I hope I'm putting this in the correct place, but how would one go about registering a game company, also the information I can find online aren't very helpful >.< , any help would be very much appreciated
P.S. We have a name and website
P.S. We have a name and website
Comments
You need to register with the Companies and Intellectual Properties Commision. Once you've got the paperwork from the CIPC, you need to open a company bank account, register with SARS for employee witholding tax (like PAYE), and possibly VAT, depending on your turnover, and register with the Department of Labour for UIF and the Compensation for Injuries Act. Also, in terms of the Companies Act, you'll need to file an audited annual return to the CIPC once a year, so you'll need to find an auditor to do that for you, and they can cost quite a bit.
Start with the CIPC website. There's a hell of a lot of information there.
P.S. Marketing. Show off your stuff. Do you have any prototypes or anything?
But ja, what @AlphaSheep said if you want to do it yourself
I really should have done business studies instead of accounting at school :P
You should only consider registering the company if you have a clear reason to do so as well as something to gain from it. I am not suggesting you never do only that you know why you are doing so when you do.
@LexAuillia has made me aware of a few good reasons to register early. Such as qualifying for certain grants when your business is of a certain age. What reason do you have for needing a company right now? There is IMHO far too much damn admin that goes with running a business additionally there will be costs to consider.
@AntiVoid you will need to set up UIF and various other taxes as soon as you plan to pay one salary or more. VAT registration requires a certain amount of turnover a year and they will come and inspect your operating premises to determine if you are a legitimate business (I am not 100% sure they still do this since that was last done about 4 years ago).
(the only thing I can think of is having to hire an accountant to record that you've done buggerall each year :p)
I would always, always ask why anyone is trying to start a company without a game they've got ready to sell or a contract for work they need to deliver that's ready to sign. I worked for years building games and designing things for people before I needed a company. Always chat to a financial adviser about what you're trying to achieve and see what they suggest: They will probably come up with solutions to things and ways to access money that you had no idea existed at all.
Most people trying to start a company seem to be doing so because they assume that that's what they need to do before they can make a game. Which is so totally incorrect that it hurts :(
Is there much reason to start a company if one is working alone (perhaps with people contracted from time to time)? (Dislekcia has commented here, but elaboration would be appreciated) If not, are there conditions under which it is? (For example, is one required to start a company when one does have a game to sell?) If it isn't required, are there any advantages to starting a company?
1) You need to invoice someone and they insist you do so from a company.
2) You need to employ people and would prefer to have them employed from the company then in your personal capacity.
3) You have potential clients that expect a vat invoice.
4) You want to gain access to certain public funds only available to businesses that follow a series of ground rules.
5) Someone wants to invest in your venture and insists on a formal business.
You do not need a business for any of the following things.
Copyright can be held in your own personal capacity.
Partnership, there are laws around Partnerships but there is still nothing wrong with 4 people writing a simple agreement of shares in a project. It probably won't stand the test of a courtroom, but one would assume you working with a certain amount of trust between you and your team.
Steam, Paypal and various online stores. Most of the online stores I know of have personal options as apposed to corporates ones. In fact since we have a formal business its just more hassle to get on then it would be without one.
Most of the reasons you might want one are probably something you can work around, spend your energy building your game. This paperwork nonsense can be sorted out quickly when you actually sure you need it and as I mentioned before, you know why you need it.
@LexAquillia the laws around independent contractors are damn well changing every year.
My 2c on that is hire people to do work. Make sure invoices don't say hours and only work output with a total price.
Really appreciate all the experience being shared here, though I'm still not quite understanding the pros and cons. I think the best approach for me is to have my misconceptions debunked:
Here are my absolutely most honest impressions of this whole company thing: it seems to be on par as everyone else who hasn't started one who wants to, as in:
1. I'm not 100% sure why I need it right now, but if I only get it when I need it it might be too late
1A - Some things need the company to have existed for x amount of time
1B - Registration to instantiation takes forever, given government "efficiency". I've also heard on 702 over and over again CIPS failing to process things at a reasonable speed. So rather do it now than later.
