Contractual Obligation's

Employment

The purpose of this contract is to set forth the terms of your employment - what the company expects you to do for the company, and what the company will do for you in return. Employment contracts at game companies are pretty much like employment contracts at any other sort of company. The game industry employment contract is likely to include clauses about benefits, confidentiality, about inventions, and about not competing with the company during or shortly after the term of employment.

Development

Game publishers often hire game developers to create games for them. A development agreement is a contract that spells out the terms of the development deal. Terms is the part of the agreement spells out how much the publisher will pay the developer, what timeframe the developer has to develop the game, and if there will be royalties, what the royalty rate is. It's important to clarify whether the publisher owns the IP or the developer owns it. The developing company has to swear that it won't use anybody else's source code and the publishing company has to swear that it has the right to ask developer to create this particular game.

License

When a publisher wants to make a game about a movie or something, the publisher and the movie IP owner execute a contract spelling out the terms of the license. contract spells out exactly what the publisher is getting the rights to use. The contract probably specifies that the publisher only has the right to make a game that works on the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. Or even on PC. The contract specifies what parts of the world the publisher's game will be published in. Publishers always want worldwide rights, of course but licensors often charge more for that. The contract probably doesn't run forever. Most license agreements run no more than 5 years.

NDA

In Non-Disclosure Agreements, Disclosure Agreements, One party, in order to do business with the other party, has to disclose a secret of some kind (a plan to make a particular game, or a new technology or process for making games, or a business deal that hasn't yet been publicly announced), and has to tell this secret to the other party. The other party agrees not to disclose the information - to keep it confidential - else damage will be the result to the first party. In such an event, legal abuse will happen in a court of law to the second party.

Collaboration

The above types of contracts cover the most frequent types of contract in the mainstream game industry. But a lot of people are building indie games or hobby games, and for those folks a very important need is an agreement that cover the all-important issues of ownership and compensation in the creation of games that exist outside of the mainstream industry. The majority of hobby and indie projects fail, and a huge factor in those failures is who owns what, who's supposed to do what, and who's going to get what. A collaboration agreement sets forth in clear terms how the indie or hobby project is managed and controlled, who owns the IP, how the game is intended to be used, how any possible income is to be handled, and how termination of the project is to be governed.