Independent Games Developers Consortium

First draft about motivations, functions and structure

by the Provisional Steering Group

rev. 1.3 – March 29th 2011

This document is changing constantly while the email discussion is

proceeding. Please check it out on regular basis to see how it’s evolving.

Motivations
Indie games are the creative life blood of the casual games world. Companies like Oberon Media
have made a fortune thanks to Indies, having a zero cost influx of new games on a daily basis. This
allows those publishers to constantly increase their userbase; offering a huge amount of new games
to fit any user taste. The bulk of sales and advertising revenue accumulates into their wallet while
games struggle to get noticed because every day games are cycled into the mix. In this situation it is
very difficult for a single Indie to get some decent money out of a game, while for the publisher
there is a constant income. This model is a form of digital slavery: and WE are the slaves!

An Indie has no financial means to promote his games or provide decent infrastructure, so there
aren’t any other options to get published. Thus we are forced to give away our games for free on
Kongregate or on some Facebook container, or hoping that on XBLIG our game will sell enough on
the first week to be on the top 20… but it’s usually buried by other new arrivals.

The system forces us to work against each other to feed the various distribution channels as fast as
we can, not getting real money for the efforts and time we’ve put into developing and supporting
our game. Moreover, as those channels have a huge number of new games coming in each month
they can also choose not to accept your game for reasons completely divorced from its merits. So
you have to resubmit to see if your game can get through in their next window. That is actually
depressing and unfair.

IGDC will deliver to the Indies a fair solution putting the word “End” to the Indies’ digital slavery.

Functions
The main services delivered to the Associates will be:

Game Servers
This is the very basic need we all have: a place where to host the game and store our game data
(high scores, achievements and so on). The same goes for MMOG: we need a reliable place to run
our game server, IGDC will provide it.

Assets
Game assets will be collected in a community repository to allow an easy collaboration between
artists and developers. IGDC will establish the fair revenue share that Associates must grant to the
artists. This includes artwork, modelling, and audio assets.
Gaming portal
Hosting our games on a gaming portal owned by IGDC, so that the overall revenues from the games
and associated advertising will not inflate somebody else’s wallet: applying to each game the usual
30/70 revenue share will grant to all the Associates to evenly split that 30% (deducting the running
costs), making the whole thing actually profitable to us, not to some profiteering corporation. The
portal will also have a Facebook portal application dedicated to social gaming.

IGDC will also take care of the distribution of the shares on each game where the revenue share
between members has been arranged through IGDC Asset Marketplace.

Marketing
IGDC will drive the public to its own portal, making the advertising affordable. For consoles and
mobile platforms IGDC will buy space on a regular basis advertising the games/apps that its
Associates put on App Store, XBLIG, WP7 and Android.

Advergames provider
IGDC will actively market advergames and pass the contracts on its Associates in rotation. Presenting
as a worldwide consortium will make easy to get the best contracts with the best customers at a
quite high level.

Advocacy
Once we have asserted IGDC on the market we will make the Indies’ voice loud and clear in the
industry. Then we would be in a position to lobby the engine and console producers to meet our
needs.

Structure
Legal setup
IGDC will be incorporated in Ireland as a private company limited by guarantee not having a share
capital. The Irish law and tax regime is very good for running this the best possible way. All the
Associates are shareholders of IGDC equally (upon subscription a share certificate will be issued and
posted to the Associate). No Associate will have special rights of any kind. All money records (profits
and costs) will be sent to the Associates on monthly basis.

Membership
An IGDC Associate is normally an individual. Studios, partnerships and incorporated entities may
apply for membership, but in that case, respecting the concept of individual independent developer,
the application must be multiple, for each partner, and IGDC will issue one “share certificate” (a
formal membership certificate) to each member of the studio.

The normal minimum age to apply is 18years, but to be fair to those brilliant kids that are actually
working as Indie we will make exceptions on a case by case basis.

To qualify for the IGDC membership one has to answer “YES” at least to one of the following
questions:

 Do you own a paid game engine licence?

  Are you a registered developer on App Hub, App Store or any other games marketplace?
 Are you a UDK commercial licensed developer?
 Have you already published a game on XBLIG, STEAM, iPlay, WP7, Android or similar
commercial platform?
 Have you been credited (any role) in a published game?

Another mandatory rule is that in the previous fiscal year the applicant cannot have games related
revenue in excess of 100,000 USD.

Keeping the membership

To IGDC Membership the Associate shall actively work in the gaming industry publishing with IGDC
(or being credited some work in ana IGDC published game) no less than one game every two years.
During the two years the current work in progress shall be showcased on the “coming soon” section
of IGDC portal.

Management
IGDC will have a Board of Directors elected annually during the Online General Assembly of
Shareholders. The Board shall have a minimum of 5 directors. The Board will designate three
Managing Directors, one for each major region as follows: Europe, Americas and Asia. This is just an
indication and can be changed at any time by the Associates during a General Assembly (ordinary or
special) or (in case of urgency) by the existent Managing Directors using their power of delegation to
appoint a Vice Managing Director with full managerial powers. For such appointment is needed a
unanimous decision taken by a special meeting among all Managing Directors.

Games publishing
IGDC will establish a Peer Review System to publish the games on its portal. A game has to comply
with the standards defined by IGDC Associates to be allowed on the portal and the adverts. The Peer
Review system will be integrated by a community help system; if a game fails the review its author
will have all the help he needs to fix the issues found during the review. This will guarantee the end
user that all the games under the umbrella of IGDC are high quality products.

Technical infrastructure
To start up the services we won’t need anything too big, so we’ll start small with a basic account on
Dream Host (which doesn’t have the 25 processes limit). As soon as the traffic increases (very soon I
hope) Dream Host’s account will seamlessly be upgraded to a Virtual Server account, then up again
to a dedicated server account to grant enough bandwidth and CPU.

Once the whole thing is really up and running we’ll move on Amazon EC2. In this way the starting
cost is really reduced to the bare minimum, but we are ready to scale up almost in real time. Each
Associate will have the opportunity to help setting up our server infrastructure.