2. I hear that having company will give you access to a bunch of stuff that you'd want. Am I going to use them right now? No.
3. Those things are like: Tax returns on company expenses (sounds like free money to me), tax returns on everything else I could sneak into company expenses (lunch), possible gov grants (sounds like free money to me again), and stuff I probably don't know about.
4. Having a company saves you from the 25% freelance tax that you'd have to otherwise pay (sounds like more free money)
5. There're minimal drawbacks to having a registered company and not doing much with it compared to not having one when you need it.
6. Even if I do freelance work I'd rather do it through a company than through personal means.
7. What do you *need* a company for?
Thanks again guys for your wisdom :)
I'm a member of the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation I say this because they a lot of resources with reference to taxation and owning companies in and out of the country which some people may find interesting, so here goes :).
65% of all wealth in the world is stored off shore, it is almost always better for you to store your money offshore or incorporate in a tax haven.
Loopholes and pitfalls:
If you start a company in a tax haven like the Caiman island but the shares of the company is more than majority owned in South Africa then regular laws for taxation with references to business will apply, however if you own 50% or less in South Africa you are only liable to pay tax on the salary which is paid out to you and or the dividends (Which is 15% I believe)
How this is relevant => I will use myself as an example, My "Company" (which hasn't been incorporated YET) is shared in equity between myself (50%) and David Nickerson (50%) meaning that a majority is not owned in any one country, this is fortunate because if we incorporate offshore we will only be taxed off shore and will only have to pay dividends tax on money earned.
So lets say Pixel Boy sells 10 000 copies (for arguments sake), it would earn R1 000 000 of which we would see about R700 000 because the Caiman islands has 0% tax rate we would pay no tax on this R700 000 but it would also be on some island somewhere which isn't very useful, but lets say I wanted to use R50 000 of that 700k then I could pay myself 50k in dividends and only pay 15% South African Tax on it. (I believe all of this information can be found in section 9 of the SARS tax laws). This is an IDEAL situation as tax rates are low and money only is taxed when it is brought into the country.
Another awesome loophole is the fact that Singapore has a tax rate HOWEVER said rate only APPLIES to money earned inside of singapore meaning you will pay practically 0% tax if you own a game company incorporated in singapore but your forms will look more legit (this is if you don't want to be associated with Caiman islands due to stereotypes)
THE BEST part of this is that its all 100% legal!
Pitfalls:
If you own more than 50% shares in your company, such that a company is 100% south african one would have to pay the South African tax + the country where you incorporates tax (which ideally should be 0%) however because you would be paying south african tax as well its better to incorporate in SA and pay (28%) standard business tax...
tl;dr: depending on your share distribution one should consider weather one wants to incorporate offshore or in SA
Hope this is of some use.
Because the bottom line here is that you only really start to notice your business paying tax when you're earning more money than you really can understand anyway. Some of you might think that the R1.6M that DD has pulled in so far means that QCF is like super crazy profitable and that we must have eaten a fair amount of tax. Nope. Development is expensive and those expenses eat into that income in a way that means that QCF hasn't booked profits that mean we've had to pay anything noticeable as tax at all. The only thing we deal with is PAYE on salaries, which everyone would have to pay anyway.
How does min-maxing your tax expenditure help anyone make more games or build their reputations from scratch?
That's one of the many reasons I seriously dislike the "You should start a company ASAP" angle - it makes people focus on useless stuff that is just noise, but other people consider important for reasons (ok, yeah, sure, when you have a company that has like 500 people involved in it, then saving enough cash to create another 2 jobs by dodging tax is useful, no indies in SA are in that situation).
Nobody ever got rich dodging taxes. No country full of people dodging taxes can deliver services to people that need them.
