What is the legality of, if I purchase a 3rd party asset from the asset store, can I use the asset in another game engine like Unreal Engine or Godot to make commercial game?
No.
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Talk to a lawyer and show them Unity’s EULA. In my interpretation, the unrestricted assets can be downloaded through Unity and used outside of it as long as you embed them in a game or other media. But I am NOT a lawyer.
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You can, unless it is a special restrictive license. Unity EULA says that assets are provided to create interactive media, and never says, which engine you should be using.
Here’s the problem though. I believe that Unity EULA insists that you can only access asset store through unity. Meaning if you are using asset store, you have unity install, using unity for your game. That implies that you’ll be required to subscribe if you reach revenue cap for your game, even if it does not actually use unity outside of asset store.
But as LN said, you need to ask a lawyer.
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I’m interested in the legal of this also.
I feel like there’s a need for a lot of pooled legal information going into the future.
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I’m glad I went for a few Humble Bundle offers which included the assets straight from the source. I have a bit of a hoard of usable stuff now.
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We can’t offer legal advice. If you need to know either read the license agreement or ask a legal expert.
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Good question. Anyone from Unity to answer this?
You will need to contact Unity directly, either through your rep or through support to get a proper answer. Legal advice from public forum won’t prevent lawsuits or other legal issues. Legal advice from the internet is a bad idea in general.
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In terms of assets purchased off the store under a normal account, wouldn’t there be one general answer to this though?
Exceptional cases aside, I imagine not everyone would need individual legal council.
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That would be up to the OP to determine. Any response from anyone else wouldn’t be legally binding. There are already two takes on it this thread.
No, they don’t need legal counsel, but if they are unclear, they should contact Unity for clarity.
Can’t the individual asset authors grant the rights of use needed for using their work in other engines? I don’t think they give Unity exclusive rights, since they still can and do sell the same assets elsewhere.
And while you’d have to use unity to download the asset data, I would assume that their EULA is all about the license. So once you have the data downloaded, and the original IP owner (asset author) grants you the rights of use to use the things in another engine, I don’t see how Unity could prevent you from doing so.
Afaik Unreal doesn’t allow this, but they also offer more and better content made by Epic directly. So it makes sense there. And I expect the original IP creators of assets can still grant you additional rights of use outside of the assetstore EULA.
@PROTOFACTOR_Inc : I think you just sold a ton of licenses in a humble bundle (that I bought too, thank you very much!). Do you allow use of your assets in other game engines like Godot or Unreal?
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They can, if they published it under custom license, or if they granted permission on request.
The issue here is that in order to download data from asset store, you have to use unity.
Yes, you can. you purchased under the unity Asset Store EULA. It doesn’t prevent you from using the content inside another engine at all. Please note that you’ll have to deal with the porting of the content on your own.
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Yeah. something like a 2D image or audio mp3 is just a matter of drag-and-drop. 3D models too, mostly. I think, for example, Unreal has a roughness map instead of smoothness map, so converting PBR materials might be a matter of editing the maps and inverting the values, or moving values from one channel to another. Thnigs like that.
Something like Dialogue System for Unity is a script utility built on the Unity API and systems, so it will be useless in another engine unless you completely rewrite a majority of the scripts.
Any shader and particle effects rely on Unity’s renderers and either shuriken or the VFX graph, so those won’t transfer either. You could possibly use source files, like textures and alpha-mask images, though.
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Thanks a lot, I really appreciate the quick and clear reply! Very happy to hear that!
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FYI: Epic has the same strategy, general assets bought in the marketplace are transferrable (if you deal with Unreal’s idiotic proprietary format), but Epic’s own assets aren’t (Unity also doesn’t allow their own assets to be used in any other engines).
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But how do you know that Unity’s management won’t simply change the EULA retroactively? Maybe they’ll demand that you have to pay an installation fee for your Godot game, if you are using a Unity Marketplace asset.
I think it’s a good idea to not buy anything from the Unity store. Ever.
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I would check the asset’s about me files or store info, and see if you can contact the original creator- you can probably negotiate permission to use an asset if they sell it in other places and such, I think right now many asset creators will be very open to help people out. Also look to other sites like Itch.io to buy assets that are not set to just one platform or engine restriction.
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