I'd like to work with people to develop my own projects, but I don't have any method of paying people for it, and if I were to promise royalties, then I'd have to figure out how to release the game somewhere where it'd get attention and can be sold, and work out the necessary contracts for sharing royalties.

I've been thinking along the same lines, in terms of thinking this is a very common problem.

The problem in a nutshell: "I'm trying to put together a hobbyist team to produce a video game to sell. I have no money to pay anyone. I can offer royalties but I don't have enough money to consult with a lawyer to produce effective, enforceable contracts. The other people I'm trying to recruit are complete strangers, who have no reason whatsoever to trust that even if the game is a huge hit, and I promised them a significant share / equity, that they will receive any payment at all."

The basic solution to this involves eliminating or vastly reducing counterparty risk. There are several ways to do that, including coming up with a 3rd party website (whether gamedev.net is interested or another site) that keeps track of the time spent and business contracts used by the parties involved. These log entries of who worked what hours when, along with the business contracts that detail what everyone is entitled to in terms of profit split, are going to potentially hold up in court far better than "we verbally agreed to xyz", or "here you go Your Honor, you can see I as the artist own 20% of the company because it is on the back of this napkin".

Honestly, I'm surprised none of the Staff have actually posted in this thread. I would think some of what was said would interest them.

Honestly, I'm surprised none of the Staff have actually posted in this thread. I would think some of what was said would interest them.

Third reply.

I posted twice, to be fair. ;)

So some thoughts..

There are several ways to do that, including coming up with a 3rd
party website (whether gamedev.net is interested or another site) that
keeps track of the time spent and business contracts used by the parties
involved. These log entries of who worked what hours when, along with
the business contracts that detail what everyone is entitled to in terms
of profit split, are going to potentially hold up in court far better
than "we verbally agreed to xyz", or "here you go Your Honor, you can
see I as the artist own 20% of the company because it is on the back of
this napkin".

This is so far off of what we are aiming to do that I don't think we would ever attempt to touch this. There are plenty of sites like elance that perform this function already.

What we really want to be doing is getting back into having our community publish articles/code snippets again rather than trying to mediate other people's contractual agreements. You have to remember, Gamedev.net is only run by a few people on the top level (Drew, Jason, and myself) at this point along with the moderators. We just don't have the resources to get into something like that.

This is so far off of what we are aiming to do that I don't think we would ever attempt to touch this. There are plenty of sites like elance that perform this function already.

What we really want to be doing is getting back into having our community publish articles/code snippets again rather than trying to mediate other people's contractual agreements. You have to remember, Gamedev.net is only run by a few people on the top level (Drew, Jason, and myself) at this point along with the moderators. We just don't have the resources to get into something like that.

eLance supports the time entries, but not really from the equity / royalty side, just your typical hourly rate. I actually haven't found any website that handles the equity accounting side of things (at least in a commoditized fashion, certainly there are tens of thousands of accountants who can handle this via manual labor, at high cost).

I agree it would be a significant project though, requiring software development, legal, etc. I would work on developing it myself but am busy with my own game.

In terms of the Developer Journals, I am generally happy with them as is though also like the ideas presented on this thread. If I were to suggest anything in that area, it would perhaps be more categorization. eg, I'm interested in finding MMORPGs, or first-person shooters, for Android and Desktop Mac. Ideally you could easily find things like team size, and development stage (concept-only, prototypes, early development, alpha, beta, live) etc.

I confess I didn't read the entire thread, but you might be interested in checking out the concept I posted in the 2013 ideas sticky here:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/636615-gamedevnet-2013-what-do-you-want-to-see-from-the-site/page-3

Looks good! Something like that would help for sure.