Pitch Your Game
Fishagon publishes micro-games. Small, finishable games built around one idea that works, made by one person or by a few.
We are a small studio ourselves, so the deal we offer is the one we would want to be offered. You keep your game, you keep the final say on it, and you never end up owing us money. The terms are further down this page rather than behind a call.
Ten minutes, if your links are ready to hand.
What we publish
Micro-games. A game you can finish in three to twelve months, built on one mechanic that earns its place. Not a forty hour epic, and not something that needs a team of fifteen and two more years.
- Three to twelve months of work left on it. This is the number we care about most. Outside that band we will still read your pitch, but be honest with the estimate.
- One core mechanic, done properly. Not a genre sampler.
- Solo developers and teams up to about three. We work at that scale ourselves.
- Steam first, on PC. Nintendo after that, funded and managed by us.
- A build we can play. Not a deck, not a design doc, not a Kickstarter page.
- Any genre. We have shipped card games, platformers, puzzlers, a Git tutorial, a Game Boy homebrew, Playdate dexterity and a party game about describing films badly.
And what we do not
- Live service, MMOs, or anything that needs a content treadmill to stay alive.
- Mobile free to play, gacha, loot boxes, or real money gambling.
- NFTs, crypto, blockchain.
- Games with generative AI in the shipping build. Art, audio, writing, code. Made by people, or we are not the right publisher for it.
- Work for hire. You own your game and we publish it, never the other way round.
- Anything that needs an advance to get made, because we do not pay advances.
The deal
Here is what we bring, before you have to ask us for it.
You keep your game
You own the IP, the code, the art, the audio, all of it. Publishing is a license to distribute and nothing more. If we ever had to step in and finish the game, you would still own the result.
70/30, your way
Once we have recouped what we actually spent, revenue splits seventy percent to you and thirty to us, permanently. Before recoupment it runs the other way. That is the whole split, and nothing else is hiding underneath it.
You keep creative control
Design, art direction, story, scope, content. Final say is yours and it stays yours. We will give you an opinion whenever you want one, and we cannot force a single change.
No advance, no debt
We do not pay an advance, and you never owe us money out of pocket. Costs come back to us out of our own share of the revenue and from nowhere else. If the game earns nothing, you still owe us nothing.
Only real costs recoup
Recoupable costs are money we actually paid to outside companies, with the invoice to prove it. No salaries, no overhead, no management fees, no in-house marketing charge. If we cannot produce the receipt, it does not count.
Buy us out
After your first year on sale you can buy the deal out, at twice what we actually earned across the previous twelve months plus anything still unrecouped. Rights revert, our share ends, and we help move the Steam app, the wishlists and the review history over to you.
We fund the marketing
Real money behind the launch: ads, festivals, creators, agencies. The budget is agreed in writing before we spend any of it and we cannot go over it without your approval. Not one cent goes to our own salaries or overhead, and every line has a receipt. Our time sits on top of that, free.
Nintendo port on us
We fund the Nintendo port, we manage it, and we deal with certification and the platform holder. Xbox and PlayStation we look at once we see how the first two releases perform. If we ever bring in an outside porting studio, you approve them first.
No cross-collateralization
Your revenue never pays down another game in the catalogue. Separate books, no offsets, and an unrecouped balance from some other project can never reach it.
Real production support
QA, production management, localization help, store page assets, analytics, live ops advice. You get our working hours, and our working hours are never a recoupable cost.
These are the terms we start from, not a binding offer. Every deal is its own conversation.
What a publisher actually does
Publishing is a vague word, so this is the list.
- Store page setup, build submission, platform certification and release scheduling.
- Festival and event submissions.
- Bundle sourcing and negotiation.
- Marketing strategy and running the campaign.
- Press and creator outreach.
- Production support and QA.
- Localization, store assets, analytics and live ops guidance.
- Every platform holder relationship, on every platform we ship you to.
Who you would be working with
Fishagon started in 2012 making tabletop card games and now makes video games full time. We have shipped Train Your Minibot, git gud, Vice Versa, DexSweeper and Boring Movies on Steam, DexSweeper on Playdate, and OXO on real Game Boy Color hardware.
We publish other people's games too. Zyndeck VX, a tactical RPG card battler by CaliCG, is the first game we took on as a publisher and arrives in 2027. You can see it at the top of the 2026 showcase, or on Steam.
How this goes
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Send the form.
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We play the build. Fishagon is a small team, so we are not going to promise you a turnaround time that we would then miss. What we will promise is that every pitch gets an answer, including when the answer is no.
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If it looks like a fit, we get on a call.
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Term sheet, then the agreement. The terms above are where we open, not where we insist.
Two things worth saying before you send anything. We do not sign NDAs to look at a pitch, so please do not send us something you need kept secret. And we turn down pitches that overlap with any of our upcoming projects, because that gets awkward for everybody.
What you will need
The form below asks for all of this. Worth gathering it first.
- A playable build.
- A trailer or gameplay video. Unlisted phone footage is fine.
- Your Steam page, if you have one.
- A one sentence hook, under 140 characters.
- Two hundred words on what the player does and why it is worth their time.
- An honest estimate of how many months of work are left.
- Who is on the team and what they each do.
- Whether anyone else has a claim on the game: publishers, grants, platform funds, signed letters of intent.
- Any licensed or third party assets in the build.
- Wishlist numbers, if you have a store page already.
Pitch us
Got a small game? Tell us about it.