Laws and Contracts

As we know game industry is one of the most booming sectors in the present day economic and cultural environment. Games industry have had its impact on many areas of technology and creative design aspects and approaches adopted by other creative and technical fields. So even with me mentioning it should you could assume how much money and economic flow takes place behind each projects and developments. were there is money there comes the laws to safeguard and methods to prevent intellectual theft. below I will be mentioning the 5 major form of legal agreements that are made to prevent all known forms of ethical and civil violations. Non-Disclosure Agreement or NDA to many this might be a very familiar for of legal agreement that's made between and employee and and the company to not let out any technical or intellectual detail regarding the ongoing project. Even for the internship job that I was hired into recently I was asked to sign up an NDA to keep things confidential.

Work For Hire Agreement This contract in simple terms can be defined as a contract made between the game dev studio and the collaborator/contractor regarding who owns the legal rights and ownership of the produced asset which is made as the result of the collaboration. The collaboration contracts are made mostly specifying a payment and milestones and all the necessary requirements to consider the work to be completed.

The studio has the right to deny payment if the produced work doesn't suffice the indented quality requirement.

Development Agreement

its a legal contract made between the game development studio and a video game publisher were the publisher stand as a client asking for the production and development of a certain content. the contract specifies the amount of money the client/published is willing to pay to the game dev studio and amount of work the studio should provide them. The publisher may give right to their on IP to the game dev studio for to make a game. the game developers are supposed to submit a GDD to the client so that the planning, paying and risk assessment get more accurate. The developers are payed o reaching milestones and the clients own all the rights to terminate a project.

Publishing Agreement publishing agreement is one commonly faced contract when studios want to publish their game to reach a wider set of audience and user such as : multi language support, multi-platform support etc. in this form of contract the publisher will be paid on share. There can be short term contract which can be renewed annually, were that the developer can decide to continue the contract or not. End User License Agreement

out of all the contracts this is the most present and popular, were on purchase of the game, the user have the right to own a copy but does not own the game or the source code. The game studio can also enforce rules regarding consumption and player to player interaction while using the game. The contract that is made towards the consumer can vary a lot based on the included legal statements. A most commo clause which can be found associated with video games are regarding the PEGI age rating age.

References:

Witman, P. (2005). The art and science of non-disclosure agreements.Communications of the Association for Information Systems,16(1), 11.

De Cleyn, S. H., Meysman, J., & Braet, J. (2015). A critical assessment of the non-disclosure agreement in the framework of the technology transfer process: a longitudinal study.The Journal of Private Equity,18(2), 39-51.

What Is a Work for Hire Agreement? (n.d.). Retrieved April 29, 2020, from https://www.rocketlawyer.com/article/what-is-work-for-hire-agreement-cb.rl

Rosini. N. (2014, December 3). What’s a “Work for Hire” and Why Should You Care? Retrieved April 29, 2020, from https://www.chronicle.com/article/Whats-a-Work-for-Hire-and/150333

Pearson Television Inc, Pearson Television Netherlands, Pearson Television North America Inc., & Uproar Inc. (n.d.). Internet Game Development Agreement. Retrieved April 29, 2020, from https://contracts.onecle.com/uproar/pearson.lic.2000.07.24.shtml

Strebeck, Z. (2020, February 10). How to get the best game publishing deal. Retrieved April 29, 2020, from https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-03-08-how-to-get-the-best-game-publishing-deal

The University of Melbourne. (n.d.). Understanding publishing agreements : Retrieved April 29, 2020, from https://copyright.unimelb.edu.au/information/copyright-and-research/understanding-publishing-agreements

Taylor, A. (2019, June 20). Everything you need to know about video game EULAs. Retrieved April 29, 2020, from https://seqlegal.com/blog/everything-you-need-know-about-video-game-eulas

CBS This Morning. (2014, December 28).What exactly are you agreeing to with an end-user agreement?[Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceYoNM-DJ80