Commercial Recruitment and Resources

[Kain Nobel]

Hello and good day! This is NOT a recruitment thread (otherwise it would be posted in Recruitment and Classifieds section), this is more about how to go about it.

The thing is, I've been wanting to recruit some help for awhile now, but I haven't because I'm not entirely sure if its going to be a freebie project or a commercial game, probably won't know until the day its done. I've worked 3 years to try and make something that is tangible and 100% original, I treat it like a second job and set goals and deadlines for it, so in that aspect I feel that the time spent means I should one day make something back from it. On the other hand, if it doesn't live up to being as awesome as I want it to be, it would be posted for free for everybody to enjoy (or hate, lol.)

So yeah, how do you recruit for something like that? Obviously, I will always be thankful for anything anybody has contributed, but other than that I don't really have much to offer and could only promise some kind of royalty or pay-back agreement if the game went on market. Even then, what if the thing we all work so hard on totally bombs or gets killed by piracy or whatever? Then what?

While I'm on the subject, what about these "free for commercial or non-commercial use" agreements folks submit on forums? I usually try to steer away from pretty much anything that isn't made by me, even if it has that agreement, because I don't want to have to remove it from my project a few years down the road if somebody changes their mind. Surely, I do use SDK and MACL, and a few things personal and trusted friends have sent me, but I worry that I can get screwed over if somebody decides they don't want their stuff being used (hence, I don't use Ccoa's UMS.)

These are the things that I think about, and the reasons I've never recruited, so feel free to discuss below because it could help us all out.

[KasperKalamity]

i'd be more than willing to lend my talents to your project if you would lend yours to mine. pm me.

on the subject of that "free use agreement" stuff, i think people on forums just put that there because they feel they have to. nobody is going to sue you over it, they're just going to be whiny entitled internet babies. I've seen maybe one or two really populated forums that were super anal about forcing members to declare usage and put 20 lines of credits into 5 lines of code. nobody will ever be able to tell that it's "their's", unless it was specifically made for a certain game like Starless Umbra.

there's only so many ways to do one thing properly. if you walked into somebody else's office, and tried to describe exactly how the things on their desk came to be arranged in the way that you saw them, you would probably be wrong, but you would still see the same end result. nobody's going to blame you if, when all the pieces fall together, it resembles something somebody else did years ago on a site that only exists as a cache.

[MetalRenard]

If you work with someone, draw up a contract with them that clearly defines your role, their role, and what can and cannot be done.
Here, this is one of the licenses I use that I wrote myself:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28025798/MetalRe...signed.pdf

You need to use that kind of thing, signed and dated, and "irrevocable" for everything you do. That way no one can ever come back and F*** up your project.

As for recruiting, personally I never work without at least a large % payment upfront per track. And I'd never work for a "maybe one day you'll get some money". It just doesn't make sense. I think you need to just make up your mind. Sitting on the fence won't help your project. Sitting on the fence never helps anything. u_u

[DerVVulfman]

Insofar as worrying if a person who posts a resource (whatever it may be) and declares it as "free usage... blah blah blah", whereby you garner the resource and the creator then labels it as "not for use but...", retroactive removal of a person's right to use something is generally frowned upon and not something that can be legally held up in court. If I decided that I wanted to make money from all the old copies of Animated Battlers, I'd be in the wrong. Plain and simple. Only if I released a new version as an exclusive would I have any say. Like the free version of the the InvisionBoards software and the full IBPro version 3+ paid software. And if Cogwheel (the maker of RTAB) sold his library of scripts to another person who said you now had to pay for them... "all rights reserved", only those NOW acquiring those scripts are required to pay. That set of terms are only valid from that date on. But again, if what you downloaded was free when you acquired it, tough noogies on their part.

Now forum to forum, you may find some sites that are property of a single person or collective whereby their terms of use are spelled out. KDC scripts (the Japanese ones) are popular and have been posted here and there and everywhere. But not allowed to be posted here because we honor their terms of use... "No posting elsewhere" Granted, you'd probably avoid their scripts because it's also stated "No commercial use". Just saying, some places have their terms right in their page.

[KasperKalamity]

i just bury in my EULA that if someone posts my work as their own, they consent to me tracing their ip, and coming to their house at night to mangle them with a pipe bender... has there ever been any successfully set legal precident involving rpg maker related shenanigans? i've never heard of such a thing in the 8 or so years i've used the program. relatedly, are there any resource websites that follow a subscription model? information isn't something that can ever be controlled by human hamds, and it's really disheartening to see it attempted.

[DerVVulfman]

Er, you're talking to someone who caught a few plagiarizers including one guy stealing both SephrothSpawns and Yeyinde's work, claiming it as his own, and another guy illegally posting something by Mewstreus without permission in Creation Asylum. Both of which were properly handled.

If I find someone posting your work somewhere saying it's his... I got your back.

[MetalRenard]

Legal stuff is so complex u_u

[Charlie Fleed]

I thought I could add about my personal experience in this subject.
I found really hard finding people, artists, willing to provide you any quality resources against just profit sharing. I ended up paying for anything I'm using in my Hartacon game.
One artist was just beginning to make game resources at the time when I hired him. We agreed on "payment after the job is done" terms, but in the end he thought that he had spent too much time for the job, and he didn't even charge me (I gave him some "gift").
The one that is making my game interface is much more strict, sometimes even annoying, and he wants payment in advance. We agreed on a three-steps payment plan against partial handover of the resources.
In none of these cases I signed anything nor I made the other guy sign anything. A preview/payment/handover policy and splitting the job in more steps was enough for me.
By the way, if you want to really make money from your game, I am under the impression that you need to have exclusive original resources.

[KasperKalamity]

i can agree with paying somebody to make something especially for your game, i think it's really neat when you're offering something different. especially nowadays when the jrpg formula is getting stale, and western rpgs are getting so big and open ended. has anyone been sucessful in turning a profit with an rm game? i'm not even going to try.

[DerVVulfman]

Amanda Fitch aka Amaranth at her Amaranthia.com site (or Lambchop at HBGames). She made the Aveyond series with RPGMaker XP on up.

Aveyond
Ahriman's Prophecy (made with RM2K3... she has a license)