speaker Charne on developers' contracts

Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2007 attendees benefitted from the talk of Jim Charne, an attorney experienced in the video games industry. Charne spoke at length about how video games developers will be able to negotiate well on their contracts with publishers.

Charne made sure to advise game developers to define what constitutes a material breach. He spoke about solutions to breaches being simple and existing as the contract. Knowing what material breaches are would make everything simpler, and would make simple material breaches easy to cure.

Curing breaches, however, start as favorable to the publisher, but the developers are advised to talk this down, and to make these as fair to the developers as possible. The right to terminate for convenience is unique in the games industry. Being extremely disruptive to the developers, they must establish ways to soften these down, that developers don't fall victim to a terminate for convenience being treated as a terminate for cause.

Charne also warned of turn around, that happens whenever a game is dropped by one publisher and picked up by another. Many other things can get in the way of small game developers being paid, but Charne said that understanding and wording contracts in simple language will help a lot. All in all, the talk proved to be informative and helpful to game developers, about their ways of dealing with game publishers in the gaming industry.