{"id":5363,"date":"2026-07-27T15:27:38","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T13:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/candy-arts.com\/?page_id=5363"},"modified":"2026-07-28T01:56:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T23:56:28","slug":"indie-tiers-overview","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/candy-arts.com\/index.php\/indie-tiers-overview\/","title":{"rendered":"Indie Tiers Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Indie Tiers Overview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Please note that the following is provided as a simplified overview of our asset licenses. Nothing written here overrules our license terms<\/a> nor is legally binding or contractual.
Always refer to the actual Candy Arts licenses for the most accurate information.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Basics<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intended Audience<\/strong>
Our Indie licenses are designed for small, independent projects as a cheaper and simpler alternative to our Studio licenses.
\u2022 Instead of royalties, Indie licenses only require payment of a one-time fee for each of our Assets.
\u2022 Paying this fee allows you to use Assets for unlimited projects, for life, without additional payments.
\u2022 Updates are free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eligibility<\/strong>
Indie licenses are a very generous deal considering our Assets provide important core functionalities to your games.
For this reason, we need to limit their availability to ‘true’ indie projects:
– Small team
– Small budget
– Not registered as a company (there’s a small exemption if you need to register as independent\/freelancer or an LLC).
– No business structure (employees, interns, unpaid volunteers…). Commissioning freelance work (e.g. artists) is allowed.

To see if your project qualifies as Indie, see our Indie Project Checklist<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

License tiers<\/strong>
We provide three Indie license tiers:
\u2022 Free Indie<\/span>: for non-commercial projects only, and a \u20ac5 000 budget limit.
\u2022 Starter Indie<\/span>: for commercial projects, and a \u20ac5 000 budget limit.
\u2022 Pro Indie<\/span>: for commercial projects, and a \u20ac25 000 budget limit.

Upgrading to higher tiers is allowed at anytime, e.g. if your non-commercial project starts to earn revenue, or if your budget grows beyond \u20ac5 000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A project can only belong to one tier at a time. If a project uses multiple Candy Arts Assets, licenses of the same tier must be used for all of them (e.g. all Assets must be Starter Indie tier, you can’t mix Free\/Starter\/Pro).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who needs a license?<\/strong>
Every person who owns rights to the project or who gets paid based on the project’s revenue needs a license for each Candy Arts Asset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those people are called Creators<\/strong> and they are all responsible for ensuring the project complies with all license terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third-party services and commissioned freelancers don’t need a license: they are not Creators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Budget<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you create a project under our Indie licenses, you need to track the money you spend on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What counts in the budget:<\/strong>
\u2022 Commissioned work (e.g. paying an artist to make custom art assets).
\u2022 Asset purchases.
\u2022 Software license fees (e.g. 3D design software).
\u2022 Marketing costs (paying for ad space somewhere).
\u2022 Media licensing costs (e.g. fees or royalties for the use of music).
\u2022 Third-party services (e.g. legal advice, accounting services, server hosting).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What doesn’t count:<\/strong>
\u2022 Payments made to Candy Arts, such as license fees or royalties.
\u2022 Hardware purchases.
\u2022 Your own time and work.
\u2022 Learning costs (e.g. tutorials or courses).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Budget splitting:<\/strong>
If you buy an art asset for \u20ac50 and you use it to make two different games, it increases the budget of each game by \u20ac50. The cost doesn’t get split between the two games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news is, the budget limit applies to each project, not to you personally as a developer. So if you make a game with a budget of \u20ac4 000, and a second game with a budget of \u20ac3 000, you have spent \u20ac7 000 as a developer. However, each game is still under the \u20ac5 000 limit of the Starter Indie license.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What happens if you exceed the budget limits?<\/strong>
Simple: you just need to upgrade to a higher license tier (e.g. Starter Indie to Pro Indie).
If you exceed all Indie budget limits, you must upgrade to a Studio license, which has no budget limits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Commercial \/ Non-Commercial<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A project is considered non-commercial if it doesn’t earn any revenue.
\u2022 Non-commercial projects can use the Free Indie License, which allows using our Major Assets for free!
\u2022 Minor Assets are not<\/span> free for the Free Indie License.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A project is considered commercial if it earns any revenue.
\u2022 Commercial projects must use the Starter Indie or Pro Indie licenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How is revenue calculated?<\/strong>
Revenue is any money you earn from your project. Some examples:
\u2022 Sales of your game, or pre-orders.
\u2022 Subscriptions to play your game.
\u2022 Microtransactions in your game.
\u2022 Being paid to advertise products in your game.
\u2022 Being paid to release your game exclusively on a specific store or console.
\u2022 Crowdfunding, donations or recurring support.

