I was wondering this and thought it’d be nice to ask here as many of you may have worked with teams.
Say you have a team were you all participate on making the game, every and each one of you on his own way. Now comes the time where you publish your game and say you manage to sell it on steam. How all the team members will get paid and by which way? A member who will be chosen will give his credit card on steam so profits will go on this account and then share the profit with other members? But that doesn’t really seems a good idea. So how it’s done?
If you want on the sure side, it would be no bad investion.
Setup a working(!) international NDA is not easy, when you have no company.
Check identity of teammembers, when you met them in the web first time.
So many greedy fakes around.
It’s really complicated… As the contract must be done through the internet… And even if you do make a contract, you’ll have an extremely hard time suing someone from another country…
So it’s better to work alone…?
You would have a limited company (or whatever it is called in the US, or wherever you are), and that company would have a bank account. That’s where the money would go, not onto a credit card.
As for paying people, it depends how the company was set-up.How much of the company does everyone own? Are all the people shareholders? Do they take the proceeds as employees or shareholders? (That last question is for your individual accountants, though).
Making a limited company is a pain in the *** too as you’ll have to pay fees, and especially here where I am (Greece) it will take a long time to establish such company because of bureaucracy…
So without establishing a company, nor going to the lawyer I imagine there is no other way than waiting from the others to have “a good heart” and make the split equally(at this point put the laughter on volume 3 please).
It’s probably not a good idea to get in league with someone you can’t trust in the first place. I know that can be difficult to do over the internet, but asking for credible references and researching potential colleagues goes a long way.
Valve won’t take you on, unless you are a company. It’s simply one of those things you have to do. EDIT: Wrong!
And if you are setting up the company, and you are worried about being let down, make yourself (or someone you trust) the person who is in charge. Simple!
“Make yourself the one in charge”. Well I’m not the only smart person in the team who would like that… Others aren’t stupid either…
Valve won’t take me on? Then how indie’s put their game on greenlight?
Greenlight rules:
About the game
This one-time fee will grant your Steam account access to post and update as many of your games as you like within Greenlight.
All proceeds from this fee (minus taxes) will be donated directly to Child’s Play, a charity dedicated to improving the lives of children in over 70 hospitals worldwide.
Once you’ve paid the submission fee, you can continue the submission process through the Greenlight website. Before posting your game
Before you post your game to Steam Greenlight, you must agree to the following:
- You own the rights to sell the game you are posting, or you have specific authorization to represent the developer
- You agree to the terms and conditions of the Steam Subscriber Agreement
Additionally, you agree not post any item to Greenlight that contains the following:
- Someone else’s game, unless you have specific authorization to do so
Porn, inappropriate or offensive content, warez or leaked content
- Cheating, hacking, game exploits
- Threats of violence or harassment, even as a joke
- Games using copyright material such as assets or intellectual property without permission from the owner
- Soliciting, begging, auctioning, selling, advertising, referrals racism, discrimination
Abuse of Steam Greenlight will result in forfeit of your Greenlight Submission fee and/or banning from Steam Community services.
It doesn;t say anywhere that you must be a company to submit…
It is very important!!!(overuse of ! i know, but it is one important step).
You have to trust eachother.
When you reached halfway up with your project and one anonym greedy ******* is stealing code, or selling retextured meshes, perhaps you change the way you think…
I hold it so:
Make a picture of your ID card, black out the numbers, but adress name and country has to stay intact.
Then make a selfie, where you hold up a piece of paper with some special written words under your face (for project xyz).
Ok and then what? Say you do this. If in the end, one takes the project and sells it as his own? Will you sue him or beat the **** out of him? He is in another country man… All this require a tremendous fuss and I doubt that you’ll find a good lawyer to back you up in such a case…
If you got funds (kickstarter/private), or substantial money in my country and i think in europe in general, and you haven’t a company all money its considered benefits and taxes are big (around 50% passing certain amount > 2000€/3000€).
You must create a company for pay salary, expenses (software,hardware, etc) and not pay taxes for that incoming since this are not benefits. And taxes are around 20% after deduct expenses, instead of 50%.
Of course i speaking about my country but if you live in europe i think its very similar.
Do it without company or without declare the money for pay taxes and perhaps later in a year or two you receive a penalty for defraud and letter for pay “50% of all incoming”.
I doubt, at least initially, but if you launch your game and got enough incoming and you can pay royalties, i think its a great idea legalize all with contracts before pay and contract a adviser’s office.
at least if you not want have problems for defraud your country taxes.
Your best and cheap option (legal way) i think its contract a adviser’s office / tax advisor (i think its the correct word in English). They do contract, advice, invoicing an taxes for (Here) 60€-100€ monthly.
And you as ‘self-worked’ / self-employed, i read you must pay 50€/Monthly + taxes in Greece.
I am lucky that my friend who i trust is living in same country (same city even) and we teamed up to make some indie games. So for now I do not have headache of international team members. At some point (when we get some funds for game) we hire artists, pay them for work and that is it. We have luxury of us both being coders, so there is no need of giving source files to anybody. Artists can work with compiled game taken from flightest.
Yes, you’re extremely lucky… Also an artist can make a model you want in a 3d program and just give the model to you and that’s it… He doesn’t even need to get his hands on the game…
But in overall, I think that making a team is tedious, even for “learning”, many could steal your finished work and apply it to their project… What a pitty…
I agree the right way to do this is with a third entity that holds the funds (A company) and then issues payment based on the agreed split. This also gives you a single pool to pull expenses from. IE: submission fees. This way one person isnt footing the bill.