If you go with a software version of your game, heaven help you, there are so many loopholes in software contracts to plug, it's a seemingly impossible task. Here's a horror story; I used to have a contract with one company that said they write the software and put it on-line, and I get paid by the number of hours people play it, as a percentage of the money they pay to play. This all seems reasonable until the game goes on-line for free. Free? How can they make money from that? Simple, they put advertising on it, and also use it as a hook for their pay-and-play games to bring in customers. The contract wording is just ambiguous enough to make this practice very questionable, but the bottom line is I don't get paid anything.

How do you cover yourself for this? It's hard to guess what the computer industry will do next, when I signed the aforementioned contract, advertising banners were not considered a viable source of income (DOS times, pre WIN95). Still, try to imagine ALL sources of income that the game can produce, figure out a way to calculate that figure, then ask for a percentage of that. Actually, that's what I thought I was doing, but got caught by modern times. Possibly sources of income include sublicensing to other on-line companies, secondary market products, advertising income, "hook" use of the game for other marketables, sale of the game as a stand-alone product, etc, etc. Use your imagination.

Probably the best way to handle it is this; get some cash up front, and an annual fee for every year the game is on-line, and a lump sum if the game is published as a stand-alone. Everything else is frills. If you base your payment on sales quantities, sure enough someone is going to make it freeware with advertising sales. Make the contract as cut-and-dried as possible, no room for arguments and no questionable phraseology. Eventually, I will post a contract here so folks have a standard to work with. Hey, who knows, maybe it'll become an industry standard?

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Tom Jolly
www.jollygames.net