The German VG Wort, collecting society for authors, now uses the board game database of of the Altenburg Game Archive and releases royalties for board game authors. Spiele-Autoren-Zunft demands funding for the continued database maintenance from the Federal Government.
Great news for board game, card game and tabletop authors: In the future, VG WORT will use the board game database of the Altenburg Game Archive, operated by Stiftung Spielen, as an additional reference for determining library royalties. This was announced by the Board Game Designers Association Spiele-Autoren-Zunft e.V..
Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort (VG Wort) represents the interests of German authors. Registered authors receive royalties based on their own publications. This now also applies to game materials. Eligible game authors can therefore now submit title notifications to VG Wort, provided the titles are recorded in the Stiftung Spielen database.
The Spiele-Autoren-Zunft is also calling for funding from the federal government to keep the database up to date: “The foundation for this archive and its database was laid over the past decades through volunteer efforts. The development of the database was also supported—for a limited time—by federal project funding as part of the ‘Neustart Kultur’ initiative. However, professional continuation on a volunteer basis is no longer possible, as the merger of several archives and collections has expanded the collection to over 82,000 games, of which only 33,000 have been digitally cataloged so far. In our legal opinion, it is now the federal government’s responsibility to provide this archive with institutional funding, similar to that received by the German National Library (DNB).”
Video game authors are not represented by VG Wort. Instead, a separate Verwertungsgesellschaft für die Hersteller von Games (VHG) was founded in 2023 by the game association (we reported in German).
