At Pocket Gamer Connects London 2016, Shum Singh, MD & Founder of Agnitio Capital, gave a talk on the "golden rules" for raising funding from institutional investors.

He began by talking about the market in general, touching on its impressive growth, the lack of paid games in the top 100 grossing games on the US App Store, and the growing cost of buying users.

Keeping it local

When it comes to actual funding, Singh noted that the majority of games funding has been seen in the UK and Finland, as well as some in Germany where there are strong analytics companies.

However, most VC's are now looking to invest outside of Europe "despite the talent and success that has blossomed here in Europe", as Singh says.

This has led to a rise in strategic investments from developers and smaller companies into other developers, as well as VCs which fund only developers from their country.

Know your business

Getting down to the matter of actually getting funded, Singh suggested that you need to start by trying to "assemble as great of a team as humanly possible" to stand out in the market.

This includes hiring a commercial director, "somebody who understands your finances", as most developers don't know enough about the business side of running a company.

Singh further drove the point home by saying that investors are interested in games that are commercially focused, particularly in the free-to-play market which has seen significant growth in revenue.

As well as this, your team will need networking skills, so that they have the ability to talk to as many investors as possible.

You can see all our videos from Pocket Gamer Connects London 2016 in this YouTube Playlist.