Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 12 months, you’ve more than likely heard about NFTs, and even if you don’t fully understand exactly what they are, we felt that we need make it clear on the stance of GameDev Market from a licensing point of view…
GDM & NFTs
Whatever your personal stance is on NFTs, there’s definitely been mixed feelings towards them in general, especially within the gaming communities, but we’re not here to give the ins and outs or the pros and cons of NFTs, just to make a clear statement on assets listed on our store.
Over the last few months we’ve had numerous people get in touch with us to ask whether they can use assets from GameDev Market as part of their new NFT collection and our final response to each person has been the same…
No.
That’s not to say assets from the store cannot be used at all by NFT projects, they can still be used within a game that is part of the project and there may be other instances where it is ok, but in terms of being used to create the NFT itself, at the moment this is a firm no.
The Reasoning
While there’s multiple elements that can be broken down when looking at the decision, everything essentially relates to one of the key restrictions within our license terms that protects our asset creators;
4.2. A Licence does not allow the Purchaser to:
(b) Use, sell, share, transfer, give away, sublicense or redistribute the Licensed Asset or Derivate Works other than as part of the relevant Media Product
Based on this license term, the below issues arise if assets were used to create an actual NFT;
By using an asset, especially if as a key component such as a character, this immediately falls under redistribution, so even if the NFTs were given away for free, it will still not be covered by our license terms.
Our license terms also cover Derivative Works, so even if the assets were used as a base and extensively modified, the original asset creator still retains the rights to their core work.
As well as these specific licensing problems, allowing people to use assets to create an NFT would potentially be detrimental to asset creators, as well as anyone buying the NFT;
– Asset creators: a seller who lists a character pack for $20 on the store could see someone purchase their pack, make little to no changes to the assets other than creating new clothing/body combinations and then sell out their NFT collection for $2m+, essentially just by using the characters created by someone else that they have bought for $20.
– NFT buyers: generally anyone purchasing an NFT thinks they are purchasing an exclusive item that they can show proof of ownership of and sometimes even have full commercial rights to use. Neither of these would be correct if assets from the store were used – anyone else could buy the asset from our site and make the exact same character under our license terms, plus if the NFT buyer attempted to use their NFT then they could then be found to be in breach of our license terms themselves.
Ultimately, this isn’t actually a decision we’ve had to make, our license terms already did this for us, but we wanted to make it clear that our current license does not allow assets to be used to create an NFT. The main goal of the license is to add protection for all parties and, as shown above, NFT usage goes against this.
If you would like any further information on whether your intended usage would be covered under our license, then please feel free to get in touch – [email protected].
GameDev Market is a marketplace for high quality, affordable game assets handcrafted by talented creators from all around the world.
GameDev Network Limited is registered in England & Wales (08951892). Registered office: Baltic Co-Working Space, 12 Jordan Street, Liverpool, UK. L1 0BP. ICO registered (ZA122213).
