My company does a lot of Unity work, and we were considering posting assets to the store, but we have some concerns about legal risks, eula, etc… My personal impression is that code/models available on Unity has been developer to developer, with an understanding its not necessarily perfect, and I can’t imagine sueing another dev over some glitch in their code.
But the risk still might be there, and I wanted to get feedback on what we can do to protect ourselves. What have been your experiences? What things should we do to protect our selves? Are there things in place from the asset store itself that helps protect us?
I understand your concerns, however - the only two things you can rely on are reading the Eula and a Lawyer.
These two things are the main things that can tell you without a doubt what your rights are as a publisher.
There may be a corporate lawyer in here somewhere, but I ain’t never seen one. So we can’t really give you any *Legal advice.
Yeah that is true. I can sue someone because a piece of grass offended me in their yard, doesn’t mean I’ll win, but it will cause a headache on your end.
I read a comment on a product one time where a buyer was angry because the asset package had the standard assets included and they overwrote his ´game´…
That said, I think the EULA already covers legal protection for content creators. The one I was curious about was if a content creator stole content, then sold it, and the buyer was later sued by the original creator.
Buying an asset is like buying any other product, as far as I know, with equivalent consumer protection laws as whatever juridstiction the Asset Store falls under. So, as long as you’re willing to provide the relevant level of product support and the thing you’re putting up for sale is something you feel is of salable quality from a customer perspective, I think you’re good to go.
My personal experience as a seller been putting a smallish asset on the store for a company I used to work at. It was a thing we needed to make anyway, and with an extra day of work I was able to QA, document and package it for sale to others. It was a fairly consistent seller at around 10 units a month all the way until I moved on from that job some years later.
On the up side, we got to re-commercialise some work for relatively little effort. Judging from reviews at the time it was received really well, which was nice and potentially good for our marketing. And my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest it was quite nicely profitable even after taking a few support activities into account.
On the down side, we couldn’t have planned on or projected either its sales or support load. Also, while it was nicely profitable it was a small trickle of funds over a long period, so you’d need lots of similarly profitable stuff to run even a one person business off it.
My experience as a buyer is that QA is key! There are loads of assets I’ve used that pretty clearly don’t have any formal QA because they’re internally inconsistent. I can’t complain given the prices on the Asset Store, though I won’t use something in my professional work unless I feel I can trust it. I want it to be clear that the developer has thought about how it will be of use to other developers and designed around that, rather than just packaging up some internal tool and leaving others to work out its idiosyncrasies. A nicely thought out UI or API, consistent naming, and appropriate documentation are all things that help there.
We’ve been pondering putting some Assets up for sale, but there are some confusing and possibly conflicting restrictions involved, from this non-lawerly standpoint.
For example, we purchased an Asset that was sold (er, licensed) under the MIT License, which permits reuse including resale (re-licensing?), as long as the MIT License remains intact on the reused content. There is one tiny bit of code I considered reusing – I could reinvent that wheel myself, but (a) why bother and (b) there aren’t many reasonable ways to solve that problem. The author was clearly OK with reuse since he chose the MIT License.
However, it seems Unity doesn’t permit that, for some reason. The submission guidelines say, “1.1.d Submissions that include any content from another Asset Store package is a violation of the Asset Store Provider Agreement” – although I can’t find that prohibition in the actual Provider Agreement.
Worse, further down that same page is the End User License Agreement (EULA) for the Asset Store (not sure why it isn’t on a separate page), and the EULA stipulates a whole bunch of things that seem to be completely incompatible with something like the MIT License. Edit: I do see the EULA includes this: “In the event of a conflict between the applicable EULA and any such open source licenses, the open source software licenses shall prevail with respect to those components.”
I was originally just considering how we’d like to license our Asset if we decided to submit it, but the whole thing feels a bit messy…
I once purchased something that came labelled as MIT. When I contacted the author about that it turned out to be a mistake, so it might be worth explicitly flagging that with them in case something similar has happened.
I decided to ask Asset Store support about the Submission Guidelines versus the Provider Agreement.
They’re forwarding to their legal department for an answer, I guess that’s above support’s pay-grade.