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Release free game with open source code using art which costs money

A topic by Heathro created Oct 02, 2020 Views: 787 Replies: 9

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Hello, everyone.

I am developing a game for CS50 final project. I used free art from couple artist on this website. It says I can use it for any purpose. But I also want to buy additional art from same artists, to make extra levels and enemies. And at finish, I want to leave project with public access at github, to use it as a portfolio for future job search or any other purpose.

Is it okay if there will be sprites which I have bought here? Because people can take them for free, instead of buying them from these artists.

Also I would like to publish this game here for free. Hopefully few users will try it and give me feedback/advises for my grow as developer. And of course for a "look, mom, I published my first game".

Will I make big problems for me and for these artists? I do not really understand licence/juridical rules. Do I need to hide art for somehow and leave only code, or I can publish open project with payable art with permission from these artists? Maybe I just need to mark somewhere in project or game page, that "I have bought this art but you can't use it unless you will pay as well".

Thank you, and sorry for my English.

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Afloof.devModerator4 years ago(+1)

Before you read this, keep in mind I’m not a lawyer.

Even if you make a paid game, those assets will still be included, and people would be able to get them, even if they haven’t paid for them.

I think the important part here is the license. It’s fine if people get hold of those assets, but you have to make sure they are aware that those assets are not licensed for commercial use. That means they can’t publish any work that includes those assets. Unfortunately this can get difficult to track, I’m not sure if there is an easy way to deal with it.

Keep in mind that it doesn’t matter if your project is open-source or not. I can access assets of a closed-source AAA game I’ve bought, that doesn’t mean I can use them on my projects.

If in doubt, check with the original creator, to confirm what their intention was when they were selling the assets.

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technicat4 years ago (1 edit)

Generally, when someone sells you assets to use in building and shipping a game, they're not granting you the right to distribute those asset files individually or in an asset pack, for the obvious reason you mention, and I expect the source project of a game falls in that category.

So if you release the source of a game then you should omit those files or use placeholder assets. For example, years ago I wrote a Unity book with a sample project that used free assets from the Unity Asset Store, but even for free assets, the store license does not permit redistribution outside the store, so I did not include them in the github repo, and users have to get them from the Asset Store on their own.

Thus, even with free assets, you need to make sure however they've been licensed to you is compatible with the open source license you choose to distribute your source project (and there are differences among free and open source licenses, so you may need to note the differences and credit/ownership). If the license for an asset is unclear or you want permissions, you should ask the vendor directly.

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Afloof.devModerator4 years ago

Generally, when someone sells you assets to use in building and shipping a game, they’re not granting you the right to distribute those asset files individually or in an asset pack, for the obvious reason you mention, and I expect the source project of a game falls in that category.

I’ll admit I don’t have much experience with paid assets in open-source projects. But why would it be different if those assets were part of an otherwise open-source project, versus being part of a downloadable zip which is the game itself? In either case the customer can gain access to those assets. This is assuming the open-source project makes it explicit that those assets are not under the same open-source license.

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technicat4 years ago (4 edits)

I'm not a legal or IP expert, but the distinction seems clear to me. As I understand it, the poster mentions two cases: publishing the playable game on itch.io and publishing the project source on github. The former sounds fine, using the assets as intended, and if users extract asset from the game they have to have a certain level of savvy and make a deliberate effort (with willful disregard for IP considerations) to dig in and find the assets, and those assets may or may not be easy to identify depending on how much the game engine combines, compresses, and renames in the course of optimization and obfuscation.

The source project, on the other hand, is not a playable product, you are presenting the individual components for building the game in their original form, easily browseable, individually linkable, and downloadable, so that in itself is not much different than just redistributing the files individually or as an assets pack, and making it part of an open source project on github is actually worse since it's easily forkable and cloneable and it's easy to not realize or forget that some of the assets are not intended for redistribution or rationalize that everything in there is open season.

