what may I not sell?
The questions is wrongly asked: As a licenseholder to your project, which you would usually be if you are it’s developer and are indie, you are absolutely allowed to do anything with your own project:
We only require that your game is freely available to the public so the public can create the game themselves in order to get the full essential gaming experience.
Good example: You have released a game with all of it’s components as DIY and give it to the world. Now you decide to sell physical pre-printed copies from your site, or components with alternative art, lore that isn’t essential to play the game, or a dinner with you et.c.
Bad example: You release the game as DIY, but now you create an expansion that adds something to the game, like a new faction or mechanics. You don’t make that available for free, and charge money for it.
What you are doing is withholding the players the full essential gaming experience. Problem here is not that you are selling the expansion, the issue is that you are not making it also freely available as DIY.
who may sell my game?
We wouldn’t know – that’s only for you/the licensholder of your project to decide. The following applies if you want to control that and also be a part of WTactics.
[Anyone] If you are fine with anyone selling it then you can use the following licenses: GPL2, GPL3, CC BY or CC BY-SA
[You] If you want to keep your rights to be the only one that may legally sell it then you need to use: CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-SA
We are however not lawyers and do not take responsibility for your actions or interpretations of the licenses and what they (don’t) entail. Please read through the license(s) you want to use and make sure you understand these matters before you make a decision about what license you will use.
WTactics recommends you to consider using a very liberal license, and to actually allow anyone to sell your game, but it’s up to you and we are happy either way if you are. Our reasoning is this:
- To be honest, most of us that are creating card- and boardgames as indies will not be make a living out of it in any case due to many factors beyond our control. There are much better ways to make money seen to time/effort investment.
- Commercially it’s a very hard market that is also satured.
- For most of us the goal is to reach people with our games and know that they are being played and enjoyed by the world. Hence, we don’t measure the success of our games in units sold or revenue.