POSTED BY Micah Kesselman on October 18, 2013

Video games, a relatively niche industry only a decade ago, has quickly grown into one of the largest entertainment sectors in the world and, as recently as a year ago, was projected to expand to an $82 billion dollar market by 2017. Families now game together. People watch competitive video game tournaments live over the Internet, raking in ad revenue from hosting services and sponsorship deals from competitors who travel across the globe to participate in these multimillion-dollar competitions. The face of entertainment has rapidly and unquestionably been changed by the rise of this subset of the entertainment industry.

Media and analysts have widely, and thoroughly, covered this shift. The advent of the independent developer, however, has started to shake up what is already a young industry. What was originally a rare and newsworthy event, a small team of dedicated and hardworking developers pushing a product to market to create their own careers, has become a nearly commonplace event over the course of only a few short years. It has come to the point that the monoliths of the video games industry have begun to embrace this quirky subset of a subset of the entertainment industry. Realizing the astonishing success of games such as Minecraft, Microsoft, Sony, Square-Enix, and many more have provided self-publishing venues to independent developers. Crowd funding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo allow start ups to acquire funding more easily than ever before. On Kickstarter, games account for 7,152 of the launched projects, while simultaneously pulling in more than $182 million of crowd sourced funds – more than any other category, with Film & Video coming in a respectable second at $173 million.^[i]

Some of these projects are conceivably nothing more than testing the waters for a market^[ii]; many others can have teams, as small as two or three individuals, all specializing in development roles.^[iii]  This gives cause for concern—as entrepreneurs in the software and entertainment industries, video game developers are vulnerable in virtually every single domain of the general field of intellectual property. While large companies, with their veritable armies of lawyers and limitless funds, can thoroughly protect themselves, the independent developer may need to hit it big before they are able to properly guard their legitimate interests or stave off the much feared creatures known as IP trolls. However, even those that have hit it big had relatively humble beginnings.^[iv]

When developers are in these early stages, they are not only vulnerable to extrinsic predatory forces, but can also face the more run of the mill issues associated with a business being conducted without any kind of legal counsel – falling victim to terrifyingly lopsided contracts, choosing among the distribution platforms and their respective licenses, and a myriad other legal issues. What results is a class of entrepreneurial entities that, though someday may be able to afford legal services, are incredibly vulnerable at a critical point in their growth. There is no easy solution to this dilemma—basic filing fees may be beyond the budget of these developers, much less the payment for representation—but basic knowledge of some of the issues can only help independent developers.

Further exploration of such topics is certainly merited and will be seen in my later blog entries. For the time, this entry is simply intended as a basic overview of the issues which a new subset of a relatively new industry faces.