Ultimately, you have to interpret the terms for that asset (Unity's Asset Store license says "integrate it only as incorporated and embedded components of electronic applications and digital media") but I think you also have to consider what the asset vendor would reasonably want. If I was selling game scripts, of course it'd be fine for customers to incorporate them in games, that's the point, and if players extract them and essentially pirate them, that's an unfortunate fact of life, but I wouldn't want customers reposting the files on github or any files server, even within a project, and I don't see why that would be different for models, textures, and sound files.

Just one more example: suppose I wanted to open source my HyperBowl game, which I've stopped developing, so actually I wouldn't mind posting all the Unity scripts I wrote, but if I posted the whole project on github it would include all the art and sound assets which I licensed from the original developer (not to mention all the third-party stuff I got from the Unity Asset Store and other vendors). Even with all the disclaimers, I think that would get me in trouble, even though people have extracted assets from the published game (I recently found one of the soundtracks on youtube with an explanation they pulled it out of my game)

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Afloof.devModerator4 years ago(+1)

I’d be really interesting to know how the law handles this. From what you’ve mentioned of the Unity Asset Store license it makes sense. But what about a more generic license? What if someone puts an asset in a game but doesn’t obfuscate it?

One thing I could mention is that there is a distinct difference between scripts and assets. A script is (usually) compiled to such an extend that is not 100% recoverable. Assets on the other hand sometimes stay on their original format, or get translated to a different format, that can also be read. I’ve definitely played games where changing one asset would also change it in the game.

This was an interested read but unfortunately I can’t contribute anything else to this discussion. Since OP decided to ask the original artist, that should be the safest option.

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technicat4 years ago

I really think the ease or difficulty of extracting assets from a game is beside the point, the point is the purpose of what you're distributing, a game intended just to be played and presented more or less as a black box to users vs. source projects where you're serving up individual files for inspection, use, and potential modification. As an analogy, you might buy some graphics to use for a web site, which would be pretty easy for anyone to download, but I don't think that means you can include those graphics in a public github repo (which is an issue I've considered with my github pages-based web site, since those are automatically public repos).

Also, the distinction between code and other assets is not what it used to be, especially with modern game engines like Unity that just treat everything including scripts as assets, as opposed to old-style engines where you have a hunk of compiled code and loaded data (I kind of miss those days, I was consulting on one Unity project and told my client hey we need the project source, and they just gave me the script files which was pretty unusable without everything else in the project).

But whether source code is compiled or embedded unchanged as scripts doesn't change the original file's distribution terms, same goes textures that are embedded as-is or ultimately merged into texture atlases, or models that are used in their original obj or fbx format or converted into an engine-specific format. Otherwise, you'd get into weird reasoning like I can publish this texture because I used it in a ren'py game which is pretty easy to open up but I can't publish it if I used it in, say, a Unity game because they bundle up and convert their data, or an iOS app because those things are just hard to get at.

Of course, it all depends on the asset licenses. For example, in the Godot asset library, everything is open source (typically MIT license) so you're on pretty safe ground there.

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Heathro4 years ago(+3)

Thanks for the answers. I will ask artists direct. To be sure what they really expect for their assets.

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Identical Games4 years ago

Personally I wouldn't use any paid artwork in an open source game unless the license is compatible with open source. The problem is your game cannot be distributed with any Linux distribution when the assets are restricted. I recommend looking at opengameart.org and see if you can find something equivalent there. It can be hard to find things that match up in style but it makes it easier to distribute your game. Open source code that people can't easily expand on isn't of much value in my opinion.

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Heathro4 years ago

Well, few week left. I was trying to contact artists. Got answer only from one, saying that I am free to publish game on itch.io, but no single word about github. I asked again, and no answer. Looking on your replies here, I see that licensing and copyrighting is very difficult and dangerous. Thank all of you, it was very useful.

I published game on itch.io. https://heathro.itch.io/lost

Later on github I will leave code to public access, as I said before that I want to use in searching a job, to add this to my portfolio, But I will not include any assets there. only code. If some technical specialist interviewing me, he can look on the code, he do not need pictures and sounds. I think that will be most correct way to do this.

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