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Tips for Negotiating Mobile-Game Development Agreements
The mobile-game industry can be lucrative. Mobile games ' which can be downloaded to cell phones and other mobile devices ' can be cheaper and easier to develop than games created for platforms like PCs or game consoles, where users expect higher production values. What also makes mobile games attractive to developers and entrepreneurs is the potential market of consumers who already carry and use cell phones ' estimated at 207.9 million nationwide and 2 billion worldwide. Mobile games present huge brand opportunities as well: Celebrities such as hotel heiress Paris Hilton, rapper 50 Cent, skateboarder Tony Hawk and poker champion Phil Hellmuth have each licensed their names and images to mobile games. Tom Cruise, notoriously shy of associating his name with videogames, lent his name exclusively to a Mission Impossible III mobile-phone game.
But to access these potentially large returns, developers must deal with complexities ranging from the need to redevelop or 'port' the same game to various platforms ' such as Brew, Java and J2ME ' and tweak it for display on a wide variety of handsets, to navigating the nettle of contracts and legal issues in a long and complicated value chain from developer to end user.
In negotiating a mobile-game development deal, a rightsholder must understand the significant licensing and rights issues that result from the variety of players involved in the production and distribution chain. This article discusses these players, the legal issues each one presents and how to work through them. The hope is that by highlighting the main issues and legal pitfalls to which these various relationships give rise, a workable set of best contract practices can develop that will foster longer-lasting, more-rewarding business relationships for clients and help promote the growth of the mobile-game business generally.
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