britown

Brianna Townsend

@britown

Creative-Type Impersonator

🌸请别在工作死🌸

I sometimes like working on never-to-be-finished video game projects

Right now I'm making a game called Chronicles.

Wanna make a game? Here is a list of great C++ libraries to use.

I maintain a Letterboxd in much the way that I assume people maintain bonsai trees.

This is Owen:
Owen
And this is Molly:
Molly
Furthermore, this is Max:
Molly
log inask
britown
@britown
MyKneecaps
@MyKneecaps
MyKneecaps
@MyKneecaps

A Question for the Indie Devs

Hi, cohost. I've been getting myself set up for putting a small game on itch.io, and was hoping some of the more experienced indies here could answer something for me.

Basically: what do I do as far as license/copyright/general rights whatever for a tiny itch game?

So for context, most of my previous gamedev stuff was done as part of small teams - first under college, then under a small LLC. I've had to juggle a fair bit of the business planning/marketing side of things, but taking care of rights/ownership stuff has never really been my cup of tea. Also US copyright law kinda just annoys the hell outta me.

At the moment, I'm just doing solo dev stuff (someone hire me) and I've hit the point where I'm starting to think about releasing something. But last week, as I was poking around in the settings of my itch page, it occurred to me that I really have no idea what the standard is for ownership on this sort of project.

Should I... trademark my 4-week indie game?

Do I just kinda pitch it onto the web like I was intending to?

Or should I just bite the bullet and make another, even tinier LLC?

I'm finding these sort of questions to be basically ungoogleable. It's all either reasonable-seeming advice that doesn't to apply to me, or corporate buyout strategies - which I care to hear right now even less.

I'm not asking about this because I particularly care about keeping an ironclad grip over what I release. It's more that I'm not sure what exactly I should be doing on the trademark/copyright front as an indie dev, and I don't want to be in a situation where I realize I've screwed myself over after it's too late.

Anyways, if there's anyone more experienced here who can give me recommendations on what to do (or else point me in the direction of a better resource for this sort of thing) I'd appreciate it.

Thanks! And have a good day.

(I'm also going to tag my friend @DT75ART here because I know she's also been looking at trademark stuff for her indie project.)

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @MyKneecaps's post:

hthrflwrs
@hthrflwrs

Personally, I haven't found a need to trademark my projects, especially four-week-long ones. If you plan on spinning that particular project into a much bigger business enterprise, it may be worth it, but otherwise it's a lot of hoops to jump through for negligible gain. You may want to form an LLC for tax purposes down the line, but for right now I personally wouldn't worry about it.

login to reply
SketchyJeremy
@SketchyJeremy

As you might already know, anything you create is automatically your own intellectual property. If some unscrupulous individual were to steal your game and sell it as their own, they would have violated your copyright, and you would have the full legal right to "get their ass". You don't need to do any extra work for these protections.

A trademark can offer further protections with regards to things like a game's name, but I fully agree with hthrflwrs that, at this scale, trademarks are more trouble than they are worth. I also agree that you might want to consider forming an LLC, but only if you think you might be handling decent amounts of money in the future. This would separate your personal finances from business finances, granting you some protections in the event of, say, getting sued by a loan company.

login to reply
Pinned Tags