While I have always advocated offensive goals such as getting better at your craft, finding a team of like minded people, shipping a portfolio of innovative games, and not worrying too much about defensive details such as contracts, NDA’s, company structure, etc. many people are still concerned with these issues. Since Push Button Labs recently went through getting our company set up, I thought I would give you just one example of how to get through some of these issues and explain how we did it.

Dividing Company Equity Is Not As Easy As Cutting Pizza

Before we get started, I have to give the big IANAL (I am not a lawyer) disclaimer, but I have been through a bunch of company start ups, so I have some experience here. Lawyers are going to be a big reach for any unfunded Indie developer. My take on all of this is to make sure you have a great honest relationship with the people you are working with. Once you have that, completely discuss everything as clearly and honestly as you can, then put down your agreements in plain terms (I’ll give some examples below), then once you get some traction, you can make things official later. This is the way Damon Slye and I did it for Dynamix. We didn’t have attorney drawn up papers for years, and once we got bigger we still went back to our original personally written documents if we had questions. In other words, you need to have partners you can trust and if you don’t, no amount of legalese or contracts can make things work. Partners have to want to make things work with each other.
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