Hello Game Developers,
I have a question that I hope people with your experience can answer:
How do you divide up equity and profits in a creative endeavor?
I’m a product designer and I’m working with some classmates on a bunch of products/inventions that we hope to license or sell. We each have our own part time jobs, class schedules, and other responsibilities. We work on the company when we have time, but a lot of the work and communication is done online. Nobody is clocking in a time sheet or anything because it’s cumbersome to the creative process, and we trust each other enough not to mandate such a thing. But we know that not everyone’s work will go into the final deliverable, and that some contributions are more invisible than others. But how do we split up any money we get if this works out?
The more I thought about the situation, the more this sounded like game development, particularly in modding. I’m sure a lot of great games have spawned as side projects and mods, but at some point the team had to agree on how to divide up the revenue from sales or possibly an acquisition. But if the project has been underway for several years by then, who can accurately remember who contributed what? Even in an established company, one person’s work can be totally cut from the final product, but that doesn’t mean he/she didn’t contribute to the overall success and deserve a paycheck.
Do you have any suggestions or best practices for this kind of thing? Technology has made work so flexible and incongruous, but how can we also make it fair?
Any advice is appreciated.
David