Follow the money

Funding and Accelerators

The “Uncomfortable” Zone

Most incubators cannot afford to directly finance or fund their teams with capital. Those who can are usually private and take on the role of seed investor. More commonly this is a practice with accelerators.

As an incubator, if you do not invest yourself, your role will be to help your teams on their road to introducing themselves to funding organisations, accelerators and business angels (mostly they also do seed investment). This ties in with the community network and industry events discussed in the “Community” chapter as the people we are looking at here will also be present at some of these events.

On the other side, there are events that introduce teams specifically to e.g. funding agencies. Therefore, you will need to have good knowledge of the different funding schemes offered to game start-ups. Knowing the stakeholders will help you shape the teams’ own approach to these decision-makers.

Another type of funding is through prizes won with awards. Here too, you cannot do a direct introduction, but your pitch practices and your knowledge of the “nature” of the awards and the “spirit” of the jury and award operators will again help you in supporting the teams’ own presentation in these contexts.

For accelerators, unless you are yourself operating in this direction, your knowledge about the type and ambition of different accelerators will be valuable in guiding the way the teams introduce themselves to these key stakeholders.

Awards and Other Competition Events

• Digital Dragons Awards
• gamescom Award
• German Computer Games Award (Deutscher Computerspielpreis)
• Independent Games Festival
• Nordic Game Awards
• The Game Awards

Resources