So did I read the new EULA on FAB wrong or is the Standard License for personal use only meaning no commercial use ?
So what about all free assets ? They can’t be used commercially even inside an Unreal Engine project anymore ? Meaning the free and monthly free products got on the UE Marketplace obviously have the old EULA and are licensed for commercial use but now that is not true anymore ? Or not ?
Standard License (Spoiler/Click)
- HOW YOU CAN USE CONTENT TO DEVELOP PROJECTS
a. License Grant. A “Standard License” grants you a non-exclusive and non-transferable license to privately use, reproduce, display, perform, and modify the Content in accordance with the terms of this Agreement. This means that as long as you are not violating this Agreement, such as by using the Content in violation of any applicable law or regulation or for any unlawful purpose, you can privately use the Content however you want under a Standard License. If you want to share the Content or anything you make with it, Sections 4 and 5 address when and how you can do that.
Applicable uses (Spoiler/Click)
- HOW YOU CAN SHARE PROJECTS YOU’VE MADE WITH CONTENT
a. Projects. If, under a Standard License, you develop projects that (i) are made using the Content or (ii) combine the Content with any other software or content, regardless of how much or little of the Content is used (collectively “Projects”), you may only Distribute those Projects as expressly permitted under this Agreement. "
Distribute" means, with respect to a Project, to provide or otherwise make a copy of the Project available publicly or to any other person or entity or make the Project’s functionality available on a network.
Distributing Linear Media Projects. Subject to any applicable restrictions in Section 6 (Content Use
Restrictions), you may freely Distribute a Project that is a rendered linear media product. This means, for example, you may freely Distribute:
i. rendered video files (e.g., broadcast or streamed video files, cartoons, movies, or images) and
ii. images created using Content.
c. Distributing Other Projects. Subject to any applicable restrictions in Section 6 (Content Use Restrictions), you may Distribute a Project that incorporates Content as an included dependency to end users. When you make such a Distribution, you may, however, only authorize end users to make use of Content solely as incorporated in the Project in object code and you must restrict end users from extracting or otherwise using Content outside of the Project.
You may use third parties to market and Distribute a Project on your behalf in accordance with this Agreement.
This means, for example, you may Distribute software applications (such as video games) that include Content to the general public, whether directly by you or through a distributor or publisher. You and your end users may also (i) use the Content as incorporated into the Project in promotional materials featuring the Project, and (ii) to develop systems to protect against prohibited content or activity.
- HOW YOU CAN SHARE CONTENT ON ITS OWN
a. Sharing of Content. Under a Standard License, you may not Distribute Content on a standalone basis to third parties except to your collaborators (either directly or through a third-party repository) who are utilizing the Content in good faith to develop a Project with you or on your behalf. This means, for example, that you may share Content with your employees, affiliates, and contractors in a private online repository while you work on a Project together. Those collaborators you share Content with are not permitted to further Distribute the Content (including as incorporated in a Project) and must delete the Content once it is no longer needed for developing a
Project with you or on your behalf.
You are responsible for ensuring that any third parties you share Content with
comply with the terms of this Agreement. You are solely liable for any violation of this Agreement by collaborators with respect to any Content you share.
b. Plugin Distribution. Distribution of Plugins in source format to your employees, affiliates and contractors is permitted so long as use by those employees, affiliates and contractors does not cause you to exceed the number of paid users you have purchased for the Plugin. Any such Distributions will be subject to the terms of
Section 5 of the Agreement. Additionally, for Unreal Engine Plugins any Projects you incorporate Plugins into may only be Distributed as Engine Tools under the Unreal Engine Agreement.
