Hi, I am brand new to Defold and was looking over the terms of service and I had a few concerns. My concerns come from the part that talks about what you are allowed to make as far as games in specific you cant make anything offensive or harrasing. I have no intentions of making anything offensive or that could be considered harrasment, however people do seem to be offended by about everything these days so I was simply looking for more clarification as to what is meant by this.
Other things that I had questions with is that sometimes I will when starting out on a project as I am a programmer and not an artist, I will grab images from google that are similar to what I am planning on having for art assets, but it seems to say that we cant do that either as it would be uploading content that I don’t own. I never release anything with these assets as they are just placeholders but I don’t want to get in to trouble by even using them temporarily.
Finally, is there a way to create or load projects locally to my computer instead of having to be online all of the time. I have internet connectivity problems where I live and I really do not want to be unable to work on my projects as I do not have a connection to the internet.
I have emailed these questions to info@defold and have received no reply almost a week later.
Hi Travis! I can’t really answer about the offensive content etc, but I guess this is the same as in many other engines and if you look at the rules for app stores. I’m thinking things Nazi symbols, the Holocaust, violence against minorities, that sort of thing.
You must currently be online to open projects, but once you have a project open in Defold you don’t need to be online anymore.
First of I would like to say thank you for the response.
Ok I can sort of understand the no nazi stuff but what if you were making a historical game for example a game where you have to escape a concentration camp sorta thing? Would that still be offensive or no? Like I said anything could be offensive but then history is offensive and so is life. I wouldn’t be glorifying nazis or anything like that but it happened, I mean if thats the case some of the best games out there are offensive and we couldnt do something like call of duty1 or 2 or 3 or company of heroes with the engine and that would be seriously limiting.
While I love the tools so far if I am restricted to much creatively, I will have to go somewhere else unfortunately, and I would really not rather do that.
As I said, I’m not a lawyer so take what I say with many grains of salt. So I’m guessing a game where you’re a concentration camp guard getting points for killing Jews would be considered offensive on all levels. But if you’d do a game depicting a camp guard with a conscience where you need to be creative in finding ways to save people then that might be something else (I’m thinking an intelligent game such as Papers Please or The Westport Independent). Common sense will get you a long way when deciding if a game is offensive or not. It might also be a good idea to look at content ratings for video games and see what things won’t even pass for an 18 yrs+ game.
I’ll try to find someone who can provide a better answer. @Axel perhaps?
Thanks, I am hoping that you are right about this as I am ok with these things, however with the wording it leaves it way to open to interpretation and then we could get sued for anything with the way its worded.
Hey Travis! Welcome to Defold, hope you like it so far. Sorry to see you didn’t get a reply on the info@defold.com mail, I’ll try to see what happened there.
First of all, a disclaimer: I am in no way a lawyer, I have not studied law, and most of what I know about the legal field comes from watching “Legally Blonde” one too many times. With that said – I did skim through a bunch of various T&C’s for game engines and other services, just to check if these sort of phrasings on offensive content are a “must-have” or not.
It seemed more difficult to find legal text which didn’t over-protect themselves in this manner. Having said that, I agree with @britzl that common sense goes a long way with these sort of things. Furthermore – while everything theoretically can be offensive to someone, and you theoretically could get sued for a lot of things, it doesn’t automatically make your game or content offensive. I don’t have a clear-cut answer, just my two cents.
So, tl;dr:
This sort of phrasing seems like a “must-have” for a lot of services and creator softwares out there.
Thanks for the response. This helps me feel a bit better about the terms of service at least when it comes to offensive material. I still have the other question about the online requirements but mostly britzl answered that and it seems there is at this time no way to get around the “always online” requirement. It would be nice to have some way to open into the editor the project while offline as I can clearly see it in my project folder inside of the defold folder. Since I have the whole thing locally why is it that we can not open it without the internet connection. Hopefully this will be removed at some point.
The other issue that I did have is that sometimes I will when starting out on a project as I am a programmer and not an artist, I will grab images from google that are similar to what I am planning on having for art assets, but it seems to say that we cant do that either as it would be uploading content that I don’t own. I never release anything with these assets as they are just placeholders but I don’t want to get in to trouble by even using them temporarily. Any idea on if we can use stuff downloaded from the web as temporary placeholders without getting in trouble?
From what I see most of these relate in practice to what you publish on our site (this forum for instance). If you use our git servers to somehow spread material you don’t own you might get in trouble, just as if you publish a game with stuff you don’t have the rights to.
Still, we can’t allow you to use material you don’t own in your games, even as placeholders. In most countries it is not legal to download copyrighted material for personal use. Since the things you make are stored on our servers we could get in trouble because of our users activities if we did not disallow that. Compare the terms on GitHub, for instance. They say the same.
Sicher thanks for the response. Well as I am not an artist this makes my life harder I’m afraid guess I will have to get friendly with Photoshop then. :). I am pretty sure we can use things as long as we are not using them commercially but because of the fact that everything with defold is uploaded to your servers then that would not work because that is no longer borrowing but now distribution in some way. Wish there was some way to not have to be online with everything all the time
Editor 2 will support offline work, but I strongly encourage that you use a git server for your material.
Sidenote: Even of you download copyrighted material and never redistribute (“borrow”) I believe that is illegal in most countries. It is up to the copyright holder to enforce that though.
We received a question earlier which referenced this old post about the terms of service and if any of the things in this thread still applies. The contents of this post is mostly obsolete and no longer applies to the use of Defold.
I’m posting a reply here for anyone else searching for Defold Terms & Conditions and coming across this old post:
You can create any kind of game you want in any genre (horror, gambling, porn, extreme violence, religion, terrorism etc) but you must obviously make sure to not break any laws in the countries in which you release your game.
If you decide to post about your game on our community forum you must make sure to follow our terms and conditions for the forum: https://defold.com/terms-and-conditions/#part-c--terms-for-the-community-account. This means that we will reject forum posts with content which is “unlawful, harmful, harassing, defamatory, obscene, illegal or otherwise objectionable”. This will be done at our discretion and according to the laws of Sweden.