So taking advantage of that is pretty much correct, if it maximises the time you can spend in development, rather than trying to make ends meet?
That's not even taking into consideration all the tax leeway initiatives and windows for new businesses. Tax is something you care about in year 3. Caring about tax means you're already successful, not somebody that's just starting out.
@Tuism from my point of view and I would stress this is only based on my experiences.
Everything in this post is my own view and certainly not professional advice. It should be read and taken as such. Take entirely at your own risk. If you are serious about creating a business I strongly suggest seeking a professional consultant. I can not think of any situation where it would be too late. Assuming the issues is you suddenly hit it big and loads of money comes rushing in. I am certain you can use that money to solve any administration issues you have. This is true only for the opportunities @LexAquillia mentioned in his last talk. That only applied to certain opportunities and I would not be surprised if you could not overcome that with a proxy company that would assist you. They are remarkably better then the old CIRO and still bad. That having been said this is only a real issue assuming point 1 is. So if point one is not a real issue then how would this matter. The expenses are tax deductible, not free money. This will only benefit you if you are spending a lot of money running your company and your company is also earning that money. If you are putting that money into the company, you have already been taxed on it in your personal capacity. Now that money is seen as profit for the company and will be taxable too (Fortunately you can offset it against a loan account, leaving the profitability as 0). So you can claim some of that expenditure and then your company will make a loss that you can offset against future earnings. This way in the future with money you haven't made yet you will save the profit tax on those lunches. How much lunch are you planning to have? Do you consider 30% or so of that total value to be enough money to keep all the receipts and lodge the claims. If I am not mistaken it will also be an allowance against your total turn over. Ultimately you playing a statistics game with rules that change each year and processes that require constant attention to how they have changes for a very small return on money you have yet to make. Absolutely not. The company has money now and you have none. That money can only be transferred to you via salary and loan account drawings possibly dividend payout (This ultimately ends with about 40% taxation so don't rush to this option). Once paid to you that salary will be taxable UIF, PAYE, Skills Levy and some municipal one on the percentage I forget the specifics that's why I have an accountant after all.
Your companies money is not yours, this is the one things I see a lot of people that want to start a company not understanding. Its swings both ways though. Your companies debts and responsibilities are not yours either (Except tax, and anything you sign personal surety for). If you want a loan you will almost certainly have to sign surety for it. But in no circumstances should you sign surety for a lease agreement (and don't believe everyone is doing it that's poppycock). Approximately 30% of running a business is administration. A great deal of it only necessary due to legislation so that tax can be accurately measured. Also we still yet to establish this crisis that occurs when you don't have one. Remember no one really cares until there is a lot of money. When there is a lot of money you can get professionals to assist. Well naturally this is a statement of choice. Not necessarily a reason. I have a company for my corporate work, we have managed up to 20 employees at once time and spend a great deal of time administrating it so that we can manage the tax requirements. I only registered Celestial in the last 2 weeks and primarily so that I can correctly allocate the shares in the business and make some international deals as a company, we have moved the IP's into the company now and there are several ways to benefit from doing so when the IP have value as apposed to when they are just ideas. Most of my corporate clients would not let me invoice them until I was VAT registered. VAT registration means my rental and general operating expenses VAT is covered but the incoming VAT.
Lastly When we created Celestial in 1994 we did register right out. Then the laws were more lax then today. I really buggered up the admin and ended up spending two weeks at SARS in JHB resolving it (not the least stressful experience I have had to date). I was not in trouble because I had not paid them simply because certain returns were not done. The are many laws you will have to follow and quite honestly the time and effort doing it yourself means less time and effort building your game. If you register get an accountant to manage the business and keep the money in a separate account. Make sure you know how you are paying yourself and how tax is due on that money. Most of the savings running a business come not from saving money but from having to pay less out in the first place. This only maters at scale not small numbers.
Also (this may be slightly off-topic) is there tax charged when selling a game on steam, or even the google play store in South Africa?
