Video games might look like a niche corner of contract law, but the deals behind them turn on issues every commercial lawyer recognizes. Customer content, licensed IP, platform terms nobody can negotiate, and counterparties scattered across the globe all surface the moment you look closely. The user-generated content economy just brings those pressures to a sharper point, and it does it with younger, faster-moving players who will not sign a long contract.
Laura Frederick hosted a How to Contract conversation with two lawyers who live in this world. Adam Starr, General Counsel at Do Big Studios, one of the top studios operating on Roblox, sees the platform side from the inside every day. Keith Cooper, Partner at Cooper and Iravani, represents game developers and content creators across publishing, licensing, and brand deals. Both spent close to two decades as litigators before moving into transactional work, so they read these contracts with an eye for exactly where they break.
They worked through platform distribution terms, developer and publisher agreements, the creator-to-creator deals where most of the money actually moves, enforcement against parties in other countries, and the copyright realities of a market full of copycats. The throughline stayed practical. Know what you cannot change, lock down what you can, and never warrant something the platform controls.
Here are our top ten takeaways from the speakers' comments during the webinar:
Treat platform terms as fixed rules. Even the biggest studios sign the same click-wrap agreement as a teenager uploading a game over a weekend. The platform can change monetization, content rules, and payout criteria whenever it wants, and you accept the new version just by continuing to use the service. We cannot negotiate these terms, so our real work is understanding them and shaping the rest of the deal around them. The sooner we accept that, the less time we waste pushing on terms that will never move.
Read a suspension as a termination. When a platform restricts or suspends an account, that is effectively the end of the relationship, and there is usually no cure period. You may get an appeal right, but those often go nowhere. Plan the client's business around that fragility rather than assuming a due process that does not exist. We serve creators best when we tell them the truth about how little recourse they have.
Keep the platform relationship healthy. Adam made the point that a studio's whole business depends on the platform, so blasting them in public invites quiet retaliation you will never trace. The asymmetry here runs deeper than the contract. You can honor every term and still lose when the relationship sours. Remind clients to treat the platform as the party that pays them, because that is exactly what it is.
Secure the IP chain before the game ships. Founder agreements, contractor agreements, work-for-hire language, and IP assignments decide whether your client owns the game or a contractor does. Many of these contractors work overseas, which makes a missing assignment much harder to fix later. We push clients to paper these basics early, even when they are racing to launch. A clean chain of title is worth far more than the week it takes to lock down.
Plan enforcement before you draft the rest. Adam settled venue and dispute resolution first, because a contract you cannot enforce against someone in Vietnam or Romania is barely a contract. Remote arbitration in a chosen jurisdiction, plus consent to service by email, removes the friction that usually kills a cross-border dispute. Even then, you may be chasing an empty pocket, so weigh whether the remedy is real before you rely on it. We draft for the dispute we can actually win.
Trace the money through every tier. Money can travel from the platform to a publisher to the developer to individual creators, and each layer carries its own triggers and timing. On Roblox, whoever controls the account sets the payout percentages, which creates real exposure when that person sells their interest. We tie payout control to the contract by requiring any transferee to sign onto the same terms. Following the money from source to bank account is where you find the gaps worth fixing.
Do not warrant what the platform controls. A publishing deal layered on a platform deal can tempt you to promise availability, monetization, or performance that the platform alone decides. Make those representations and a single rule change can put your client in breach. You want every warranty to match what your client actually controls. We carve out platform-dependent outcomes so no one is on the hook for someone else's algorithm.
Weigh IP protection against speed. Most games spike and die, so a creator who waits to register a trademark or scrub AI-generated code may miss the window altogether. Keith believed longer, more protective contracts prevent the ambiguity behind most disputes, and he asked clients whether they wanted it quickly or correctly. Both answers can be right, depending on how long the game is likely to live. We help clients make that trade on purpose instead of by accident.
Clear the rights before the brand deal lands. A streamer usually needs a license to display game footage, not a work-for-hire agreement. The harder job is confirming that the underlying assets, including any music, were cleared before that footage feeds a brand deal. Brands will ask the creator to warrant rights in content they do not fully own, and that is worth resisting. We protect creators by refusing to warrant third-party content as if it were theirs.
Fight copycats at the platform level. The question is rarely whether a game infringes, because that fight almost never reaches a courtroom. What matters is whether Roblox or Epic will process a DMCA notice and pull the game down, and they decide that by comparing screenshots side by side. A few aesthetic changes can keep a game live without hurting the player experience. Adam said it plainly, that ten business days offline is a lifetime, so the real win is never coming down at all.
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