Pitch & Pixel

Pitch & Pixel is a business simulation about running a digital agency across 30 years of industry history. You manage sales and marketing, win clients, deliver projects, grow your team and compete with AI-controlled agencies. You choose your path, whether that means building a small team, expanding into an agency group with subsidiaries, specializing in an industry, collecting awards or acquiring rivals.

Run your agency

The game spans four eras, each with its own interface, period-specific fonts, animations and sound effects. You promote your agency through 11 channels: newspaper ads, trade fairs, PR work, expert articles, sponsorships, radio spots, banner ads, SEA, SEO, conference keynotes and influencer deals. Each channel has a historical availability date, a distinct mix of lead tiers and its own return-on-investment metrics. The trade press reports on your successes and setbacks.

Marketing can attract clients, but you still need to pitch them on your offering. Set prices with the market in mind: even a successful, well-known agency cannot charge unlimited rates and remain profitable and competitive. Clients fall into four tiers—small client, mid-market, enterprise and corporation. As your agency grows and its reputation rises, larger, more demanding clients with deeper pockets approach you. Reputation improves through awards, marketing and clean work, and falls after scandals or botched projects.

Accepted projects run day by day. You assign hours to tasks, manage deadlines and choose whether to trade quality for volume. Good delivery can earn retainer contracts, which provide recurring monthly revenue.

Build your team

Your employees fill eight roles: Sales, Account Manager, Developer, Designer, Marketer, Accountant, HR and Manager. Each has a skill rating from 1 to 10 and individual traits. Training raises skills at a cost in time and money, while a fruit basket helps keep morale high. At the start, you also choose one of six founder traits: Perfectionist, Specialist, Salesperson, Networker, Strategist or Investor. Each brings both bonuses and penalties.

Compete and expand

AI agencies operate alongside yours, with their own staff, marketing budgets, skill profiles and strategies. They pitch against you, poach employees, acquire competitors, go bankrupt or become industry leaders. As you succeed, a personal rivalry can emerge; rivals repeatedly challenge you, and you can deliberately sabotage them or drive them into insolvency. Each run randomizes the number and orientation of competitors, as well as market volume and growth.

You can acquire weaker competitors and absorb their staff and contracts, or keep them as subsidiaries. Subsidiaries find and process their own contracts autonomously. You decide how much of their profit to take as dividends, and whether to bail them out when they struggle or let them fail.

Crises and difficulty

Historical crises include the Dotcom Crash of 2001, the Financial Crisis of 2008 and the COVID Pandemic of 2020, alongside other market upheavals. You need to manage the agency over multiple in-game years, with bankruptcy possible if you make poor decisions. The game offers four difficulty levels:

• Story: Score multiplier ×0.6, for learning the system at a more relaxed pace.
• Standard: Score multiplier ×1.0, the recommended setting.
• Founder: Score multiplier ×1.4, with more aggressive competitors and rivals who start with twice the cash.
• Ironman: Score multiplier ×2.5, with one save, no reloading, significantly higher costs and harder AI.

The game includes a mod system with Steam Workshop support and a leaderboard.