Don't let legal and administrative "things" cause you to lose focus on the thing that will actually make you the money: making a kick-ass game. Once you have that kick-ass game, then you can worry about all that other stuff. Technically steam will levy state/national tax's on the sale of games through its portal. In the South African context though no. Technically speaking it is up to the purchaser of the game to notify SARS that they have bought it and pay the 14% VAT that should be levied on it. Same applies to the google store, iOS etc. On the flip side, any profits you make from the sale of the game through any portal will be subject to income or company tax.
Focus on your game, forget about the rest.
Now, the thing is that if I go into this I'd probably go at it half half and still take some freelance jobs while I'm working on the game. Well, if I can afford not to I would do that, but if I couldn't then I'd have to go into "make money mode".
Does having a company or not affect that part of the equation? Since it's not the "work on your game till it sells" approach, does a company maximise contract work income flow?
Is the difference in the tax that you pay between personal and company capacity small and therefore doesn't really matter? Min/maxing isn't worth it till the income is in the millions, is that right?
@LexAquillia thanks for the over to help I'll send you pm about some of the other questions I have
Out of curiosity, is there any reason you haven't linked your site here yet? Also, I'm worried that you saying there's 15 people in your team and nobody's got experience with questions like this, are you all students? Not that that's a bad thing! It just means that there's a lot of common misconceptions that inexperienced teams have about the process of building games that you totally don't have to make if that's the case :)
P.S. We are making an MMO using java and lwjgl
building an MMO...
Just out of highschool...
All these send red flags up for me from the collective wisdom I've been exposed to around here.
I think the other guys can probably say it better than I could, but it's definitely too early to be even thinking about a company! Start small, start simple, start making things. Anything, with the goal of making, breaking, finding out why it wasn't fun, finding out the limit of your skills (it's inevitable! We all start crap no matter how big our ideas are!), and get better and get better before trying to do something INCREDIBLY MASSIVELY BIG.
We all wanted to do an MMO when we started. My first game idea was to rival Pokemon. But that was never going to be the first game anyone made. Angry Birds was Rovio's 30th game or something, that's just how it goes.
So try and keep it managable, and keep improving, and don't think you're gonna crack it first time - you're not, accept it and keep going :) It's not discouraging, it's normal! Even the successful guys here have gone through lots of fails before getting to a win!
If that's the case, I'd like to ask you a few questions:
1. Why SQL. What is it supposed to be for in your MMO and how are you going to handle the need for realtime responses? How many MMOs out there use things like SQL and what do they use it for?
2. 15 people? Wow. That's a ton... What are each of their roles and what experience do they have in those roles? Do you have a manager? (I mean, I run a team of 8 of us and that's bloody hard enough, I don't want to touch a larger group)
3. Have you guys heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? What estimates have you made and what expectations do you have of this project?
4. Can you make Tetris? :D
Also yes we have a manager, no to be honest I haven't hear of the Dunning-Kruger effect, we know that it won't be the most amazing MMO in existence and might just become a game we LAN together. Also I can probably program the basis of Tetris as in blocks and moving them about and selecting the random shapes chosen (though probably not as intelligently as the AI that Tetris uses for it, as I have heard there is more at play then just random shape selection) and make lines disappear
P.S. (also I might I have phrased it badly, how I meant we would learn more in one go than in small amounts)
@Max9403 I would never be as presumptuous as to tell you what you should or should not be doing with your time and effort. I do however agree in principle with learning to walk before you run. I looked at you page not much information about your game there. Do you have some screen shots or current working Alpha versions. Game architecture design notes or anything we could see/discuss and become more involved?
