I''ve just stared designing a game for the PC and i want to make it myuself so my friend and i decided to make a company, but i need help, especially if there is anyone out the from the UK who could answer this question for me, how do you regiiser your company, and trademark your logo and stuff like that? If anyone could help id be most grateful. Also does anyone know how to go about trying to gte a publisher intersted in my game? thanks. -Surreal

I''m also developing a PC game atm, which I''ve been working on with someone else for about a year. We looked into starting up our own company, and still plan to do this eventually.

I got as far as getting a booklet from Business Link, which is an organisation that can give you all the advice and support you need to set up a small business.

However, we decided to wait for now for a couple of reasons. The first was that we want to have complete creative control over the game, and don''t want to be pushed around by a publisher or investors or anyone else involved. We thought that if we started setting up a company with the help of Business Link they would want to pair us up with an existing development company, which we don''t want.

Also, I live in Leicestershire and the other person working on the game lives somewhere south of Birmingham, and we will soon have a third member who will likely live in a third location. We thought this would put the business people off and they wouldn''t be confident that we were serious about this.

So what we''re doing atm is trying to at least get the design doc completely finished and a demo sorted out before we do anything else. But we could really do with some financial help to get software/hardware that we need.

We really want to get set up as a dev company asap, and we want to get in contact with publishers, but we haven''t done anything about this yet, and don''t really know where to start. So if anyone has any advice on this...

I wondered if there was a website anywhere that had a list of publishers and contact details, or usual procedures for submitting games to them. Also I imagine there are good practices to follow, such as not sending them too much to start with. And what about different contract types, etc?

Thanks,
thats the same problem i''ve got only my friend and i both live in Lincs, so we don''t need to worry about that though we''re still looking for a team but i think that can wait till i''ve finished the design doc.

You expect other people to put money into your company, but want to keep complete create control?

You dont want publishers telling you what to do?

Dream on.....

I have to agree with Mr. Anonymous -- a new company can have one of two things: creative control, or funding from a publisher. Not both. I highly recommend heading over to gamasutra.com and reading one of the latest features, which dispels several myths about starting your own business. If you''re serious about doing this, you have a long and difficult road ahead of you.

-Ironblayde
Aeon Software

Thanks for your advice,
what about if we made the game ourselves without any funding from anyone so we have full creative control, and then we take the finished game to a publisher - will they still be likely to want to change things then? Wouldn''t they still want to change the same things as if we went to them in the first place? I mean is it worth struggling by without funding if in the end, if we want it published commercially, it will have to end up the same way anyway?

If they don''t like all of what they see they will demand
changes. It costs money to publish games. So they won''t
publish if they don''t think it will sell. You
could always self publish on the internet. I don''t
know if you would make any money though.

Like Davaris said, it''s kind of a gamble, because whether or not a publisher will touch it will be based largely on whether what you''ve created coincides with their vision of what will sell. You will have completed your game, though, so that takes away some of the risk -- nobody wants to have their project cancelled after a year''s worth of work, and then not be able to do anything about it because it''s still the publisher''s intellectual property. But it will also make it more difficult to implement any changes that the publishers will want to see. That kind of stuff is much easier to do earlier on in development.

So I guess it''s up to you... good luck to you.

-Ironblayde
Aeon Software