Developer Resources
Welcome, traveler.
Soooo, before we start – here’s a caveat. This is by no means the most extensive resource on the world wide internets or anything of that sort. So what is it? It is a solid car, a car you named after your favourite actor some years ago. A car you’ve traveled with extensively that you know will get you where you need to go when you need to be there. In short – these are templates we have used, and are using, for our own internal needs. Some of them you might need to adapt to your specific circumstances, some of them you might not need at all, and some of them might take you from “where in the everloving fudge am I going to start with this” to “oh, I’ll just fill this in” and in an hour or three you’ll be far past that dreaded white page of nothingness that can feel insurmountable sometimes. You can use this link if you want to go check this out right this second:
Click here to access Raw Fury – Developer Resources [Dropbox]
We will sporadically keep adding to this when we find a) the time and b) stuff that can be templated that we keep running into internally or c) when we see a lot of folks asking for something specific that we happen to have but brainfarted and didn’t include here.
You will find useful stuff in here like:
- A pitch deck template which serves as a sort of minimum viable pitch and is based on what we (and many other publishers) want.
- Mutual non-disclosure agreement (MNDA) for when that is relevant, outsourcing and content creation agreements (with a legal FAQ on how to use them – among other things)
- An elegant financial spreadsheet (well, as elegant as one of these can get) that allows you to lab and test different scenarios for what you’re building.
And more!
You can also find our publishing agreement in English (which is used for all deals and considered the “true” document that we use in business) and localized versions of it (for reference) in Spanish, Brazilian-Portuguese, Russian, French, Japanese, simplified Chinese, Korean and Croatian. Hopefully this can be one step in combating some of the language barriers in place and the power imbalance that comes with that. Here are the three main reasons behind why we are sharing our publishing agreement:
- We believe that by having this out in the open we enable devs to be better equipped in contract discussions either with us or with others.
- Transparency. We have talked to many a dev about what they wish publishers could be better at or do more of, and transparency seems to be one of the core things we can improve on immediately.
- Contracts should not be hidden away until you’re finishing up a discussion on whether or not to sign, and then be produced like a jack-in-the-box. It puts undue stress on the developer to read, reflect and decide on the contents in a time during the signing process where they might already be stressed (financially or mentally). It’s an unfair power dynamic.
A second caveat; The contract outlines a lot of things, but it doesn’t give the full picture of what we (or others) do – you will still have to read, talk, and discuss with publishers as to what level of support they supply, and in which areas. We speak very little of what our Brand/Marketing/PR/Sales/QA/Game producers/Media Creators/Development Studio can do and offer within the contract, as that would a) bloat the contract and b) end up with a potentially rigid process and understanding of how we work.
So what is it that we actually offer in terms of support as part of our deal? Every project is different, and every team needs different things, so we do try to adapt ourselves to whatever specifics the project needs – but there are some basics that is the foundation for working with Raw Fury. We fund development, and we like to get in early. We’re usually funding anything from 12 to 24 months of development (sometimes shorter, sometimes longer). We offer a full stack of disciplines for anything non-creative related to development. Basically, anything you would want in a game company outside of actual development. Production support, brand management, PR, marketing, sales management, partner/platform relations, IP refinement (ranging from movies/tv-series to ancillary products like physical editions, vinyl, merch etc), quality assurance (internal and external), release management, events management, social and community focused work, media asset creation (from in-house trailers to documentaries to Steam capsules and press kit assets) and so on. We have our sister company, Fury Studios, that can help out with technical stuff and porting at a very good price, with a priority on Raw Fury projects.
At the time of writing (December 2020), we’re about 50 people on three continents working hard to make every single developer we partner with as successful as can be. Furthermore, we do that at no cost to the project so long as we handle it internally. Any activity that can be done by a Fury is paid for by Raw Fury and does not count toward a game’s recoupable budget. The only thing that goes towards the service and marketing spend of a budget are things we pay for externally. In short – if there isn’t an invoice from an external company, it’s not a cost that goes to the recoupable budget. This is just part of what we do, but it’s relevant to outline it as this differs wildly depending on what publisher you are working with, which in turn affects how the deals are structured. Any deal is much more than what is in a contract, so it’s important to take the time to research what you’re getting for the deal you are making. However, without those contracts being out in the open, it becomes exceedingly hard to find the relevant information as a developer. We hope sharing our publishing agreement can be a step in the right direction for more transparency and making the research phase of any endeavor easier in the long run.
Our publishing agreement was drafted by Jónas (after +10 years of running his own dev studio) and forged with the help of the first developers we joined forces with. It is built to be straightforward, readable by humans and, most importantly, a fair partnership. When that ink hits the paper, we are partners and will be working towards a collaborative, successful future.
If you want to read more about why we think this is a good idea you can check out this blog post on why we are publishing our publishing agreement.
Right, so – let’s get into it! Follow the link below to check out our DevResources. We hope they will serve you as well as they’ve served us. Use, adapt, or disregard at your leisure.
FAQ
We will be building an FAQ here, based on the most common questions submitted to us via this form: Raw Fury Publishing Agreement FAQ [Asana]