishlist,” said Ding.

How important are Steam wishlists?

Whereas once Steam wishlists were considered the ultimate indicator of potential success, their importance as a metric has been questioned in recent years. “The thing is, wishlists can be inflated or not really convert,” said Curran. “And there’s definitely been cases where the developer has done a campaign to get wishlists from just anywhere, and there’s a mistaken belief where this will actually convert to purchases.”

“Wishlists can be inflated or not really convert”

Ding said that wishlist numbers by themselves are not enough to go on as a reliable metric, and should be paired with other indicators such as Steam followers, or anything that can demonstrate that there’s an “active, passionate player community that are eager to play your game and willing to pay for it.”

A Kickstarter campaign is a good example, he said. “If there are already lots of people who are willing to pay for something that hasn’t even been made yet, that could be a very, very good indication.”

That said, wishlist numbers do still carry weight among the top ten publishers. “One of the publishers told me specifically, ‘I’m only looking at the companies who have made the top hundred wishlists – if they’re not on the list, I’m not even talking to them’,” said Ding. “But if you’re talking to, for example, indie publishers, then they would be looking at things that are totally different.”