One account per game IP: separating revenue by title

As a studio grows past its first hit, a structural question appears: should each game live in its own legal entity, or at least its own account? Many studios end up running a company per title, or per major IP, so that one game's success or failure, its royalty splits and its storefront payouts stay cleanly separated from the next.

This is not the generic problem of managing a few subsidiaries. For a game studio the driver is specific: storefront money arrives per title, co-development and publishing deals carve up that revenue per title, and the cleanest way to honour those splits and value each IP is to keep its money in its own container. This guide covers why studios separate by IP, what it makes easier, the overhead it adds, and how to run several titles' money side by side.

Why studios separate money by title

A game IP is an asset in its own right. It earns revenue, owes royalties, may have outside investment tied specifically to it, and might one day be sold, spun out or licensed independently of the rest of the studio. When every title's money flows through a single account, untangling any one game's true economics becomes an exercise in spreadsheet archaeology.

Separating by entity or account means each title's revenue, costs and obligations are ring-fenced from day one. A successful game's cash is not quietly subsidising a struggling one without anyone deciding it should, a problem title's liabilities are contained, and the financial story of each IP is legible to investors, publishers and potential acquirers. The separation also makes per-title royalty and revenue-share arithmetic dramatically simpler.

Royalty splits with co-devs and publishers

Few games are wholly owned by one studio. A co-development partner may be owed a share of net revenue, a publisher who funded the title takes its cut and may recoup an advance first, and engine or middleware royalties attach per product. Every one of these splits is defined per title, against that title's revenue, not against your studio as a whole.

Holding each game's revenue in its own account makes these splits enforceable rather than estimated. The publisher's share, the co-dev's share and any recoupment can be calculated against a clean per-title balance, and the money owed to each party can be reserved or paid from the right pot. When everything sits in one account, you are constantly reverse-engineering which slice of a blended balance belongs to which deal, which is exactly the kind of ambiguity that strains partnerships.

Storefront payouts arrive per title

Storefronts generally report and pay per product. Your storefront payouts, your console storefront statements and your mobile app store revenue all break down by title, which means the money already arrives pre-separated by IP at the source. Routing each title's payouts into its own account simply preserves a separation the storefronts have already made for you.

This alignment pays off at reconciliation. When a storefront statement for one game lands in that game's account, matching reported revenue to received cash is direct, and the per-title revenue share owed to publishers or co-devs follows cleanly. Collapsing several titles into one account throws away that built-in structure and forces you to rebuild it manually every reporting period.

Weighing the overhead

Separation is not free. A full legal entity per title carries real cost: incorporation, separate bookkeeping, filings and possibly separate tax treatment, and the burden grows with every company you add. For a small studio with one or two titles, a separate account per game inside a single entity may give most of the clarity at a fraction of the overhead. The right structure depends on your investment, your deal structure and your jurisdiction, so take this as general information and confirm it with your accountant and lawyer.

The practical middle path many studios take is to start with separate accounts or pots per title for clarity, and only stand up separate legal entities when a specific deal, investor or risk profile genuinely requires it. The goal is clean per-IP economics, and there is more than one way to reach it.

How Altery fits

Altery is built for running several titles' money side by side. Multi-entity management lets a studio operating a company per game oversee all of them from one place, while dedicated pots let you ring-fence each title's revenue, and any publisher or co-dev share owed against it, even within a single entity if you are not ready to incorporate per title.

Because storefront payouts arrive per title and often in USD, multi-currency accounts let each game hold its storefront revenue in USD, EUR or GBP and convert on your own timeline, and real-time balances with categorised spend keep each IP's revenue, costs and royalty obligations legible for reconciliation, investors and acquirers. Global mass payouts then let you settle each title's co-dev and contributor shares from the right pot. Altery is not a bank and provides general information, not advice; confirm the right legal structure with your accountant and lawyer.

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