Can Defold engine be used to create games that include gambling (slot, casino)?
More info:
We do not plan to build and release gambling games made with Defold. We would use Defold to create content (animations, scenes, particles) which would get Exported as JSON files into 3rd-party system where games are developed that include gambling mechanics for FUN and real money.
Good question I’m not a lawyer but the T&C (https://www.defold.com/about-terms/) mentions this:
3.2 As a further condition of these Defold Licence Terms, you may not use or incorporate or distribute the Defold Software in any Games which:
include or are in anyway related to real money gambling or any other gambling product or service which is regulated by any local, state or national authority and requires a gambling licence;
I assume your company has a lawyer or two you can consult to get the proper legal advice regarding our Terms and Conditions.
What’s the reasoning for this? Code auditing liability?
Social casino stuff should be OK since it’s not real money.
To OP’s question I think Defold’s use in this situation is okay because Defold software is not being distributed only products of tools made with Defold but the software is still not being used in the end product.
This is correct, we are not building games with Defold, nor any defold code or part of it is included in final software. It would be used just as “text editor”, and .txt is an output.
But it is possible that even with this usage many softwares cannot be used anyway.
We’ve reached out to our legal team. The restriction is really aimed at restricting the use of the Defold engine in real money gambling games. These games are subject to strict regulatory regimes. The software used to power these games is also subject to compliance with these regulatory regimes, so there are companies that provide this specialist software.
We don’t want to allow developers to use Defold in these games as we don’t make the Defold engine compliant with the different regulatory requirements for gambling worldwide.
With that said, it is ok to use Defold to produce art assets or other types of content used in third party gambling games, as long as there’s no Defold technology included in that game.
Side note: I used to work at a company developing online gambling products and full end-to-end solutions. We had our own gambling license, and the regulatory requirements were no joke and the auditing of our code was very very thorough. The rules and regulations around the back end systems producing the random numbers was very strict (for understandable reasons).
Our view is that as long as the game isn’t considered gambling in the jurisdictions in which it is made available then we’re ok with people making social casino games using Defold.
Ultimately it is the developer’s responsibility to make sure that the games they make don’t infringe the laws in the territories in which they are distributed and we need the right to protect ourselves to the extent that the developer causes us to be dragged into a law suit because of their actions. This responsibility is already clear under section 5 of Part 5 of the Ts and Cs (Your Liability to Us).
Thank you for the clearance @britzl.
Correct, none of the code from Defold goes to final product.
Company has our own SDK, licences for real money gambling. But it does not have any editor. We wanted to allow artists to create scenes, prefabs, particles or animations inside editor.
My job it to take all this and export it into JSON, which then will be loaded into our SDK and interpreted so it looks 1:1 from what is inside editor.
All code is still written inside our in-house SDK.
Hello,
This situation about use Defold to gambling, changes with the news about open source?
thanks
Yes, absolutely. The new terms and conditions for the Defold Software has been much reduced and is mainly now covered by the source code license which doesn’t restrict the kind of content you can create.