Open sourcing a Unity game with assets

Question

So, I have a goal to make and publish one (small, stupid, simple) game every ~Saturday. (I've made two, so far, thanks for asking.) I've started in Unity, because it's convenient. My plan for each game was to have a free version with ads, a paid version without, but also have it open sourced (and if they're willing to go to the trouble of removing the ads themselves, so be it).

Now, concurrently, I keep wandering into e.g. Humble Bundle, or Unity Asset Store sales, and picking up things I probably don't need but maybe might use.

It has just occurred to me, though, that if I'm open sourcing these games - I kinda suspect the owners of these assets aren't going to be happy with me just posting all their files on the internet. Pretty sure I can't open source assets I've purchased.

Now, I could probably just use free assets and make note of where they came from, and everyone would PROBABLY be ok with that. But that significantly restricts the things I can use. (And it would be kindof a waste - you don't want to know how many ancient untouched game-dev Humble Bundles I'm sitting on, haha.)

Is there some kind of workaround? Like, if I posted the whole project, but included a license stating that only my code was open sourced, and the rest could not be used in anything else, for instance? Anybody know any nice solutions?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there's no real workaround other than contacting the owners of the products you licensed whose license doesn't already specify they can be freely distributed. Even if in YOUR license it says that they're not allowed to touch that stuff, you're still distributing other pieces of software without being allowed to.

There is one solution which would save you a lot of time and would also make it harder for people to just copy your game outright. Put all the purchased and downloaded assets and the like in a separate folder in your project, then when it's time to upload your project to wherever you're hosting the source (I'm assuming GitHub?) just exclude that folder. If you still want to make it easy for others to figure out, just post a list of all dependencies in your readme. Or write a bit of code that does that for you.

Good luck!