It does seem like a bit of problem, but it also seems like a very specific thing that could be… cleared up, and then it would be all sorted.
That would be like shipping photoshop with your game to allow people to customize their character’s hair color.
> “Game Engine Product” shall mean software used for video game development. This includes both the content authoring software and the software used to show the created content.
The license allows redistribution so long as:
> a) You do not sell or otherwise commercialise the Work or Derivative Works as a Game Engine Product; and
So my read is that any tool that allows you to modify game content constitutes a game engine product and they specifically do not allow you to sell a game engine product built with Defold.
This weird technicality that is invented in this discussion about whether or not you're using Defold's built-in engine tools, or developing your own tools on top of Defold is entirely irrelevant to the language of the license.
It’s not enough that your game could be used by someone for video game development, a reasonable person would have to believe you were selling it as video game development software.
There’s definitely some gray area here for something like Roblox which is a game, but also allows people to develop and sell video games. But the risk of Defold suing you and a court finding that the map editor you added to allow people to make free levels for your puzzle game constitutes selling your game as video game development software is so far down the list of things you need to think about at all that it’s not worth considering.
If you want to make something like Roblox that is essentially a game engine, I wouldn’t use Defold. Otherwise I wouldn’t worry even a little bit.
Shipping 3rd party engine tooling is not. At all.
The equivalent to what valve did would be if Defold released some games made with Defold and then released the Defold engine, which is basically what happened.
There’s also nothing stopping from releasing your game, linking to Defold and saying use Defold to mod this game.
Modding a game engine’s editing tools to the point where they are user friendly enough for your players is almost always a bigger challenge than building basic editing tools using the engine.
This entire argument is insane to me. Someone is releasing something for free with the caveat that you can’t use it for this one specific very uncommon thing. Then people are up in arms “what if one day I want to do this one specific thing? Do you? No but what if I did?” Don’t use Defold.
You do not sell or otherwise commercialise the Work or Derivative Works as a Game Engine Product.
"Work" shall mean the work of authorship, whether in Source or Object form,
made available under the License, as indicated by a copyright notice that is
included in or attached to the work
"Derivative Works" shall mean any work, whether in Source or Object form, that
is based on (or derived from) the Work and for which the editorial revisions,
annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an
original work of authorship. For the purposes of this License, Derivative Works
shall not include works that remain
separable from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the interfaces of, the Work
and Derivative Works thereof.
(so if the extension API is missing something, contribute the feature(s) you need back to core, then you can write your extension free of issues, so far as I can tell)