How does your login work whats security solution are you happy with. What communications protocol are you planning to use. If its a web based MMO that might make things far simpler. I have just finished our cloud storage and retrieval solution for Unity and its not aimed for real time or an MMO even so it was a fair amount of effort making it secure fast enough and convenient. You mentioned LUA in conjuncture with MySQL. It doesn't give us much information. If you using Java I hope you looked at jMonkey before rolling your own full engine. I published a game last year in October in Java and then spend 6 months rewriting it in Unity. I can tell you now personally using Java in the first place cost us time effort and left us with a worse product for all the extra effort. Seriously take a look at tools like Unity.
Hopefully you can see our concerns are kind and that we want to see you succeed with your efforts not be discouraged.
@dislekcia I just read about there being a semi-AI in Tetris somewhere XD I'll give it a shot when I have some spare time though I appreciate your thoughtfulness on the subject though
If you want me to post a separate discussion about the game as to keep this one on topic tell me
As an example, for a dog food company
1. Premium Dog Food
2. Woofles
Number one is much better because it's descriptive of the product rather than cute, like number 2.
It's my 2 cents (and I'll be talking more broadly on this at a meet up in future), so you can take it or leave it. More advice here: http://www.yourseoplan.com/business-name-seo/
Also, a lot of people are reading this thread that might actually be ready with a decent game :) I was just adding to the discussion in general.
The reason for the mantra "Learn to walk before you try run", as in make small games before you make a big game, is that getting feedback on the small game will allow you to learn something a lot faster. Trying to make a large game means spending an awfully long time producing nothing that anyone can play, and when there is something others can play it will be very hard to use the feedback they are giving (because the experiment you are making is really really complex).
"Learn to walk before you try run" works because learning to walk is quick, and learning to walk a little faster is also quick. But learning to run is impossible before you can walk and you might not even learn to walk in that time. That's a huge risk.
Rami Ismail from Vlambeer did a talk at Wits a couple weeks back. He said something along the lines of every developer learns by testing ideas. Some developers spend 6 months producing an idea and testing it... but his team try do it in a weekend. Both tests result in learning, but for Vlambeer they can learn the same thing many times faster.
Which is at least part of the reason Vlambeer are very profitable and they've been out of college for around 3 years.
(I haven't been nearly as successful as them for instance. I've spent a long time on projects I learnt very little from... and probably started off with a fair bit less innate talent).
@Max9403 I know this isn't what you want to hear, and it probably sounds discouraging. I can't really help that. Many of us have been in your position and most of us wish we'd heard about other cheaper, more efftive, ways to build our careers.
Maybe you've got to just go ahead and try. Hopefully you can take away from this the idea that learning is something you can try optimize.
Maybe breaking your project down into testable chunks might help you "walk" better along the way. And importantly, get something playable ASAP.
But game development is a subtly different beast. Designing systems that produce enjoyable experiences is somewhat different to designing usable systems.
I hope you will post here in future with your progress. Even if your game does just get to the point where it is only fun amongst friends at a LAN (like you said it might) then there's still a lot of value in that.
Making games in South Africa is what this forum is about! If we can help you in any way (like playing your game and giving feedback) I think we'd all love to. We all want the best possibly games made in South Africa, by happy and successful South African game developers!
And then when players start spending a ton of time in your game and want to actually give you real money for it, then worry about restricting access to paying customers.
Until the game is at the point where it is polished and super fun, you're not going to get anyone to play it who doesn't have a stake in it's success. A community like this is good because we all want South African games to win, so we'll be willing to put up with a unpolished experience. It's not like random people are going to jump in an play a pre-alpha prototype of a game, there's tons of super polished finished games that are competing for their time.
We want to help you reach this dream you have. Right now, you really don't know much about how to achieve it - almost everything you're doing is an assumption based on no actual data or experience. For instance, trying to build an MMO with a huge team is not a very successful way to build a career making games. All you have to do to test this is visit any game development forum ever and see the hopeful announcements of how awesome MMO X is going to be and then see the complete lack of anything materialising months and months after that.
