Creators are any entity (any person or company) who owns rights to a project or who is paid based on a project’s revenue or profits.
For example, indie developers, studios and publishers are usually Creators; studio employees or hired freelancers are usually not Creators as they are paid a salary or a fixed monetary amount.

All Creators of a project are bound by our license terms and therefore responsible for ensuring compliance with those terms.

Distribution platforms and game stores are exempt from being considered Creators (e.g. GoG, Steam, itch.io, brick & mortar stores, etc.).
In other words, your project can qualify as indie even if you use such platforms to distribute or sell it, and these platforms are not bound by the terms of our licenses.

What’s the scope of your project? Is DLC subject to our license terms if it doesn’t use our assets? Are expansions part of your game’s budget? Do you owe royalties on sequels? With all the options that exist in the video game world today, it can be hard to draw lines precisely.

We use the following definitions:
1. Any game, software or digital product that includes or uses Candy Arts assets is called a Work, and requires licenses for these assets.
This includes DLC that don’t ship with our assets, but which make use of the assets included in the base game (e.g. the base game includes Candy Dialogue Engine, and a DLC only includes dialogues). However, since indie licenses can be used for an unlimited number of projects, you don’t have to buy multiple licenses.

For studio licenses, if an expansion or DLC can’t be used without the base game, and the base game already includes licenses for minor assets, you don’t need to pay one-time fees again for these minor assets.

2. Any game, software or digital product that is closely similar to another Work and differs only in minor or partial ways is called an Alternate Version.
This includes things such as ‘North America’/’Europe’/’Asia’ localizations, ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ versions of a game, ‘Deluxe’, ‘Gold’ or ‘GOTY’ editions, versions made for use on different hardware or operating systems, etc. For most practical purposes, Alternate Versions are considered the same game.

3. Any game, software or digital product that adds or modifies any content in a Work is an Expansion.
This includes DLC, expansions, patches, and so on. Note that this doesn’t include mods for games (see « Mods and Add-ons » further down).

4. Any product (digital or physical) that unlocks or modifies any content already present in a Work (but doesn’t add content like Expansions) is called an Access Product.
This includes all kinds of game codes, microtransaction-style cards/tokens/passes, and even physical items that can be scanned to unlock in-game content.

Our licenses don’t impose any revenue limits. If you make a breakthrough commercial indie game and earn millions, you don’t owe us more than what you’ve already paid.

The only condition we have is that Free Indie projects can’t earn any direct revenue. For Studio licenses, royalties owed include all direct revenue as well.

Direct revenue includes:
• Money earned from selling your game or DLC, subscriptions to play your game, microtransactions inside your game, etc.
• Donations and fundraising (e.g. personal donations, Gumroad, Subscribestar, Patreon, Kickstarter, etc…), rewards and contest prizes (e.g. game jam winnings), or any funding by third-parties who aren’t also Creators in relation to your game.
• Revenue from licensing the use of your game in any way (e.g. being paid to let third-parties run servers, or to display advertisements in the game).
• Revenue you perceive on game content sold by third-parties (e.g. royalties, fees or commissions on mods, on the sale or trade of game content or accounts between players, etc.).
• Revenue from selling data or content generated by your game (e.g. user data, usage or performance stats, etc.).
• Revenue from selling the rights/ownership of your game to someone else.

If your Free Indie game promotes your brand and increases sales of other products you offer, if you sell derivative products based on your game (e.g. toys), or if you license your franchise (e.g. allowing a business to use your characters in their advertisements) that’s indirect revenue: you don’t need to upgrade to another license. For Studio licenses, royalties are not owed on indirect revenue.

Our licenses come with one of the most fair clauses when it comes to how we can modify them:
• Any modifications to the license terms that may negatively impact your project require your approval. We can’t force you to update your projects to new license versions. We can’t even tell you « Either agree to the new license or stop using our assets ». Once you assign a license to your project, the terms are locked in.

• We can only impose license terms updates if the new terms are not detrimental to you. For example, should we ever rename our brand, we could update our licenses at any time to reflect our new name. We can also modify the license terms automatically if the new terms would benefit users. But even then, you can refuse the new terms if you justifiably find they’d have negative consequences for you.

That said, anytime you assign a license to a project — such as when you add a new asset to an existing project, you start a new project entirely, or you switch to a different license tier — you may only assign the latest version of that license. The guarantee we provide is that once you start a project under specific license terms, the terms won’t change in a bad way and compromise your project.

