[casual_games] Standard Casual Game Contract

[Christopher Natsuume]

All of this talk about lawyers and contracts brings me to another point I
wanted to bring up. I was reading some of the casual game whitepapers, and
there was some talk of creating a standardized casual game contract with a
couple key changeable variables, but identical language that we could use
across the industry. I thought that was just a super idea.

If a couple of the larger portals (hint, hint) were willing to support the
effort and use such a contract, it would make life easier on everyone -
including the distributors themselves, as they could pretty much remove the
"deal with developers trying to change their boilerplate contract" step in
signing games - which would save a lot of producers I know a lot of time. 

If 2-3 of the really major portals were willing to use it, it would likely
have very wide adoption very quickly. I've seen a lot of casual game
contracts, and aside from some structure and wording, they all are about the
same in function. It seems wasteful to have to go through the specific
wording of each one just to make sure it truly is like all of the others -
seems simpler to just have a standard one to start with. And with a standard
contract, the potential frictions that could create legal disputes would
also be minimized, decreasing the contract enforcement burdens on both
parties as well.

The end result would be to keep more of our hard earned development money in
the hands of developers, publishers, and distributors, and not wasted on
unnecessary lawyers. Which we all want, no?

Anyone have any idea how we could get something like this started? 

Cn

__________________________

Christopher Natsuume
Co-Founder, Boomzap
natsuume at boomzap.com