When a project has more than one founder

In game devs, the founders are usually creative people who dream of creating decent games. And even with the dominance of kazualshchina, when in addition to the professionals absolutely “left” people who want to quickly cut the dough seep in here. Distinguishing such people is not a particular problem. Those who come to geymdev, first of all think about creativity, money goes by the wayside, unlike other professions such as bankers, speculators, officials and the like. Therefore, initially in the game devs, respectable people who trust each other gather.

But on one trust you will not get far, over time we change and if at the start the founders coincided in opinions, then over time completely opposite plans for further development appear. As an example - the founders of the Space Rangers eventually disagreed, one decided to play fantasy games, and the other still make games in the style of science fiction. And this is not the only example, there are many of them - www.gamedev.ru/industry/forum/?id=162545#m10

Therefore, initially there should be only one person who alone makes all the decisions about the development plans of the game or studio. With the obligation to listen to the arguments of other founders, however, he alone must make the final decision. If there is no such person in your team, then a high probability appears in the breakdown of your offspring on the principle “neither to yourself nor to people”. And do not think about the chosenness of your team, they say this will not happen to you. Thinking so once I paid for it :)

In the end, the question arises as to how other founders get out of the project, without a quarrel, when will it go awry? I think about it periodically and came to such conclusions. Initially, there is no point in assigning to each founder fabulous percentages: 20%, 30%, 50% is a bad idea.
')
The share of profits from each founder should be as small as possible, for example, 3-5%. After paying these interest your team will have 80-90% of free money, which should be distributed to salaries (including the founders), advertising, office and other expenses. If after all expenses money remains, then they are divided between the founders working in a team, as a percentage (the sum of all interest is added and accepted as 100%).

Thanks to such low interest rates, the founder who left the team will not take the lion's share of the profits from the project, and at the same time will have a steady income from his past labors. And at the same time there is an opportunity to accept new founders in the team at any stage of the project development.

If someone has been working on a project without a salary (as is usually the case with a game of several founders), has made a great contribution for a long time, then you can usually make an increase in its share twice after leaving the team.

What is “made a big contribution”? For example, a person worked full time half a year without a salary and laid the foundations of the project. You can agree on the payment of salaries at current market value for the time of his work on enthusiasm. But not immediately, but according to the possibilities of your current profit from the project.

Thus, it turns out 10% share of the profits and another plus $ 30,000 - $ 60,000 bonus when one founder leaves the project. I think if you follow these rules and initially give similar approval to all the founders, then the insults and quarrels will be much less. And fans of your game can continue to continue to fan from it :)