Can my LLC use marketplace assets I personally bought

Development Programming & Scripting AI
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BLUF: I’ve bought assets, made a game using those assets, and now want to form an LLC and sell that game under the LLC’s license.

Other answers on this answer hub state you can share assets to others so they can create a project under your license. However, this doesn’t address if you want to share assets to a company you formed and sell a game using your personally bought asset under the company’s license.

Relevant Marketplace FAQ:

“Can I share products with my team and organization?

Yes, you can share Marketplace products for the limited purpose of the project(s) that you are developing within your team, organization, or company and its subsidiaries. Sharing products outside of your team or organization is prohibited. Team and organization members cannot use products in an unlimited fashion for their own outside projects.”

I would accept this as what I’m looking for except it is not referenced in any EULAs or other agreements (which is what would be used in any kind of litigation I imagine, FAQs are much more subject to change after you’ve already acted on the answer).

I know this is essentially requesting confirmation of a FAQ answer in one of the “legalese” agreements, so I won’t be offended if that’s not possible and will be sorry it wasted your time. However, an amendment to one of the EULAs or even marketplace guidelines addressing this scenario could save indie devs from re-purchasing sometimes thousands of dollars in assets when they decide to sell their game with newly formed LLC protection.

These are the places I have looked for reasonable equivalents to back up the FAQ answer:

There’s a short blurb in the Creator’s EULA that addresses distributions (sharing) from company to employees and contractors (as answered in another question on this hub) but doesn’t address the other way around (employees to company/team/organization) and also doesn’t state this applies to marketplace content (at least I couldn’t find where it states that with my non-lawyer eyes):

1.(A).f. “Distributions to employees and contractors - You also may Distribute Content (other than Paid Plug-ins) to an Engine Licensee who is your employee or your contractor who does not have rights under their license to the same Content, but only to permit that Engine Licensee to utilize that Content in good faith to develop a Product or other product created under the Engine License on your behalf for Distribution by you under the Engine License, and not for the purpose of Content pooling or any other Distribution or sublicensing of Content that is not permitted under this Agreement. Recipients of such a Distribution have a limited license to use, reproduce, display, perform, and modify that Content to develop your Product as outlined above, and for no other purpose.”

Basically, I can’t afford to re-purchase all the assets used in my game, especially since most of them were on sale when I bought them. For reference, it is over $1000 in assets. The majority of which are massively augmented, built upon, or are just bits of the full asset but still require usage rights. Either way, thanks for making an awesome platform available to the masses, Epic is progressing game development like no one else!

Phil T

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Hi,

I’m another user, like you, but in a simple way, I understood the next: you can share your assets with your workers, to be used internally. The one who needs to own the assets is the last person who is going to distribute/publish it to the general public or client. If it’s a company, I think there would be an account related to the company, and that account would need to own the marketplace products. If you are one of the company owners, probably you could use your personal account as the company’s account (or as one of them).

Maybe, even you can ‘vinculate’ a worker’s account as one of the company’s ones, but the point (I think) should be being sure to be able to reply the question ‘I’m Epic, where are the assets? Do you have access to that account, in order to demonstrate those assets are yours?’ So, if it’s a worker’s account, he could not be working with you anymore, when the question arrives, or you could bought them in the moment you have no more access to that account.

Maybe an expert can confirm (or not) this.

Regards!

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so if your question is can you sell a game with marketplace assets in it, the answer is yes, thats literally what theyre there for, and you dont owe any royalties or anything to anyone on the marketplace (although obviously you owe epic royalties regardless if you used marketplace assets or not. BUT the assets HAVE to be used in Unreal, not unity or cryengine or anything like that.

if your question is can you move the assets to another account, simply change the email used for your epic games account.

if your question is can you still share your assets with your team if you change your company name, then yes, it doesnt matter if youre llc or not if your collaborating you can share assets. you can share assets to other people simply by zipping the assets in the content/plugin folder and emailing them.

if you are asking if you can resell those assets as a pack on the Unreal marketplace than no, thats stealing. If they are used in a game your selling on the epic games store / steam or whatever, then thats fine.