REVENUE SHARE DOCUMENT

Hello every,
can any one help me with a Revenue Share Document for indie game team. or you can write the format for me its very Urgent.

 

Sounds like you need to find a lawyer.

Incidentally, I'm also curious about resources to help with drawing up FLAT PAY contracts for various creative endeavors, but I've figured I'll need to do the above - talking to a lawyer at least, if not having one write the contract itself.

 

Why?

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(This is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer!)

The hard part isn't writing a reasonable contract, the hard part is enforcing it once sh!t went south (in my humble opinion). I'd save the lawyer for that part.

Just google "revenue share contract template" and see if you can find a good one that is licensed in a way that you can use for free, or buy it for a reasonable fee.



I once visited an actual lawyer to ask about trademark/copyright/eula stuff for an iOS game I was planning to release, and he told me to just look at the EULAs of the top 3 games and write the same thing in my own words. He said that's literally what he'd do and I don't need to pay him upwards of 1000$ to do that.
It cost me 150,- Euro to talk to him for 45 minutes.


Don't forget to put clear terms into the contract on IP ownership, liability in case of getting sued as a developer, what happens when the game doesn't make it to market, financial liabilities in case of onforseen costs before or after release, very clearly define what exactly constitutes the "profit" or "revenue" that is being shared etc.. As a dev you probably are more qualified to think of more edge cases that need to be defined than an actual lawyer without gamedev experience would imho. So if you do pick a lawyer, I recommend looking for one with some experience in this domain.

 

thank you for your reply, your last paragraph will help is i can find a template. the issue is i have been googling for weeks now i cant find any template that has been used by game devs. i you have any of this template kindly share with me here.

 

yes , i thought of that , but the issue is finding a lawyer that have experience in game dev.

 

I don't have any templates, but maybe there's some good info in these?

 

For me it's a little more complicated than just game dev (I'm thinking about setting up a company under which music, video games, and maybe books would be released), but good point.

 

Yeah, that goes a little beyond a simple revenue share agreement, I see why you'd want to get some advice on that one from someone who knows more about IP law etc.. Not sure where you live, but where I live a tax accountant is pretty much mandatory as well for such endeavours. And someone who is aware of gotchas that are domain-specific that aren't common knowledge to either tax accountants or lawyers. In your case with music for example, there's probably a lot to keep in mind regarding youtube, content ID, licensing etc..


P.S.: worth checking out in this context:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ljfrench009

He has a patreon, but off the top of my head I don't remember if there's anything useful in his reward tiers.

 

A contract is a contract is a contract. The lawyer just needs experience with contract law, which should be easy to find.

 

For the writing part, sure. For knowing what needs to be covered in a specific industry? I'm not so sure. When talking to lawyers I've often been referred to other lawyers if asking about something that's outside of their specialty.

Broadly I'd agree, but... if the former isn't good enough no amount of the latter will fix it. So if I weren't confident in my ability to write a good enough contract I'd definitely get a professional involved.

 

Contracts are not the mysterious cryptic formulation folks make them out to be. A couple of things to remember. Will and shall mean different things..one compulsory, one not. Never repeat your condition as this will be interpreted as having two different conditions. State exactly the terms one by one. If you want to use terms of legal import check the wording against Black's Law Dictionary. You can usually find a boilerplate contract and just alter the words to suit your paradigm. I am not a lawyer but have written contracts for international commodities purchases of 10's of thousands of metric tons of steel, medium terms notes worth 10's of millions, currency swaps, every one of my few hundred freelance contracts, patent filings and corporate charters. Writing programs to do an explicit series of steps to transact a final outcome is not much different. Just be very precise with your wording. It can be quite simple. I found for example if you traded internationally you might have a contract for 125,000 metric tons of Heavy Melting Steel 1 [HMS1] that is barely over a page with another page for distribution of Mandate commissions. In the US that same contract essentially ending up with the same protections, liability and product delivery may be 10-20 pages. My take on this is to toss all the lawyers in the ocean for making the formal handshake deal transcription into a devil's maze of arcane BS when it is entirely unnecessary. Don't ever say I am not concerned about globull warming.

 

And then there are websites like the following that take the concept and run with it. I noticed one of the options under the compensation section allows you to specify a percentage of gross income which sounds very much like revenue sharing.

https://docontract.com/

 

thanks