Hi!
We are starting an RPG game development, and are fascinated with the possibilities Character Creator gives us (and especially with the content at the Marketplace). However, before committing ourselves to Reallusion products - which creates a REALLY strong dependency - we have to be 100% sure that licensing-wise we are ok. Sure, we went through all the available license documents, but unfortunately, they are rather confusing, so we'd rather ask to avoid any potential for misunderstandings.
Basically, there are two questions:
1. We would like to use the following pipeline (which is consistent with the pipelines most of games will use anyway):
- we purchase Export License for the content-we-need at the Marketplace
- we
export content-with-export-license (together with any content which is built-in into Character Creator itself), using export functionality provided by Character Creator (currently we are using .fbx, but who knows? - it may change later)- we (optionally) modify exported-content, modifications including but not limited to: format conversions, algorithmic processing, creating derivative content, combining with (other exported-content, our own content, or third-party content), or any combinations of these modifications
- we embed optionally-modified exported-content into our game, which will be distributed and exploited commercially; some of the embedded-content may be downloaded on-demand from our servers (in an encrypted form). When the distributed game runs on a end-user device, such embedded-into-game-content will be:
- (optionally) further modified; further modifications may include but are not limited to: format conversions, algorithmic processing, creating derivative content, combining with (other embedded-into-game-content, our own content, or third-party content), or any combinations of these modifications
- (after optional further modifications) rendered and displayed to the end-user (eventually using OpenGL, DirectX, etc.)
- other than above, embedded-into-game-content will be protected from extraction using state-of-the-art methods and technologies (including at least encryption with key-embedded-into-the-distributed-game or key-obtained-over-the-network)
The question is: is such a pipeline ok from licensing point of view? (it certainly looks so given the spirit of the licenses, but there are certain clauses, especially in Mass Distribution License, which make it not-so-obvious).
2. There is some confusion about that free Mass Distribution License which is associated with such distribution scenarios; it has to be obtained later in the process (when the game is ready), but the question is: what are the criteria which determine if Reallusion decides whether to grant this License or not? Is it granted automatically (but then what is the point of having it)? Or are there certain criteria the game has to comply with to qualify?
My apologies for asking about such probably-obvious things, but we cannot invest significant efforts into development without being 100% sure that we'll be able to use this content for our game.