Thanks,

Jeremiah

Best of luck.

Superfluid seems pretty tightly tied to the US tax system. Is this an inherent limitation or will you be able to provide the service for non-US citizens as well?

1) If you have more manhours available than you sell, but sometimes outsource work with other expertise; you can sell your surplus hours into superfluid, buy the services you outsource out of the superfluid system, then bill your client for the outsourced service.
2) superfluid can help you add business relationships, because it’s much easier to buy and sell in superfluid, so there’s less of a barrier to getting a new relationship started that may eventually include paid work.
3) superfluid lets you add resources for your business, so that you can provide benefits to your employees. -Doesn’t actually bring in cash, but saves a bit at the edges.

For game development, I think superfluid is more interesting in a slightly different way. If you have a project for which you have inadequate funds, but would like to bring in collaborators, superfluid can be a better way to compensate each participant, because superfluid tracks fair value. This doesn’t feed anyone, or pay their rent, but hopefully everyone is doing business of some sort that does pays the bills; if not, maybe they’re back to trying to make #1-#3 work for them, which is a different motivation, but they’re still potentially good partners in the process for game developers.

I have wondered if this kind of model can work, where members of the cooperative contributed and benefit proportionally for their efforts.

I haven’t seen it work yet, especially as the groups grow and the evaluation of intellectual and creative contributions must be valued.

That said, since my company is building a few large virtual worlds and games for clients, I am working on a model that weights and prices contribution across development tracks such art asset creation, games dev and solution, and across the phase of development (from concepting to definition, design, development, etc.) and across the individual features thare are required. Lets see how it comes out.

Cheers,
Robin

Very good article. We are Aesia a French Studio and we make Online Games. We have choose to work in cooperative too. And it’s fine for the productivity, implication and blooming of each member,

In our town (Bordeaux), there are 3 Studios Cooperative and the communication for life or business is good between us.

Now, the model of cooperative is, indeed, one of more equitable between human. (I don’t know all of models ^^)

Make Cooperatives, have fun, business and happy life !

Fred

We have gone over the possibility of membership fees rather than revenue share, but a modest revenue share (that could be capped) seems preferable in that it better represents an ownership by members, and allows a flourishing community to more actively help its members. -It’s not actually a royalty, as the members maintain control of the cooperative assets, and a royalty specifically represents a licensing fee, which isn’t applicable here.

Consider charging a flat annual membership fee instead of royalties.

Also consider some sort of entry requirement to ensure some quality standards among the developers. (Developers must demonstrate that they can make a decent game before they gain admission.)

We have created online multiplayer casual games for social networks and youd think that with over 1,000,000 million games plays a week on or flagship game we would be ok.

It’s the looking back part I really agree with.. I have lost count the times our MD/Sales have said ‘well that game works, lets rebuild it’, this is a cause of low moral and bad sales…