Should I develop the game first or get NDA?

Question

So I have been working on my game for a while now. And I now I have other people contributing to the project. I fear that someone will tell their friends and/or family then my 'great' idea is lost.

So my question is should I wait and get a NDA ( Non Disclosure Agreement) or some other form of legal document that tells everyone one the project or who has ever worked on the project to be quite until its release?

A NDA is more to A) protect the exact design rather then the ideas themselves or B) to have control about what informations are made public early and which not. — API-Beast, Aug 03 '12 at 22:59
Related: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/17663/1-idea-99-execution — Laurent Couvidou, Aug 04 '12 at 00:40
See The Worth(lessness) of NDAs. TO sum: 1) NDA is worthless if you're not willing to enforce it (thousands of dollars in legal fees). The time is better spent actually finishing the game instead. 2) Execution: who cares who's talking about something that doesn't exist yet. — bobobobo, Apr 23 '13 at 04:48

Marton · Answer 1 · 2012-08-02T18:02:29.210

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An idea itself rarely worths anything, unless you have at least a design plan that covers most aspects of the game. Your idea will leak anyways - and as long as only family and friends hear about it, you have nothing to fear. I mean, how many game development team leaders do you have in your family?

What you should have though, is some license to protect your source code and other assets. Look up GPL, and the various open source licenses, see how they work, how they're written. You can copy and modify these licenses, just make sure to consult a lawyer if you want a customized license.

As for an NDA, I think you can write (copy) your own from an job contract, or similar example which can be found online. Just make sure it covers everything you want to protect, and that two witnesses also sign it.

edited Aug 02 '12 at 18:02

answered Aug 02 '12 at 06:21

Marton

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Ideas are easy to come by, execution is another thing. – DogDog Aug 02 '12 at 13:41
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-1 for "write your own NDA". Might as well tell lawyers to program their own word processor if you want to cross highly complex skillets between unrelated professions. :) – Sean Middleditch Aug 02 '12 at 16:49
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I have signed an NDA at the company where I'm working now. It was about 5 quite general sentences, probably taken from some kind of "template". You don't have to be a lawyer (or pay 200$ to a lawyer) to copy those 5 sentences, replacing the company's name and the company's product's name. Anyways, I'll edit the post to make it more clear. – Marton Aug 02 '12 at 18:00
Ideas are precious. That's why everyone is so hell-bent on stealing them. – Derek E Aug 02 '12 at 18:05
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@dereke Successful, proved ideas are precious and worth stealing (copying). But as long as he doesn't have anything built around an idea, it's just that... an idea, one of the billions born every day. – Marton Aug 03 '12 at 06:26
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Nobody steals ideas, they steal implementation details that makes the idea a success. – Oskar Duveborn Aug 04 '12 at 23:16
If his idea is unique/"great" in some way, then that may be worth protecting. Otherwise, someone who has the resources to implement the idea on their own may come along and do it before he has the chance to. Even if he later releases his implementation and advertises that he was the originator of the idea, it would still be a loss, since some people may not care, some would have already purchased the other implementation, etc... Yes, implementations are the models of ideas that we attach monetary value to, but that doesn't mean ideas are worthless (in the general sense of the word). – Derek E Aug 06 '12 at 17:09
@dereke The problem is, he can't really protect his idea without creating at least a more-or-less detailed, written documentation of his concept. And that is already a kind of 'implementation'. I don't think you can register a patent for cold-fusion reactors unless you have documented what it does and how it works. – Marton Aug 07 '12 at 06:42
@martin He can (try to) protect information/ideas related to his game with an NDA. I do not know a lot about them, but my understanding is that it is within their scope to keep silent all information regarding a game project in development, which he has. – Derek E Aug 08 '12 at 03:30

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 04 '12 at 23:52

The harsh truth is that ideas are worthless. I am not trying to be condescending, as I myself was once protective of my ideas. If they were worth something, there would be a market for them. Have you ever heard of someone purchasing an idea before?* No matter how great you think your idea is, the human race is very large and very creative, and your idea has probably already been thought up 10 times, and if it is any good there are probably implementations of it in the works that you don't even know about yet. The best thing you can do is spread your idea as far as possible - this will test for traction, give you valuable feedback, and potentially gain you some support. Its very unlikely that anyone will try to steal your idea, because every person is more interested in their own "great" ideas.

*(Note, intellectual property is an entirely different thing. IP is worth something because it has a mindshare, and previous implementations that have built up this mindshare).

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 01 '19 at 12:27

New to collaboration, I do think ideas are worth protecting. According to this article however, it might be too late for you to implement an NDA.

Section 5 is titled: "Information already known by receiving party or in public domain". Since there was no NDA in place, your contributors have probably already shared some information about your game. While this information might not be in the "public domain", the data has already run away from you a bit.

Should I develop the game first or get NDA?

3 Answers3