Another comment, a bit off-topic but it might save you from a huge pitfall/money drainer. I quote:

Quote:When we finish the game (it will probably take 3 - 4 years, because we are learning the technology while making the game) we will register immediately a company and will start searching for publishers who will definitely pay attention to us , because they will see a working team , they will see a good title .

Maybe I'm mis-interpreting your post, but it seems to me a lot of work in your 'company' (let's just call it that) that can be done without licensing an engine is not done yet. From my experience, the Trinigy Vision engine is quite easy to work with. I personally loved it at least, but granted, it was my first (and last) professional/commercial engine so I have little to compare to. What I intend to say is that it will not take you long before you become productive with this engine, given that you have enough skilled programmers in your team.

The point I'm getting at is this: make sure that once you start licensing this engine, or another that needs to be payed for, you already have as much work done as you can on other fields. That means you have the design of your game finished to the smallest detail possible, you have loads of artwork sitting there waiting to be used, you have a team of people ready to test/work with what the programmers create, etc.

If you have prepared well, you should be able to license this engine or another for a reasonable price (I don't know if I'm allowed to say what we payed for it, so I won't.) because you will not need to license it for 5+ years.

In my opinion, as I kind of said in the last post already, after you've prepared, try to get a license for developing a prototype that will not be released, in other words get the engine for a limited amount of time just for trying-out purposes. That will keep your costs as low as possible. Set milestones for the time you have the license (say 12 months). Set goals in advance that need to be reached in order to conclude the project is succesful enough to extend your license. Also, use your prototype to attract investors/publishers and such. Waiting till your game is finished is not gonna cut it, believe me. If you can show that your company was able to produce a decent prototype (given the time and resources available), that should make them confident you can in fact finish the whole project, as long as your 'plan' is good enough (like I said, detail, detail, detail. Every aspect of your game needs to be on paper, preferably up to the level that programmers can just 'translate' it directly to code and it's done :)).

Disclaimer: all this advice given is by a huge amateur, with very limited experience in this sort of thing. I just want to prevent you from making some of the mistakes we made, and that killed our project :)

my e-mail definitely sounded like 'what does it cost to use your engine?' :))
Anyway thank you all for your replies!

Quote:Original post by devmaster
my e-mail definitely sounded like 'what does it cost to use your engine?' :))

I can haz your engine? :p

Quote:Original post by devmaster
Many of indies such as me doesn't hurry registering a company. Because if registered they should start paying taxes immediately.

You do realize you would only pay taxes if your company had an income don't you? Even at 50% taxes, 50% of 0 is still 0.

I would agree that people may not register their business because they don't want the hassle of filing a $0 tax return.

John

Quote:Original post by borngamer

Quote:Original post by devmaster
Many of indies such as me doesn't hurry registering a company. Because if registered they should start paying taxes immediately.

You do realize you would only pay taxes if your company had an income don't you? Even at 50% taxes, 50% of 0 is still 0.

I would agree that people may not register their business because they don't want the hassle of filing a $0 tax return.

John

that's not right. In my country (Bulgaria) and almost everywhere in Europe and America if I register a company for developing sofware products, selling pancakes if you wish , whatever , I must pay about 300 euros just immediately after registered plus 150 to 200 euros a month. So I will end up the year with 300 + 12 * 150 = 2100 euros. the other taxes you are talking about are taxes on the profit. This is something very different . Here taxes based on profit are from 10% to 15% of the profit. So no matter whether I realize any profit or no I must have minimum 2100 euros per year to have a company(organization).

So to clear things about my "strange" person here :)) let me tell you that I am already engine owner (T3D) and keep on making my game with my team of friends engineers just like doing their hobby. Some sunny day when our game is about to be ready we will move from professional to commercial version of T3D and then register a company. So please don't mess up thing. This is the way for non rich teams.

My only wish starting this thread was to learn something about the Vision game engine. And exactly the price. I don't hide that I am looking to move to another technology but companies like Trinigy don't use to answer to indie developers obviously. So till the moment we realize something we will be obviously using cheaper but accessible technologies such as T3D.

Once again thanks everyone for joining this discussion. :)

While I don't know about Bulgaria, your statement is definitely incorrect for most (all ?) other European countries. You pay a one time set-up fee (which is roughly 100 Euro for an LLC-style company here in France, for example, if you do all documents yourself without a lawyer). You don't pay anything after that if you don't generate an income.

Yann, I believe there is no country around the world where the owner of a company has not to pay anything for hist employees. I am not talking about salaries but I am talking about all the kinds of insurances (health , finances).

ok guys,
that's not so important at all. Everybody decides what best fits for himself.