[IGDA_indies] SIG Focus?

[Tom Park]

>But, the challenge here is that so many indie developers are just too 
>swamped and fighting to stay alive that anything that is not directly 
>applicable to their immediate survival is not of much interest (especially 
>if it means volunteering to get it done)...

I'm sorry I missed this discussion earlier. The above comment
is so right on. It's exactly why I think there's a need for
an Indie SIG.

I joined this SIG specifically because it was an Indie SIG.
I didn't join because of experimental game design. Even though
I do have great interest in experimental and non-traditional
designs, and have been working on one such game design for
years now, it is not a business plan. And in case it is a
viable product, I'm not going to share my experimental
game design ideas with any of you. There are other places
to discuss game design and technical design.

A few years ago I quit EA without any plan except to take a
long vacation, and then, somewhat randomly, I started doing
mobile games independently. Although I had done technical
consulting before, it's different trying to represent your-
self as a business rather than as an individual. Running a
business was quite new to me.

It turned out that I didn't have any trouble landing contracts.
Mobile was taking off and there was lots of opportunity. I think
I was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time,
because bizdev seems to be a problem for other indies.
My problem wasn't bizdev, but rather how to grow and survive.
It wasn't really possible for me to remain a one-man company.

My primary needs when I was Indie (i'm not indie anymore)
were:
1) Getting business/legal advice, and
2) Finding *professional* development help for projects.

I understand that IGDA already has a business/legal sig, but
that contract walkthrough didn't satisfy me. I had way too
many questions, and just didn't have the business experience
to know what were reasonable business practices.

As it turned out, an attorney friend taught me a bit about
legal language and standard software agreements. As an indie,
you can't afford to hire a lawyer to negotiate every contract,
but you're signing documents that have tremendous implication
that you might know almost nothing about:

- What constitutes material breach of contract, and what are
the consequences?
- What does indemnification mean?
- Is it reasonable to expect someone to do a service "in all
due care, in accordance with the best industry practices"?
- Is it reasonable to assign all intellectual property rights
related to any inventions discovered during the course of the
contract?
- Is it reasonable to appoint the publisher as an attorney-
in-fact in my behalf?
- Is NET45 reasonable?
- Can I insist on owning my game engine and just sell them
the game?
- Does your contract have an implied warranty? Do you have to
explicitly state a disclaimer of warranty?
- If it doesn't say "in writing within 90 days", can they hound
you about bugs they find in the software for years afterward?
- Hmmm, I didn't notice the "Except as set forth in 2(c)," at
the front of this paragraph I liked so much, but now I realize
the whole paragraph means nothing.

I didn't even know enough about this stuff to know what
questions to ask. My lawyer had to tell me what to look for.
You think I could have Googled this stuff in the first place?
No way. I googled *after* I learned about it.

So, okay, I learned a lot and in the end, I found myself
negotiating with people who didn't know what the legal issues
were either. And they didn't want to pay a lawyer to negotiate
the contract either; all they knew is that they were to stick
to the original wording of some contract as much as possible.

I still felt that I needed as much business advice as I could
get. Yeah, I read Steve Pavlina's website, but I wanted more.
Actually dexterity.com is much more like what I expected of
this SIG.

What was I was expecting from this SIG? Not sure, but I do
know I was hoping to share some knowledge and war stories.
I was also looking for part-time help. If you and I are both
indies, maybe you have an artist who is underutilized and
I could contract your artist for my current project, and
that way your artist won't quit and take a real job some-
where else that pays real money.

I was totally willing to do volunteer work as a form of
networking. Maybe that's why I never had a problem finding
contracts, because I really like to network. I also had some
industry credentials and a few nice demos. Maybe I could have
passed some of these contracts over to other indies, because
I didn't have the bandwidth to handle all the work I was
offered.

There must be some sort of positive-sum synergy we could have
gotten from a group of indies. However I really didn't have
time to screw around with a group of student wannabes, or
people who weren't truly working as professional indie game
developers and had no indie experiences to contribute. I'm
not saying that that's what the Indie SIG was, but many game
groups are like that.

I don't know. I don't know, because I haven't had a chance to
really get into some good discussions with other indies. Which
is what I was hoping to find here.

--t