All prices and royalty rates vary per asset. That said, a few things remain consistent:

For major assets:
Pro license purchases include Starter licenses as well (in case you ever want to work with other indies who haven’t purchased a Pro license of their own).

For minor assets:
Free, Starter and Pro Indie tiers are priced the same and are sold together: you don’t pay again if your project upgrades from one Indie tier to another.

Two options are provided for minor assets on the Studio tier:
Choose between a one-time fee to give you a fair price cap, or a very low royalty rate to go softer on your budget:
• The one-time fee option is more economic in the long-term or if your game is a big success.
• The royalty option ensures you don’t spend more money than your game earns, and is also a great help if you’re transitioning from Indie to Studio tier and can’t afford all the one-time Studio fees upfront.
• You can switch from the royalty option to the one-time fee at any time, such as when your revenue is comfortable enough to afford it, or once you’ve tested the waters and your game is seeing some success. Royalties are not refundable and don’t provide a discount.
• You can opt for the one-time fees for some minor assets, and opt for the royalty option for others. It’s not all-or-nothing.

Our prices are calculated to bring you considerably more value than they cost. This accounts for the following:
• Time and costs saved not having to develop similar tools and assets yourself, including the ability to start work on your project immediately.
• Time and costs saved through the use of our assets when they make your workflow faster and more efficient.
• Time and costs saved not having to learn to use new tools if you re-use our assets over multiple projects or if your team is already familiar with them.
• The convenience of letting us handle updates and bug fixes.
• The freedom of being able to modify our code and not being forced to depend on us.
• The low risks: affordable upfront fees, or royalties on direct revenue only. No heavy investments, or recurring subscriptions that ask you to gamble on your project’s success.
• The contractual guarantees: we can’t retroactively change license terms or increase fees or royalties. Once you release a project under one of our licenses, the terms are valid for life unless you agree to change them.
• The flexibility of being able to release your projects from our licenses at any time and without penalty if you no longer wish to use our assets.

The actual cost/benefit ratio varies per asset and depends heavily on your project’s needs, but you can usually expect to save multiple times the price of our assets.

Mods are third-party add-ons/plugins or such elements that modify or add content to a base game or software.

Making mods for a game or software that includes Candy Arts assets is allowed, under a few conditions.

1. Mods can only use or include Candy Arts assets if the base game/software has licenses for these same assets.
• This is to prevent loopholes that would allow games/software to use our assets without being bound by our licenses.

2. Mods that include Candy Arts assets require licenses.
• Mod licenses can be a different tier than the base game. For example, a non-commercial Mod can use Free Indie licenses even if the base game is commercial and uses the Starter Indie, Pro Indie, or Studio licenses.
• Mods that only use the assets already found in the base game/software (i.e. no Candy Arts assets are included in the mod itself) don’t need licenses.

3. Mods must be independent creations: the Creators of the base game/software can’t be directly involved.
• Mods where the Creators of the base game/software are directly involved would be considered Expansions.
• The Creators of the base game/software can’t own, work on, finance, derive revenue from, or directly influence the development or the creative direction of mods.
• This applies to all mods, even if they don’t use or include any Candy Arts assets.
• Indirect involvement is fine. Indirect involvement refers to actions that don’t directly influence the creation of specific mods, such as providing the player community with modding tools, tutorials, or mod distribution platforms.

For legal liability reasons, we can’t say that we won’t enforce the terms of our licenses in some situations. What we can say is what our priorities are.

Our focus is primarily on the following:
• Infractions that cause important harm to our interests or to our goal of supporting Indie game development.
• Intentional attempts to breach our license terms or infringe our copyrights, especially when done for personal gain.
• Infractions which would set a precedent that would make it hard to enforce our rights or license terms in the future.

We prefer to show flexibility, understanding and pragmatism for minor, unintentional infractions. For example, if an indie developer forgets to account for some expenses in their budget, nobody wins if we take a heavy-handed and punitive approach. On the other hand, everyone benefits if we allow that developer to upgrade to the appropriate license tier. This is even reflected in our license terms, which stipulate we must enforce our licenses reasonably, in good faith, and provide opportunities to fix breaches before taking further action.

Should you accidentally break any license terms, your best course of action is to reach out to us immediately so we can work out a solution to bring your project back in compliance, at minimal inconvenience to you and us.