Donations:<\/strong>
Many indie developers don’t sell their games directly. Instead, they provide their game for free, but collect donations to support the development of the game.
These donations are considered revenue, even if they’re given to support your general activity as a developer and not expressly given in support of a specific game. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This just means your project will be considered commercial and you’ll need to buy a Starter Indie license for the Candy Arts Assets you use.
It’s a relatively small one-time fee, and you can then use these Assets as much as you want in your projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you don’t want donations to count as revenue for a project, you must keep the two activities completely separate: the project that uses our assets must be published under a different name than the projects you collect donations for, and you can’t publicly disclose that both have the same author or any connection. This way, there is no doubt that any donations you receive are unrelated to the use of our Assets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What happens if your non-commercial project earns revenue?<\/strong>
If your project is on the Free Indie tier and unexpectedly earns revenue, or if you decide to start earning money from a non-commercial project, you just need to upgrade to the Starter Indie or Pro Indie tier (or Studio tier if you don’t mind the royalties that come with it).

If you earn revenue by accident (e.g. someone decided to donate money unprompted), we won’t give you trouble. If it’s a lot of money, use it to buy a commercial Indie license so you can remain in compliance and even continue earning revenue. If it happened only once and it was less than the cost of a license: keep it. If you want to be absolutely sure this won’t be a problem or you have any questions, contact us and we’ll tell you what to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Extra Content<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many games today are not sold in a single piece: they can include DLC, microtransactions, purchasable codes to unlock content, and many more such things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our licenses account for that, and there’s a few things you need to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Definitions<\/strong>:
Let’s imagine you have a project that includes or uses some of our Assets:
\u2022 Any product that adds content to the project (e.g. DLC) is called an Expansion<\/strong>.
\u2022 Any product that unlocks or modifies content in the project, but does not add any content, is called an Access Product<\/strong> (e.g. microtransactions, access codes…).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mods<\/strong> are a separate concept. They are essentially Expansions or Access Content with no connection or affiliation with the base project’s Creators. See the Mods<\/a><\/strong> page for information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

License requirements:<\/strong>
1. Expansions or Access Products only need licenses if they include or use our Assets.
\u2022 Those licenses can be a different tier than the base project.

2. If Expansions or Access Products include or use our Assets, the base project must have licenses for these Assets.
\u2022 If the base project doesn’t have the licenses, the Expansions\/Access Products are considered Add-ons<\/strong>, which are not authorized<\/span>.
\u2022 Add-ons are not permitted because they allow a project to use our Assets without being bound by our licenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Budget:<\/strong>
The budget of Expansions and Access Products must be added to the budget of the base project, even if they don’t include or use our Assets.
This is to prevent loopholes where a game could be split into DLC to avoid budget limits.
\u2022 As an example, if you pay \u20ac50 for an art asset that you use in a DLC, it counts as \u20ac50 for the DLC’s budget, and \u20ac50 for the base project’s budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, expenses are only counted once in the budget!
\u2022 If you use an art asset worth \u20ac50 in the base project and also in a DLC, it only adds \u20ac50 one time to the budget of the base project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Alternate Versions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Definition:<\/strong>
You have probably heard of Red\/Blue versions of a game, Deluxe or GOTY editions, US\/EU localizations, HD remasters, and other such concepts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We call these Alternate Versions<\/strong>:
\u2022 Games that are largely identical, with only small differences, are considered Alternate Versions.
\u2022 In the context of our license terms, Alternate Versions are considered to be one and the same project.
\u2022 It doesn’t matter if some Alternate Versions don’t use our Assets: as long as one of them does, they’re all Alternate Versions of one another.
\u2022 It doesn’t matter what they are called, or even if they have a different game title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

License requirements:<\/strong>
Since Alternate Versions are considered the same project, they must all be assigned the same licenses.
\u2022 This applies even to Alternate Versions that don’t use any of our Assets.
\u2022 It also applies if some Alternate Versions don’t use the same Assets as other Alternate Versions.
\u2022 The license tier must be the same for all Alternate Versions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Budget:<\/strong>
Since Alternate Versions are considered the same project, they share a common budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Expenses are only counted once in that budget.
\u2022 For example, if you use an art asset worth \u20ac50 in two or more Alternate Versions (same project), it only adds \u20ac50 to the budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Indie Tiers Overview Please note that the following is provided as a simplified overview of our asset licenses. Nothing written here overrules our license terms nor is legally binding or contractual.Always refer to the actual Candy Arts licenses for the most accurate information. Basics Intended AudienceOur Indie licenses are designed for small, independent projects as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5363","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candy-arts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candy-arts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candy-arts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candy-arts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candy-arts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5363"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/candy-arts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5465,"href":"https:\/\/candy-arts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5363\/revisions\/5465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candy-arts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}