Royalty-free, non-exclusive, exclusive: three words for two things

Three words get used as if they sat on one ladder — royalty-free, non-exclusive, exclusive — and they do not. Two of them describe permission. One describes payment. Conflating them is why buyers stall at checkout with a question nobody has answered for them.

Royalty-free is about money, not permission

Royalty-free means you pay once and owe nothing per copy sold, per install, per view. It says nothing at all about what you are allowed to do. A royalty-free licence can still forbid modification, restrict you to non-commercial use, or expire after a year — and some do.

So the phrase is not a permission tier. It is a payment model, and reading it as a permission tier is the single most common licensing mistake in this market.

Non-exclusive is about who else may have it

Non-exclusive means the studio grants you the right to use the piece and keeps the right to grant it to others on the same terms. Nobody loses anything when a second buyer arrives. It is shared access, not a queue.

For a Flash, that grant covers:

• shipping the piece in a game, an app, a web experience or a video, and selling the finished product;
• modifying it — resculpting, retexturing, rigging, cutting it apart, combining it with your own models;
• distributing it inside a compiled build or a .glb served by a website;
• using it across as many projects as you like, with nothing to come back and ask;
• keeping the right if the piece leaves the catalogue — the licence is fixed at the date of purchase.

What it does not cover is the file as merchandise:

• reselling or redistributing the file itself, modified or not, including for free;
• listing it on a marketplace, in an asset pack, or in a shared library open to third parties;
• claiming authorship, or registering the piece as a trade mark;
• using it as training data for a generative model.

The line is short enough to remember: the file is what you build your product with, not the product. The binding text is in the terms of sale, and it governs over this summary.

Exclusive is narrower than it sounds

Exclusivity removes the studio's right to sell the piece again. It does not add anything to what the buyer may do with it — a non-exclusive licence already covers commercial shipping, modification and distribution. What you buy with exclusivity is the certainty that the model will not appear in someone else's game.

What the paperwork should say

Under French law — the studio is a French company, and the terms are French law — an assignment of author's rights is read restrictively: what is not written down is not granted. A marketplace checkbox that says «commercial use allowed» says nothing about media, territory, duration or adaptations.

That is the reason the licence here is a dated text you can hold up to an acquisitions lawyer, rather than a label. It is also the reason the invoice carries a French VAT number: the seller is identifiable, and so is the counterparty.

The two doors

For pieces that must be yours alone, the studio has a vault of one-of-one pieces that leave once and never return, and takes commissions where a character is sculpted for one project. Both are at the studio page.

For everything else, a Flash at €80 is built for exactly that. And nothing stops you buying one to inspect the work before committing to a commission — the .blend, the UVs, the topology and the licence are all in the file, which is the subject of this note.