Oh got it I thought you meant a legally binding document or NDA, hahaha.
Yeah that’s a good idea.
It is a legally binding document. In many places, including California, even something as informal as an oral contract is legally binding.
Are you intending the person to sign the signature and provide their full real name?
You don’t need those to make it legally binding. Any contract made in good faith with free will is automatically legally binding unless some legislature says otherwise.
A quick google search yields this.
I disagree – contracts are swatting flies with a sledgehammer.
If legally binding:
Contracts may not even be admissible if either party is a minor, and not every development group is willing to spend time and thousands of dollars on lawyers to fight a lawsuit. You shouldn’t suggest contracts so easily without knowing more about projects because it’s not appropriate for every project.
If not legally binding:
When you get into serious professional work and are prepared to use them in court they’re okay, but contracts that aren’t legally binding are superfluous. Someone who’s bad at communication isn’t going to magically become good because they write down what they want in a contract.
If a contract has some sort of ambiguity, I may estimate it will take X time, but the person who drafted the contract really wanted Y and estimated X/N time even though it would take X*N time. When we get to that feature and I don’t want to spend a month on a single feature that I planned to spend a few days on, we arrive at the same problem we did without a contract. Contracts are equally effective at clarifying project goals as showing someone a project roadmap or similar – the effectiveness is the result of the drafter and not the document itself.
Having a contract does not bind you to do anything if it’s broken. What you do when the contract is broken is entirely up to you. Having a contract gives you options. Consider jailbreak - a game that wasn’t intended to be overly popular. Jailbreak is slated to earn over a million dollars this year. If you don’t take five minutes to draw up a 2 paragraph contract then you’re potentially putting hundreds of thousands of dollars in a risky position. To me this sounds like a no-brainer.
A contract doesn’t describe the project, it describes what people are trading. e.g. work for money. No other document serves this purpose in such a clear and easily-understood way. That’s why everyone uses contracts all over the place. Your hypothetical contract here was poorly designed if it allowed both parties to have a different idea of what the agreement was. Preventing this is the entire point of a contract. If you don’t do it properly then it’s not the contract’s fault, it’s your fault.
You’re assuming that everyone is in shoes similar to your own. Success isn’t some lottery that you win by luck – Sally age 13 with two years experience developing on ROBLOX isn’t going to topple the front page. Not everyone has the same mental fortitude as adults, and even drafting up a 2-paragraph contract would be unthinkable to those users. ROBLOX development isn’t restricted to adults, and contracts aren’t appropriate for every project.
Exactly. Contracts don’t make bad project managers good. Successful project managers will establish clarification with or without a contract, so I don’t understand why you’d suggest a contract for this.
NDA’s are legally binding documents too though that you sign. I’ve signed several that needed my name. Also legally binding in a sense you can use it in court or justification of removal.
It’s foolish to think that you’re so good at communicating that you always know what the other person knows. No one is that good. The contract doesn’t substitute communication skills. The contract puts all the information in one place so that everyone can go over it and clear up any concerns or misunderstandings there might be. Doing this isn’t indicative of any communication problem - it’s a standard procedure.
I was not implying there was no need for communication, but rather there are better avenues for summarizing a project or clearing up concerns (documentation specifically for project management / development like project charters). Contracts work, but are the wrong tool for the job (clarifying projects).
This is correct, I never said otherwise about NDAs
Contracts on ROBLOX are just sketchy in generaly, and will be next to impossible to enforce, especially if the other person is in another country. The best/easiest solution to this, is to make a terms of service or something similar to that. As technically speaking, a ToS is a legal contract, but it isn’t as serious as what most people here are talking about.
Layout your terms, and state what will happen if those terms are broken/not met. It can result in termination, funds being held, etc.
But a formal contract just isn’t needed in most cases on roblox, as generally you are dealing with minors who typically can’t sign a formal contract w/o parental approval (or at all, especially when dealing with money).
From what Sharksie said, this should be done for more serious games. So a kind of program would be required for Vision Development Studios.
you go with like the “I want to make the long lasting front page game” program and then you’ll have to do some legal work.
if it’s just something like “I just want to learn how to finish a game” program then you’ll have to do different types of agreements? idk.
I think a Terms of Service agreement would work best for Vision right now. If they grow into something big, and produce content that ends up similar to Jail Break, then they possibly could up the agreement to a more formal contract for the specific developers who made the game that’s blowing up.
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