Game studio CFO services: will the cash reach the ship date?

Runway-to-ship, not just runway

"Months of cash left" is the wrong number for a studio. The right number is whether cash reaches the ship date plus the tail — the marketing push around launch and the month or two before the first store payout arrives. We keep a live forecast of exactly that gap, rebuilt monthly from actual burn, and it becomes the studio's decision engine: a three-month slip is not "a delay," it is a priced quantity of payrolls, and cutting a feature or adding a contractor gets weighed in weeks of runway rather than argued in the abstract.

The forecast also disciplines optimism about revenue. Wishlists convert at launch at whatever rate they convert; the plan should survive the low end of that range, with the upside treated as acceleration rather than rescue.

Headcount is where the forecast earns its keep. A studio's burn is mostly people, so we model the roster in tiers: the core team the game cannot ship without, contractors whose end dates flex with milestones, and outsourced work — audio, porting, QA — that can be timed to land after a credit refund or a publisher milestone instead of before it.

Tax credits are real money on a slow clock

Ontario studios sit on two of the strongest programs in the industry — the OIDMTC at up to 40 percent of eligible Ontario labour, and SR&ED with its enhanced refundable credit for CCPCs — but neither pays on your payroll schedule. An OIDMTC claim for a non-specified product is filed for the year the product is completed, needs a certificate from Ontario Creates, and refunds only after the T2 claim is processed. SR&ED waits for year-end, the claim, and CRA review. And the same payroll dollar cannot be claimed under both programs, so splitting expenditures between them is a planning decision, not a form-filling exercise.

The CFO job is keeping those lines on one page: what the credits are realistically worth, when the cash genuinely lands, and whether a bridge — a bank line, a credit-focused lender, or simply slower hiring — is needed to connect the spend to the refund. Counting a credit as cash before it is assessed is the classic studio mistake; we model refunds conservatively and treat early arrival as good news.

Platform mix: the store cut shapes the whole model

Steam's standard cut is 30 percent, with reductions only at revenue tiers most independent studios never reach, and console stores take a comparable share — so a studio's real revenue line is net of nearly a third before FX, refunds, and regional pricing. We model launch scenarios on net proceeds: wishlist count times a conservative conversion range, times average net price after the launch discount, spread over the curve. A publisher advance changes the shape, not the total — it is a loan against your royalties, so we track recoupment explicitly and can tell you the sales level at which royalty cheques actually start. Subscription-style deals trade guaranteed cash for tail revenue; whether that trade is good depends entirely on your runway position, which is exactly what the forecast is for.

The cross-border layer

Store payouts come from US entities, which makes treaty paperwork a revenue issue: a missing W-8BEN-E can cost 30 percent of a payout that took years to earn. Characterization of platform income, protective filings, and the OIDMTC-SR&ED interplay with US contracts are covered on our game studio cross-border tax page. On the treasury side, USD revenue against CAD payroll is a natural hedge — we keep a US-dollar account and convert on a schedule, not on impulse.

How we work with studios

Monthly: reforecast runway-to-ship from actuals, update the credit calendar, and reconcile milestone billings. Quarterly: scope-versus-runway decisions with the founders. Annually: the T2, the claims, and the certificate files. Fees are fixed and quoted after a discovery call, and everything rests on project-coded books — see our game studio bookkeeping service for that layer.

Source: Ontario Creates — Ontario Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit.