Is a simple plain english, in other words not written by a lawyer, agreement about what percentage of 'ownership' over the entire project in all aspects sufficently binding for a project that is more to complete a decent sized project than to make money? Basically this is the situation: A group of people, some known to each other in real life and some not, are making a game and they are debating about charging a nominal fee for 'full access' to a multiplayer game. Obviously, the project probably will not make any money as it's the first time most of the people in this group built anything of a scale beyond simple single player games like Tetris or web turn-based games like Planetarion. But on the off chance it made anything beyond the red line it would be nice to have an agreement that I wouldn't have to pay a lawyer to write. And yes, we could just release everything as freeware or to the public domain and not care about it at all but we don't want to bear the entire cost of a learning experience if it can be helped easily.

Have you or are you intending in setting yourselves up as a company?.

Either way, as much as it would be nice not to involve a lawyer, you would be storing up trouble if/when the game starts to make money. After all, friends/acquaintances can fall out and, if you've not pinned down your agreement properly from the start, it could get quite messy and more expensive when you do eventually have to go to a lawyer.

Generally, your first appointment with a lawyer is free (certainly in the UK) but I've no idea if this is the case with a contract lawyer. There's plenty of sites around that could give you perhaps a more definitive answer.

Good luck

Quote: Original post by evelyn
Have you or are you intending in setting yourselves up as a company?.

Either way, as much as it would be nice not to involve a lawyer, you would be storing up trouble if/when the game starts to make money. After all, friends/acquaintances can fall out and, if you've not pinned down your agreement properly from the start, it could get quite messy and more expensive when you do eventually have to go to a lawyer.

Generally, your first appointment with a lawyer is free (certainly in the UK) but I've no idea if this is the case with a contract lawyer. There's plenty of sites around that could give you perhaps a more definitive answer.

Good luck

That isn't true with what lawyers I know of in the US. And like I said, it probably would not make any money and even if it did it would probably not make enough if any legal fees were involved. Its mainly just to make a decent sized game. And, we don't have a full team, just 3 programmers and a writer probabaly atm. So we would have strangers involved as well, and I realize I didn't mention that heh.