Updated Indie Fund Contract
Since we updated how Indie Fund is structured about a year ago, we had to modify our contract to work better with the new organization.
Someone recently wanted to setup something like Indie Fund in their own country (which we love!), and we realized that we hadn't made this latest contract version public. Please feel free to use it for your own Indie Fund-style game investments -- just make a copy and go for it!
What changed?
With the latest version of Indie Fund, individual partners are free to decide what they want to invest in. This new contract takes into account that you have a variable number of investors who have each put in different amounts, and the fact that there is no centralized investor dealing with the payments to and from the developer.
In this contract, the developer is responsible for managing payments to each investor - it is a bit of extra work for the developer, but this only happens after the game is launched and generating revenue.
Alongside the updated structure & contract, we’ve also modified how we choose games to invest in. At Indie Fund, we typically have a "lead investor" who really believes in the game, and agrees to do a little bit of extra work to manage the process - they are essentially the games’ champion inside of IF.
After doing their due diligence, the lead brings the game to all the Indie Fund partners, and any interested partners offer an amount they want to invest. If there is more money offered to invest than the developer needs, then the lead investor decides how to split things up. Typically the lead investor has a larger share, but this is not required, and of course no one invests more than they offered.
The lead investor is encouraged to make the investment split fair and inclusive so that more IF partners can participate and offer their support (financial and otherwise), keeping in mind that overhead makes it less worthwhile for partners to invest small amounts.
We hope that you find this contract useful and end up funding some great games!