Ok, thank you for the answer. Does anyone have any tip of an online game lawyer that could settle this by looking at our email conversation?

Don't think your e-mail history really qualifies as a legal document. Its better than just having an oral gentlements agreement, but its just that... a gentlements agreement.

Now, given that he hasn't contributed at all, you haven't signed any legal contracts, and he never gained access to any of your team internal servers/pages and actually used that access, you could shut him out of your internal systems, and then have a long and honest chat with him why you kick him out of the team.

Be respectful, but honest.

Of course, if there is anything legal that was signed, you need to contact a lawyer to make sure you handle it correctly. And if there is any work done by him, and you cannot flat out stop using it in your project, you also need a lawyer. His work is still his work when not done as your employee or with a signed freelancing contract.

To be honest, you should be thankful its only one in five. Depending on your own backstory, and what kind of volunteers you take onboard (completly inexpierienced vs. expierienced hobbysts vs professionals), you will always find guys that claim to be ready to contribute, but aren't. Some of them might even mean it, but loose motivation fast when they see the amount of work the need to be doing without getting paid for it.

The real problem is that you also don't own the rights to the work produced by your other team members. Register a real limited liability company and have it write up legally binding contracts for all your participants.

Quoted for truth. You actually got lucky with your current "bad team player"... you can just kick him out, without losing any work done. And if he tries to sue anyone, he has little legal grounds to do so (even though I guess Tom is right and you should get a lawyer just in case he tries).

What happens if your most valuable artist wants to leave the project in 6 months, and just disappears without giving you the rights to continue to use his prior work? Even worse, what if he leaves on bad terms and asks his work to be removed?

The longer the project, the more people involved, the more money involved in the end, the bigger the problems that can arise. Given that you hope for success, you should also plan for big problems. -> lawyer, create a company, create contracts for everyone to sign.

There is no contract

That's the source of your problem.

But it's also the solution. Tell him he's out.

He might sue you, so get a lawyer.

Probably you should get a lawyer before you tell him he's out.

Then you need to write a collaboration agreement with the remaining team. http://maientertainmentlaw.com/2008/11/collaboration/

With no written contract, this falls down to whether he HAS a case, and wants to enforce it.

First step would indeed to get a lawyer to make sure you're ready to fend anything that might come next.

Then, tell him he's off, as Tom mentioned.

Best case scenario, that's where it ends because either he realizes he has no case, or has no interest in enforcing it.

Worst case, he has a case and enforces it (could be that some of the communications between you may not have been as explicit as you might have imagined and may leave to interpretation and that his legal counsel believes he has some ground to be entitled to his shares despite not having met the actual requirements: this can occur if no clear and decisive link is established between the two).

How far off is your current project, and how complex would it be to start from scratch with a new team and an actual contract? This would cut him out entirely.