Modern game development makes acquiring assets remarkably easy. Fab, the Unity Asset Store, Sketchfab, stock libraries, font foundries, audio marketplaces, open-licensed repositories, contractor deliveries.
The difficult question arrives much later, usually from someone with legal authority: what licence did we actually buy?
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds
Asset licences are not interchangeable, and the differences are exactly the ones that matter at ship time.
Seats and entities. Many marketplace licences are granted to a single legal entity or a named number of seats. An asset bought on a personal account before the studio incorporated may not be licensed to the studio that now ships the game.
Attribution obligations. Creative Commons and similar open licences are free but conditional. CC-BY requires attribution in a specified form; miss it and the licence terms are not met even though nothing was paid.
Share-alike terms. Some open licences require derivative works to carry the same licence — a condition that can be fundamentally incompatible with shipping a commercial closed-source game.
Fonts are their own category. A font licensed for desktop use is frequently not licensed for embedding in an application or game. This is one of the most common findings in due diligence because designers reasonably assume a purchased font is simply purchased.
Contractor work. Unless a contract explicitly assigns copyright or grants a sufficient licence, a contractor may retain rights in what they produced. A payment receipt is not an assignment.
The Publisher Due-Diligence Request
A publisher is preparing to sign an indie game. They ask for a list of third-party assets and proof the studio holds the necessary rights.
The development team begins searching old email receipts, marketplace accounts, shared drives, personal accounts, spreadsheets and chat history. Some purchases were made on an account belonging to someone who left. Some assets came from a bundle nobody can now identify.
The problem is rarely that the studio lacks the rights. It is that proving it costs a fortnight of engineering time at precisely the point in a deal where delay is most expensive.
Why the Record Has to Be Built Early
Licence information decays faster than almost any other production data. The purchase URL still resolves, but the terms have been revised. The bundle has been delisted. The person who bought it has left. The receipt was sent to an address nobody monitors.
Recorded at acquisition, this takes under a minute per asset: what it is, where it came from, what licence, which entity holds it, where the evidence lives. Reconstructed two years later it may not be possible at all.
When the Question Gets Asked
Licence evidence tends to be requested at the least convenient moments — publisher due diligence, client delivery, investment, acquisition, platform submission and major release. In each case somebody outside the team is deciding whether to proceed, and the studio is being assessed on how quickly and completely it can answer.
The product here is not filling in licence fields. It is being able to answer “can we legally ship this?” without starting a company-wide investigation.
Disclosure: Asset Licence Register is built by BizziGroup, BizziKit’s parent company. This article describes a product we have a commercial interest in.
BizziGroup’s Asset Licence Register gives studios a per-project place to record marketplace assets, licence types, seats, purchase references, usage information and evidence, with automatic risk flags and a licence manifest for due diligence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a licence manifest?
A structured list of the third-party assets a project uses, the licence each is held under and where the supporting evidence sits. It is what a publisher or acquirer typically asks for.
Can I use a desktop font in my game?
Often not. Desktop font licences frequently exclude embedding in software or games, which usually requires a separate app or embedding licence. Check the specific EULA.
Do I own work produced by a contractor?
Not automatically. Ownership depends on the contract. Without an assignment or an adequate licence, the contractor may retain copyright regardless of payment.
Is Creative Commons safe for commercial games?
It depends on the variant. Attribution requirements must be met precisely, NonCommercial variants exclude commercial release, and ShareAlike terms can be incompatible with a closed-source commercial product.