DBAs, Business Licenses, LLCs, Corporations, etc...
Eero Tuovinen:
That DBA system is pretty curious. Here in Finland we have a national registry for companies which a start-up needs to register at; part of the process is an automatic comparison to make sure nobody else uses the same trade name. I guess that doesn't outright prevent conflicts, of course, if the company name then happens to be a trademark or something else important for somebody else.
Kynn:
Oh, just for the record:
My question wasn't all that clear. It wasn't "what do all these mean and what should I do?" but rather "have you guys done this?"
I've already owned my own business for 9.5 years, but I was mainly interested in hearing what other people have decided to do, instead of discussing the options.
But I don't mind the rest of the discussion on this thread either.
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
That's kind of a weird post. The Forge is a discussion site, not a place for polling. As moderator, I am not inclined to permit topics that are defined by "just asking" vagueness.
As you are a company owner, what are your thoughts and points about the various options? Or, if that is not what you wanted to talk about, why are you interested in what options independent publishers are choosing?
Best, Ron
Kynn:
Sorry, I wasn't polling as much as trying to find out other peoples' experiences rather than trying to find out what the options are.
In other words, less of:
"Well, you can do DBA, or you can do LLC, or you can do..."
And more of:
"When we did X, we did it because of Y, and here's what happened."
I'm looking to learn from people who have done it, rather than be told what the options are (especially when the options will vary a lot based on where one is geographically).
Does that make sense?
Myself, I've run a company as a DBA/single owner. In retrospect, it would have been better to incorporate, but it was a web company that ended up having employees, and not a game design company -- so I've got little experience to go on here, and I wanted to hear about the decisions that other game companies have made.
Hope that doesn't sound so much like "polling" as much as asking for advice.
I'm just looking to self-publish a handful of games, maybe 2 or 3 titles a year, myself, if it helps to know what I'm interested in doing.
Ron Edwards:
Ah! That's excellent, and thanks.
In my case, it was a matter of shifting to hard-cover book printing. That transition took $5000 of my own money, straight up, as a risk (this was in 2000, before all sorts of current cost-saving option existed). I wanted that risk to pertain to some legal entity that was not, actually, myself, so I needed to make a corporation. If I lost the money, then basically it meant that I'd made a start-up donation to the company and then the company had failed.
I also back-dated the previous year of sales and expenses into a sole proprietorship, which was easy enough to do in terms of the upcoming taxes (i.e. the ones I was about to pay). I suppose it would have made more sense to have established a sole proprietorship a while before that, but in my case, the transition to the full-on book publishing was a very fast one, and I went from pretty much lemonade-stand to full-blown international book distribution in less than a year. I'd kept really good records of all sales so far, so that was easy.
Anyway, I hope that matches what you're looking for, and I'm also interested to see the reasons and circumstances that led to what others have done.
Best, Ron
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