GCAP 2019

When making games in a team, you need to decide on how to legally structure your group; how IP is held, how liability is shared, how decisions are legally made, etc. The path that most teams take at the moment is to set up a private company, but this hierarchical structure may not gel with how your team works together in the longer term.

Co-operatives are an alternative to companies, and are founded on the concepts of democracy and equality. In this talk we will discuss how their unique democratic structure affects the many facets of running a business, including ownership of shares, how profit share is handled, team member obligations and recompensation, private investment in its many forms, team decision-making, and how new members joining or current members leaving the team is handled.

At Ghost Pattern, we are converting to a co-operative, and have done a significant amount of research into both the nature of co-ops in Australia, and various games co-ops around the world. In this session we’ll share with you what we’ve learnt about the pros, cons, and gotchas of incorporating as a co-operative. Overall this should give you a solid grounding in what co-ops are, how they differ from companies, and the basis of what you need to understand and prepare in order to decide which direction to go in for your own team.