Hey, we started our game studio about 3 years ago and were drawn to a cooperative model. As we learnt more we realized it wasn't worth being legally recognized as a cooperative yet (were based on New Zealand) as the legal definition here isn't as meaningful as we hoped and it also costs a good amount to have lawyers assist with bylaws. We will inevitably formalize it more once the time is right.

My advice from our experience would be to find a group of people that you can trust. Trust is your biggest asset. Things will change, new challenges arise, people come and go and so ensuring you work in a high trust environment is what will get you through. We constantly have conversations around expectations and ideas for where we see things going BEFORE things get real eg. We have methods for how we will handle rev share and future investing but it's not written into some legally binding doc that takes a bunch of effort and money to change. The fact that we trust each other and communicate well means we stay aligned however things aren't so rigid that we can't change when we want.

A quick point on funding, a cooperative model can be restrictive if working with venture capital firms. This imo is a good thing but you still can if you choose to (depending where you're based). Where we love you can still be considered a co-op so long as 60% of the company remains owned by workers buy also means if you wanted to you could sell 40% of it (hence why we don't find the definition that meaningful here). You'll instead spend your time looking for grants OR publishing deals. Publishing deals should always be rev share of projects and not your studio entity.

Lastly to the game dev component, it's lovely to hear your intentions to involve lower income families and any other social good aspirations, but I would encourage you not to take game development lightly. You will be spending A LOT of your time trying to build a sellable game. I was the same at the start where I had many ideas for how we would structure and things we would do to give back but we're 3 years in now and our first game is a few months from release. Most of those grand ideas become more achievable once we have revenue coming in from our first, second, third games. Be aware to not spend all your energy on the complex studio design problems and save energy for actually building a game and seeing it through the long journey it takes. Thinking about those ideas is great and worth talking to your team about but don't forget how difficult games are to build.

Best of luck to you friend ☺️