The story of how P and X game "shared"

This is a true story. The events described in the post occurred in the United States in 2015-2016. The names of the characters have been changed, but everything else is described as it actually was.

Loud success stories, like the stories of failures, are more than enough known in game devs. Against this background, it is interesting to observe those who remain "in the shadow" - ordinary people with ordinary successes - and also look at the "pitfalls" that each of us may encounter in practice.

Today I would like to share with you one such informative story. Just so that you will not be painfully hurt later, when someone else will reap the benefits of your work instead of you. The problem is that by putting considerable effort into creative and technical skills, we often ignore all other aspects of game development.

Just in case, I warn you, your humble servant has nothing to do with this story, but considers it to be quite an illustrative example of a classic situation.

Introduction

Once upon a time there were two friends in the USA - Artist X and Programmer P. Artist X was a veteran of the gaming industry and over the years managed to work in several large companies - however, his career has not reached any significant heights during this time. Programmer P also managed to work in a serious company, even if he had less experience and had a low position.
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After seeing how popular indie games are, including those released by their colleagues, they also decided to make their own game. In 2014-2015, in the USA, among many indie developers, there was a firm belief that, if they did indie, then in a certain popular genre, for which for the most part only a programmer and an artist would be enough. Having added a couple of twists to a familiar formula, on this, P and X decided and opt.

Of course, as is usually the case, the first thing that came up was the important question of how to divide the skin of an unkilled bear. Agreed that the profit will be divided 50/50. To do this, it was decided to immediately establish a company in the form of LLC .

Two years have passed. All this time, P and X have been working on the game. Artist X, through his connections, found a small indie publisher who helped him carry out a modest, but successful, crowdfunding campaign and arranged a PR game.

In the end, the game came out, after which the most interesting thing happened.

Mistake

The shortcomings and technical problems in the game turned out to be more than enough, but the main time bomb was game design and its implementation. It is simply obsolete for 20 years - no one has done this in 2015.

Many of the readers have probably seen the famous presentations of “The Art of Screenshake” and “Juice It or Lose It” , dedicated to the fact that modern pixel-art games, despite all the nostalgia, in terms of gameplay have very little in common with those games in which we played once; today they can and should be done better. Alas, the heroes of our today's history either did not watch it, or simply ignored it.

The result was the emergence of a truly monstrous creation, which was played exactly like the most hardcore games from the time of the 486th (compared to her, playing Dark Souls felt like a pleasant walk in the park, and I'm not joking). This feature was not declared, and the players, of course, did not like it - outraged players on the forums and the low rating of the release on Steam greatly undermined sales.

Programmer P was basically satisfied with the result and calmly prepared the patches. However, X was convinced that he had suspected earlier - even if P had some professional programming experience in a large game studio, he was not involved in either AI or gameplay - P did not have the necessary skills for gameplay programmer . Therefore, X, together with the publisher, decided that much more was invested in the game, time and effort, and decided to continue to act independently.

Climax

After a couple of months, the game, despite all the troubles, earned about $ 50,000; plus crowdfunding by that time brought about 25,000. Of the total amount, P received less than 10,000 - and P also paid for the foundation of the company, the purchase of necessary licenses and equipment and the server.

A little time after the release, X published a post in which he promised the golden mountains opened up a roadmap of upcoming updates, which should have corrected all the flaws, as well as added new content to the game. In it, X said that for these improvements it will be necessary to hire a new programmer, so you should not wait for quick updates.

In response, P. turned to X - for what reason he made all these decisions without his participation, because they are partners - all the more so because P. had already finished work on a patch that could be released and fix all serious problems with the game ( but note, not with its design). In addition, he asked X to abandon his plans and think over everything once again together.

At least on the first point P was right. LLC very vaguely resembles a Russian LLC. According to the laws of the United States, each of the founders of LLC has a share of 50% of the profit by default, unless an additional agreement has been concluded - P and X did not have it. True, all the other rules of the LLC in our case are strictly violated. P absolutely did not understand legal issues, and therefore he did not know anything about sales statistics, nor how profit sharing should be performed. He, of course, suspected something was wrong for a long time, but he did not give vent to his fears - after all, X knew him quite a long time and trusted him completely.

In response, X immediately took away from P all access rights to the game on Steamworks and deprived him of “access to the body” - henceforth, P had to discuss all business issues exclusively with his wife X and the publisher’s representative. Which, naturally, most of the questions and requests were silent and did not answer, but they made it clear that in their opinion, P hoped to “cut down” the money quickly, which in this case did not work. Formally, the publisher suggested that partners should resolve the conflict with each other.

He did not expect such a development of events, P turned to lawyers, hoping for a resolution of the issue through the court, but it was not there. Of course, he was told that his case has the right to exist; However, when he found out the cost of legal assistance on this issue, he decided that the best option for him would be to simply accept the situation. For the money that he received for two years of work, nothing could be done; the money that he did not receive at that time would not have been able to offset the costs. Moreover, while P wondered what he should do, X almost certainly “pulled out” money from the LLC bank account to his personal account.

In fact, all these events came as a shock to P only - X took all the necessary actions a long time ago, and obviously not without help from the “publisher”. The contract with the publisher was in the hands of only X, and he ignored all requests for P to submit it (which was also required for lawyers). X himself answered for the game design, so P didn’t understand why this question never came up before the release, because all the flaws were evident long before the game was released. Moreover, a similar precedent has already happened several months ago, when a new artist was taken on the game, who was dismissed in a short time without compensation and official employment.

For some reason, this did not alert. He was a peace-loving man and simply loved to make games, and once he was happy to take advantage of the offer of X to take all the paperwork on himself.

Decoupling

Want to know how this story ended?

The company was closed, and as a result all intellectual property passed to X.

X went his own way: he hired a programmer who completely redid the gameplay and did everything “as it should.” The success was not long in coming - from the moment of the conflict, the game brought the publisher more than $ 300,000 (according to conservative estimates).

P almost certainly confined himself to modest compensation (or did not receive anything — in fact, history is silent about this). According to the rules adopted in the United States, to start the process of closing the LLC, a majority must vote for closing it, and in some states this will require votes of 2/3 of the founders. I would not be surprised if X's wife was in fact also listed as the founder - and the staff was probably chosen the right one, the right one.

For both, this conflict has been settled. They returned to their former life and work in the office. However, for some reason it seems to me that P is unlikely to once again want to work on a new game with friends.