Ethics

Stakeholders
The studio has five stakeholders : employees, consumers, shareholders, project contributors and the contractors. Each one expects different things, sometimes incompatible. Our chance/opportunity here is that we will have complete transparency, so we can only have one message for the five stakeholder. These five groups are not mutually exclusive. For example, almost all the employees will be players and contibutors on the project. Some employees will be shareholders too, etc.



The stakeholders have different goals - but as the roles can be cumulated, so can the goals of individuals (feel free to improve the definitions):


 * Shareholders want to make a profit within a few years by reselling their shares
 * Players want to play a good game
 * Contributors want to add their work to the project and enjoy doing it
 * Contractors want to get paid for executing a contractual task that they like
 * Employees want to earn a salary doing a job that they like

Potential issues between stakeholders
The beginning of a list of potential issues to address :


 * The employee wants to earn a good salary, to travel frequently to meet other members of the community, while the shareholder wants to minimize the structural costs
 * The shareholder wants the paying players conversion rate to be high to increase the value of the company. Bugging players to pay and making the game unfair to non-paying subscribers increases that rate, but most players don't like these techniques.
 * The contributors want to implement perma-death, but the players hate the concept.
 * The employees want freedom to chose the tasks they work on, just as contributors
 * The players sometimes need to be unaware of things in order to be hooked by the game (especially storyline wise), while the more the contributors know about everything, the better
 * The shareholders might push to diversify towards other sources of revenues if they feel it is in the interest of the company, while the contributors might be only interested by participating and playing the games that were originally planned
 * solution : The studio, as member of the HackIt! project community, abides the social contract rules for all matters related to HackIt!. This does not prevent the studio to start other activities, separate from the HackIt! project, and therefore that do not go against the interests of the interests of HackIt! contributors while generating complementary revenues.