Contracts Of Employment

• Contracts

A contract is a legally binding agreement between an employer and the employee, in a games design job you can be expected to work at least 35 hours per week. When you are sick you can still get paid but if it is not in your contract then you will not.

Within the contract you might be able to negotiate some terms depending on which job you are at and which terms you want to negotiate upon, upon reading the contract provided you can find how much you will get paid, how many hours you are expected to work each week or day, as well as you will find how many breaks and holiday you are allowed each year. Judging on which religion you are you may be allowed certain other holidays specific to your religion for example if you are Jewish you would be allowed to have Hanukkah off which does not apply to people that are not Jewish. Usually within a job you would get a maximum holiday of 28 days, this could be small holiday throughout the year with advanced notice, If you are a female and get pregnant you will be allowed to leave work at a certain point of your pregnancy and then come back after so many weeks which you would still get paid for regardless. Regardless what job you are working in you would be allowed something called compassionate leave. You would only be allowed this type of leave if the person that is sick is a dependant which is someone that you care for, for example your spouse, child or parents, as well as this there is no allocated time for how long you can actually spend caring for them and is entirely dependent on how much your employer wants to allocate you, but within this break you can be unpaid. Within the games industry your boss can actually force you to work overtime which is rarely done but they can if they feel the need to regardless of other things you may have planned on that day. Within a contract there is usually a clause that does not allow you to make separate games during your own spare time, but this may not apply to everyone and you would definitely have to check your contract regarding that.

• Employment Contracts

Within the employment contracts there will be numerous details that are inside, this can be different for each job you are working within but I will only be talking about the gaming industry. First of all the main thing within the contract most people concentrate on is the amount you will get paid each week or month depending on how the company wants to pay it to you. You will also get a variety of other bonuses such as a health insurance. Whilst working for any company there will be a part of the contract that is specifically for health insurance and what you will get once you are working for them, and if you get injured whilst at work what you will be expected from the company. You will also get retirement bonuses which are what you get from the company once you retire, this will include a payment package throughout your entire time of working with the company and the total sum will raise depending on how long you have worked there.

Within the contract there will also most likely be a confidentiality clause so that you cannot discuss the game or anything you are working on whilst at the company, if you do violate these terms and get discovered about it you will get fired from the job and most likely sued by the company for violating there terms.

• License Agreements

License agreements only really are applied when a developer wants to create a game based on a film, TV series or even a book. Within this license the developer would need to get several things such as the main story line, main characters and the title of the movie so that they can use it for there game. If the developers and designers use something that is not specified within the contract the deal can be cancelled or the company making the game can even be sued. 

Another thing discussed within the contract is how much the rights will cost a company to purchase them for.  More often than not there will be a payment given first to guarantee that they are serious about making the game, as well as if the game does well there will most likely be royalties which means that they will be getting more money depending on how much they both agreed upon.

• NDAs and Confidentiality agreements

NDAs are non disclosure agreements and a lot of gaming companies use this form of contract, this only applies when you have a huge secret that you do not want anyone else knowing other than the people that are working on the project within your company and they would all have to sign these confidentiality agreements so that if they do disclose information they will be prosecuted. In order for this contract to actually be started a secret within the company has to be told to the employees else there is no point in enforcing it. The employees working on the project or even if they are not yet know about the project would have to sign a confidentially agreement so that they are not allowed to talk about the project without any punishment. If they do agree upon the contract then they cannot talk to anyone outside of work about the project else you can be sued and fired from your job. In some cases when people breach the agreements they have to pay a large sum of money in order to compensate for the damage they have done to the business with releasing disclosed information without authorisation.

• Collaboration Agreements

Recently a lot of people and small companies are building indie or hobby games. It is extremely pivotal that they come to some sort of agreement in compensation and ownership of the games creation due to the amount of risks of creating a game that is not currently considered mainstream. The majority of indie and hobby games tend to fail in someway due to the ownership and how much they can expose the game to try and get it to be a success but if it does fail they need to make sure they know who is going to get what. Using a collaboration agreement it sets in motion how the entire project is controlled throughout the creation process and the games life cycle if it is made. It also states clearly who owns the IP, how the game is intended to be used within development and how its going to be released as well as how any possible income is going to be handled within the owners of the project. This agreement would also include how the termination process would happen if the owner wanted to do so. 

https://www.gov.uk/employment-contracts-and-conditions/overview
http://www.inc.com/encyclopedia/licensing-agreements.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement