[casual_games] Standard Casual Game Contract

[James Gwertzman]

I think you saw this in the IGDA quarterly - it's one of the initiatives
that we proposed pursuing to help improve the quality of life for casual
game developers (the charter of the IGDA casual game sig).

Just putting out there an annotated sample contract is probably a good
first step and one that does not require portal participation. There is
some discussion around that now. Moving to a standardized industry
contract is more challenging but doable -- but first we're going to
focus on the data reporting standards initiative. If we can get that
adopted, then we may be able to use that momentum to pursue other
initiatives like this one. 

---------------------------
James Gwertzman
Director of Business Development
PopCap Games, Inc.
+1-206-256-4210

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org
[mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of Christopher Natsuume
Sent: Friday, April 07, 2006 11:17 AM
To: 'IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List'
Subject: [casual_games] Standard Casual Game Contract


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


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