Restrictions (Spoiler/Click)
General Restrictions. For any Content licensed to you under a Standard License, you may not:
i. attempt to reverse engineer, decompile, translate, disassemble, or derive source code or data from the Content;
ii. sell, rent, lease, or transfer the Content on a “stand-alone basis” (this means, for example, Projects you Distribute must reasonably add value beyond the value of the Content and the Content must be merely a component of the Project and not the primary focus of the Project);
iii. allow any third party to incorporate Content into their own products, services, or other projects (this means, for example, that you may not make Content available in world- or level-editing tools or templates or other modeling tools that allow works to be exported);
Disclaimer: no legal advice 
So in summary, what is prohibited is the standalone re-sale of marketplace assets, or the integration into third-party tools, like “new-game-engine-with-20000-free-assets-at-launch”-project.
What is explicitly allowed:
- The creation of projects (e.g. games), media (e.g. videos).
- Self distribution or dissemination of that creation via a publisher/distributor.
- Sharing of standalone assets with other people, IF in good faith you can guarantee that they only use it to collaborate on a project with you or for you. They are to delete the assets after collaboration ends. (So multi user, unlike unity’s 1 seat licenses //plugins have seat licenses too though)
What is implicitly allowed:
- Commercial use. (As it’s not prohibited, and distribution is allowed)
Do note this all only applies to the standard license, which only applies if your commercial entity earns annual revenue of less than 100,000$ after which you’d require professional licenses for the assets you utilize.
E.g. you can be the boss of a indie studio, and lend all your assets to the people working under you, but only as long as your studio remains broke and below the 100k threshold, otherwise you’d have to upgrade all the licenses for used assets.
Revenue also includes external sources of funding, such as having an investor in excess of 100k for the project.
With no income for the studio and say a revenue share agreement with the developers it should be legitimate to utilize a standard license during the development cycle.
What may need clarification is, if licenses will have to be upgraded retroactively for any project released after revenue hits 100k+, or if only past and current revenue applies for new projects.
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As I understand it the tier type only considers your state at the time of purchase, this is from the Fab EULA:
You are only eligible for a Personal - Reference Only tier or Personal tier if, at the time of the Transaction you, together with any controlling entity and other entities under common control with you, have not generated more than $100,000 USD in gross revenue from your commercial activity in the digital content industry in the last 12 months.
Would welcome further clarification from UE/Fab but to me this reads that you would not need to upgrade the licences retroactively?
Technically, it shouldn’t be retroactive. But again, none of us are lawyers and I wasn’t asked for any proof of how much I earned when I didn’t select the professional license. Hopefully, it’ll stay that way
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Hi all,
I’m not a lawyer and cannot offer legal advice.
The Standard license allows for commercial use, regardless of purchasing it under the Personal or Professional tier. The license is the same, just with tiers based on revenue requirements.
Indeed, eligibility is determined “at the time of the Transaction”, per the EULA.
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So am I understanding this right, it doesn’t matter how much revenue my company makes? If we have aquired the Quixel assets via that one-click-solution provided at launch, we can use them for our projects no matter how much my company makes?
This really could use some clarification in the EULA.
With Quixel, I’m not entirely sure about the licensing because I had already claimed most of them before Fab launched and nothing popped up for me when I claimed the rest, if I’m right.
As for the rest, your revenue absolutely does matters. But as far as I csn tell, they seem to be relying on the honor system, for now
They can easily see the dates and times you claimed ownership of their products and find out how much your company under which you are publishing games with their products is worth and what it was worth the year prior to your claiming their products, and they can probably do this going back probably for as many years as your company has existed. If they find that you claimed ownership and are using the lowest tier license at a time when your company was worth enough the prior year to fall under the higher tier license, they can probably sue you for profits you’ve made using their products under the wrong license and probably even have those assets removed from your library and ban your account and/or your company from using their products anymore. But I’m not a lawyer either. I’m just guessing here. I would never risk using the wrong license. In fact, having this tiered licensing scheme kind of scares me because I don’t want to find out one day, oops, I’m using the wrong license, and I get sued into oblivion after all of that hard work.
If you buy the Professional license on FAB then you got the same as the UE Marketplace license.
You can’t be wrong buying that. The issue is with too many sellers that have increased the price of their products 3x to 10x for the Professional license.