Legality Question

[GamerSJD2002]

Basically I'm wanting to develop a website to allow amateur game developers to come together as a community and work on projects together. Project leaders would be able to set prices and how they'd like to distribute their money (to the programmers, level designers, artists, etc.) The site would focus around homebrew for all systems, pc included. But I need to work out the legal aspects. If I were to create this website as a business and obtain a licenses for consoles, would the developers on the site be able use my license so to speak? Would that even make it legal to distribute games intended for a console in "rom" form?

[Darksaviour69]

I think you will find the licensing cost for big platform will be huge, + the manufactures approve the games them selfs, and can (and have) not allowed games to be release because they are not good enough.

If you look at sega vs accolade, accolade won because they backwards engineered the megadrive and did not use the SDK. But being legally right is not always good enough eg. Sony sued Bleem out of business even thought sony never won in court.

[Eviltaco64]

You might as well just have a PayPal donation type of thing.

You avoid all the legality crap and still get a little something in return.

[yaustar]

yaustar, are you sure you have to seek permission from the platform manufacture? The reason why normal game developers pay a license is because they used the SDK, but if you don't use the SDKs then its legal to release without a license, in the US a least, eg. sega vs accolade. I know the GPL licensee has changed since the last time I read about it (i thinkit was gpl 2, now its gpl 3), so maybe some thing has been added since.

Hmm. Not 100% sure thinking about it. I do wonder if running unsigned code does break an agreement somewhere.