If you don't exceed the gross annual revenue limit, you can create and distribute any number of apps, forever.

Once you exceed the gross annual revenue limit, then you'd need to license Spine Enterprise annually. If you don't renew the Spine Enterprise license, you'd need to stop distributing your applications which contain the Spine Runtimes (even if in a compiled format).

EDIT: Spine's licensing has been revised to allow continuing to use the Spine Runtimes without renewing your Spine Enterprise license. Please see here:
Blog: Our new licensing explained

I'm sorry you feel that way. I do still wish you the best of luck!

FWIW, the licensing is a sort of "robin hood" approach, where those who can most afford it and who stand to benefit the most from the software bear more of the burden. Those that make less than $500,000 can use Spine and the Spine Runtimes and ALL future updates for life, with no further charges. There are multi-million and even multi-billion dollar companies using Spine, but even those closest to the annual revenue limit are unlikely to find the Spine Enterprise expense unbearable. 2,200 / 500,000 = 0.0044, so the expense of licensing Spine is 0.44% of gross at worse and that of course gets smaller for companies making more than 500,000. I'd also like to point out any number of your applications can use the Spine Runtimes, there is no per title fee which is common with other middleware, such as Autodesk Scaleform.

Keep in mind, there are two key parts to licensing Spine: 1) use of the Spine editor, and 2) distribution of the Spine Runtimes as integrated into your software. If you are done using the editor and don't want to continue licensing Spine Enterprise, you can avoid using the Spine Runtimes in your software. You own the IP you create such as video, images, and animation data exported from Spine and can use that in your software however you like. Displaying images and video is obvious. Displaying animation data would require writing your own runtimes, which would need to be a clean room implementation.

Hey Nate, I actually have to agree with darkflameknight on this one - this licensing is terrifying to us. The model is fine for some teams, but we really need to be able to license the software, release our game on console, and not need to go through the nightmare of having to take our game down from the XBox or Sony store if our small studio goes out of business or otherwise can't pay the annual fee.

Would you guys consider offering a standard per-title or other one-time licensing option? I totally agree that your current licensing model for Spine is extremely cheap/generous, but some studios are in a situation where they might actually prefer to pay you what it's worth one-time (the VisualAssistX licensing model comes to mind as a possibility), rather than attach risk and complexity to the fate of their product. We simply love what you guys are making, and hope you will be able to offer better licensing options for small console developers and others in our situation!

Oh, and to clarify - we've never made $500k a year, but we do have boom years (releases of titles) and bust years (the 2-4 years in between). How does the current licensing model work with that situation?

and not need to go through the nightmare of having to take our game down from the XBox or Sony store if our small studio goes out of business or otherwise can't pay the annual fee.

While this is the part that has always scared me, if you go bankrupt then you don't make $500k anymore Problem solved.

That being said... if I were to allow a company to purchase my company or contract me to make a game using Unity+Spine, they would have to assume the license fee and that is a huge turn-off as a independent studio. I would honestly be happy to see a "Buyout" price for a perpetual runtime license that I can just include in the cost of development for a specific title.

My concern with the licensing is this:

Charging companies for an Enterprise License is fair enough, if they can afford it then it's only fair they pay for it. But...

What is to stop your company hiking up the license fee 10 fold in a few years time once companies have lots of live products out there? They would have no choice but to pay the fee or re-make their product?

Alan

PS. I mean this as an honest question, not a dig. At a recent games trade show lots of people I met were discussing this and citing it as the main reason their company won't use Spine.

Hiking the price up 10 fold would hurt us more than it'd help our bottom line. We do increase our Spine Enterprise seat cost sometimes to cover inflation and increased expenses on our end, and has usually been in the $10 range.

We also offer a separate, one-time per product license fee that allows you to integrate the Spine Runtime into your games without having to renew your Spine Enterprise license annually. See the license agreement for more details, e.g. what we define as a product (translations, multi-platform etc.).

Nate schrieb

If you don't exceed the gross annual revenue limit, you can create and distribute any number of apps, forever.

Once you exceed the gross annual revenue limit, then you'd need to license Spine Enterprise annually. If you don't renew the Spine Enterprise license, you'd need to stop distributing your applications which contain the Spine Runtimes (even if in a compiled format).

Hey - sorry for reviving this old thread, but the discussion re Spine Runtime licensing is close to my concern.

Let's say that I (as a sole proprietor) have built a game with Spine Runtime, and I have a valid Essentials license. Let's assume that I have not exceeded $500K per year. Is it safe to assume that I can license this game exclusively or non-exclusively to a large corporation, which probably makes more than $500K in revenue per year?

Similarly, Is it ok to do work-for-hire (as an independent contractor, of course, not an employee) for such entity with valid Essentials license?

Practical examples: building branded ad game for a fast food chain, licensing html5 mini-game to a TV network.

The scenario (below 500k myself, selling to above 500k company which subsequently publishes the product) works as follows:

If the company that's above 500k publishes the product, and the product includes the Spine runtime, the company requires a Spine license as well or they can pay the one-time per product license fee.

If the company that's above 500k publishes the product, and the product doesn't include the Spine runtime, e.g. they render the animations using sprite sheets, the company does not require a Spine license.

I'm trying to find out more information on this option (one-time per product license fee).

I have a relatively small software company that makes software unrelated to gaming or animation and we'd like to put a small animated character on our website for fun. If we hire an animator who gives us a spine for the character we'd need to use the web-runtime to be able to include it on the website and have it react to the visitor's mouse, for example, correct? (I realize if we wanted to make it less interesting we could just get animated images which wouldn't require licensing, but the quality looks so much better using the runtime and it could be interactive).

Given that we have no need of a perpetual enterprise license for our company, it seems like a one-time runtime license fee is the right option for us.

Is there any information online about this option?

If your company uses the Spine Runtimes on its website, you will need a Spine license. If you are a company with annual revenue below $500,000USD, you can purchase Spine Essential to be covered. That's a perpetual license as long as you are below the revenue threshold!

Unfortunately we are not eligible for essential (yay for growing a software company with a half-dozen employees from scratch and clearing the 500k mark!) and yet it's clearly not worth a yearly enterprise license just to cover a joke on the website. Therefore it seems like our best bet is a single-use license fee. Or really, "use something else" is more and more seeming like the best option unfortunately. :-(

So, is there any place with more information about the one-time license fee?

It's best to email us: contact@esotericsoftware.com

EDIT: Spine's licensing has been revised to allow continuing to use the Spine Runtimes without renewing your Spine Enterprise license, so there is no longer a need for a one-time product license fee. Please see here:
Blog: Our new licensing explained

Is there a way buy an essential license for an account, but retain a way to transfer that license to a different account?

Say I want to open source content on my game, so I would like to offer licenses to anyone who wants to contribute. But shall the user become inactive, I would rather keep the value of the license and transfer the licensing to another, more active account. A "license server" comes to mind, but apparently you don't have that, do you?

Regards.

We have network floating licenses, but only for Spine Enterprise and Spine Education. Spine Essential and Spine Professional are for a single, named person. You can email us from time to time to change the account information, but the license is for a single, named person and should not be passed around or shared in a group.