That's why we're saying that you need to get something playable as fast as possible - you need to feel that drive that watching people play something you've made creates, you need that feedback, you need to stumble against the unexpected hurdles that you didn't think even a simple task like building Tetris would have. Because, if you can't forsee the actual difficulty of building something simple, how are you going to hope to accurately judge what you need to do to build something as complex as an MMO?
You're not building a game until someone else can sit down and play it. I can guarantee that 90% of the stuff you're working on now won't be right for your game, simply because you don't know with certainty what your game actually needs because you're not able to play the game. Basically, you're making assumptions and not testing them, the more assumptions you make on top of other assumptions, the less stable and useful actions taken due to those assumptions are. The core assumptions that you're resting on right now are all to do with the idea that you have a fun game concept that people are going to want to play - that this MMO's moment to moment interaction is "easy" to do. It isn't. Build that first, in whatever way you can - test it on paper, have people roll dice, see if you can turn it into a card game, maybe even prototype it in a quicker system and produce a game others can download and test. Then give those things to other people and listen to their feedback, because that's a skill you don't even know you need yet - some would say that's the single most important skill you need to practice to become a good game developer: Evaluating and maximising feedback.
Good luck. I hope we can eventually inspire you to make a game instead of make nice fantasies about how cool it would be to have made a game. There's a big difference there :)
P.S. If you don't want to "expose" your game ideas to people for fear of them being stolen, that's a whole other debate. Bottom line: That's not how things happen and ideas are pretty much worthless anyway :)
If you're starting out on your game development career it can really help to meet and talk to other people that are also trying to figure it out. Sharing the experiences of how South Africans got to the point of being able to make games for a living (or just have a ton of fun making games) is what these meetings are all about.
And I can promise that we're a friendly bunch of people who are nice to meet! Certainly us Cape Town folks : )
Also, they're a great place to demo your game and get feedback (when you're game is at the point that you need feedback).
@Override public void draw() { DrawTexture.drawTexture(getTexture(0), 0f, 2160f, 0f, 3840f); GL11.glLoadIdentity(); getTexture(1).bind(); GL11.glTranslatef(((float) Game.getWidth() / 2), ((float) Game.getHeight() / 2), 0.0f); GL11.glRotatef(rotation, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glTranslatef(-((float) Game.getWidth() / 2), (float) -(Game.getHeight() / 2), 0.0f); DrawTexture.drawAreaQuads(56f, 2104f, 896f, 2944f, 0, 1, 0, 1); DrawTexture.drawTexture(getTexture(2), 108f, 2156f, 896f, 2944f); }GL11.glBegin(GL11.GL_QUADS); GL11.glTexCoord2f(placeTop, placeLeft); GL11.glVertex2f((float) (left * heightRatio), (float) (top * widthRatio)); GL11.glTexCoord2f(placeBottom, placeLeft); GL11.glVertex2f((float) (right * heightRatio), (float) (top * widthRatio)); GL11.glTexCoord2f(placeBottom, placeRight); GL11.glVertex2f((float) (right * heightRatio), (float) (bottom * widthRatio)); GL11.glTexCoord2f(placeTop, placeRight); GL11.glVertex2f((float) (left * heightRatio), (float) (bottom * widthRatio)); GL11.glEnd();) also I don't want to create a lot of hype about it since we aren't 100% sure where it is heading. I'm might know little about MMO development other than from being a player and from my days of helping to run private servers but that doesn't mean it isn't worth a shot and if it falls flat on it's face then so be it and we learn
@BlackShipsFilltheSky I'm planning on going to the next Cape Town one, I only discovered Make Games SA last weekend
Your code shows that you want to simplify the process of using OpenGL from inside your game engine this is a fair goal and shows that you have an understanding of certain codding patterns. However to get the most of out 3D hardware you have to go much further then making it convenient in fact you damn right end up having certain things near imposable to get the benefit of performance.
I don't want to start up a full discussion on building from scratch versus using excising engines. I would say though if you going to build an engine it will help you a great deal doing a little research.