I have permission from a boardgame designer to develop his unpublished boardgame into a salable video game, and I want to find the appropriate agreement to protect myself from legal shenanigans.
You need a license agreement with a specific clause to prevent shenanigans.
Ideally, I'd like a template for it, but I'm thinking it might be too unusual a situation.
Are you a lawyer with experience in Intellectual Property licensing? If not how will you know if the template actually provides the protection you require? IP law is complex and specific phrases have precise meanings in law that may not be clear to a layman (EG - would you know the difference between a Breach and a Material Breach and where each is acceptable in a contract?) I have a directory of game/IP lawyers on my site at
http://www.obscure.co.uk/directory/directory-legal/Also, what percentage of the profits should I ask for, given the information I've provided?
This is subject to negotiation and depends on many factors....
The value of the IP you are licensing
Who is taking the risk (funding development)
How the license fee is paid (up-front, staged, back-ended)
etc.
This is an unproven IP and as such has no real value (unless there is something special about the deal that you didn't tell us). Companies license IP and attach it to games because they believe it has, or will gain, market awareness - usually through a big marketing campaign. They aim to cash in on the existing market to help sell the game. Unless this board game is going to benefit from a massive marketing campaign what exactly will it provide in the way of market awareness? That is what you need to decide in order to decide the value. Remember, this game is unproven and is actually more likely to flop than it is to be a massive success. You could end up with a game that gets negative benefit if the game is judged to be a failure.
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