“For those of you who haven’t experienced Dr Sadie’s remedies for gaming addiction she is not to unlike the video game nerd, but don’t tell her I said that…she’d beat me.”

Apparently I have opened a can of worms!

Project Joystick is a competition being run by Bigpond and ACMI. The competition purports to "to invest over one million dollars to help bring it to life"! The problem here is that you will not see a penny of that cool million, and quite possibly neither will your game.

The main problem here is that you submit your fully developed game idea, complete with sketches, storylines and characters, and if you are lucky enough to have one of the top 10 best concepts, you will LOSE YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. That storyline, those characters, that artwork will all be owned by Bigpond. They MAY go and make a game out of it, and you will get your name somewhere in the credits, but that is where your involvement will end.

Whilst on the surface this competition presents itself to young and aspiring developers as a way to get their game concepts funded, it is actually just harvesting IP in order to push out a Bigpond branded online game without having to pay someone to come up with the creative.

If this was promoted clearly as being a “we will take your idea away from you and make it ourselves”, instead of a “we will invest a million dollars in your game” then I wouldn’t have a problem. How many of these 10 finalists will unwittingly sign away months or years of work in an effort to win funding for their game development without realising that they may never see their game development AND will never then be able to make it themselves.

I have contacted a Bigpond representative, and I will post an update when I hear more.

To have your say, jump over to our forum post on the topic.