Standard or extended: how 3D asset licensing really works

Six weeks before launch, a publisher’s legal team asked a four-person studio for a list of every third-party asset in the build, with a licence type and a receipt for each. That request is completely routine. It is also the moment most small teams discover that eleven of their assets were bought under a licence that does not cover what they built, and that nobody kept the invoices.

Asset licensing is not complicated once you see the actual question it is asking. The tiers are usually named Standard and Extended, and the names suggest the difference is quantity. It is not. The difference is whether the model file can leave your hands in a form someone else can use.

The test that decides the tier

Ask one thing: can a person who receives my finished product extract the model file and use it in something of their own?

If the answer is no, Standard almost certainly covers you. A compiled game, a rendered video, a printed catalogue, a website with a locked-down web viewer, an app binary. The model is baked into the product and the recipient gets pixels or a package, not an asset.

If the answer is yes, you are in Extended territory. A Unity template on an asset store, a Blender scene file you sell, a VRM avatar someone downloads, a design system where clients receive source files. In all of those the model is effectively being redistributed as a model, and the cheap tier does not cover it.

Everything else in the licence text is detail hanging off that one distinction.

What the two tiers actually permit

Two rows deserve attention. Unlimited seats means the licence belongs to your organisation, not to the person who clicked buy. If you have nine artists and a build server, all of them can open the file. Per-seat asset licensing exists elsewhere and it is a maintenance nightmare; a per-project model avoids it entirely.

The other is the row that is empty in both tiers: selling the model as a model. No consumer tier permits that, and it is the line that separates a customer from a competitor. Extended lets the asset ride along inside something you made. It never lets you repackage it as inventory.

What “one project” means in practice

A project is one titled end product plus everything that keeps it alive: patches, DLC, expansions, ports to other platforms, the demo, the trailer, the store page art and the press kit. Shipping the same game on Steam, PlayStation and Switch is one project. Nobody is going to ask you to buy three licences for three storefronts.

A sequel is a new project. A different game reusing the same asset is a new project. A separate client is a new project. If you find yourself buying the same asset for the fourth time, that is the arithmetic telling you Extended was cheaper at purchase three.

Four scenarios worked through

A paid indie game on Steam

Standard is correct. You ship a compiled binary, the models are inside the pak or asset bundle, and normal players receive an executable. Selling 400,000 copies changes nothing about the licence, because copies of the product are unlimited under both tiers.

One wrinkle worth planning for: if you later add a level editor or Steam Workshop support that exposes assets to players, you have changed the answer to the extraction question. Either exclude bought assets from what the editor can export, or upgrade those assets to Extended before that feature ships.

An ad campaign for an agency client

This is where teams most often get it wrong. The agency buys the asset, uses it in the client’s campaign, and hands over the finished films. If the deliverable is rendered video, Standard covers the campaign as one project and the agency is the licensee.

It breaks when the client asks for the project files, which they frequently do. Handing over a Maya scene containing the model is a redistribution, and it requires either an Extended licence or a licence bought in the client’s name. Agencies working at any volume usually buy Extended and treat it as overhead, because the alternative is a per-client purchase and a spreadsheet nobody maintains.

A Unity template you sell on a shop

Extended, without question, and check the “sell as a standalone asset” row before you go further. Buyers of a template download a project folder containing every FBX in it. That is redistribution of the model in usable form, exactly what Standard excludes.

Some shops additionally forbid third-party assets in templates entirely, regardless of what licence you hold, so read the storefront’s submission rules alongside the asset licence. Two documents, both binding.

Print-on-demand merchandise

A poster with a rendered character on it, a T-shirt, a resin figure printed from the mesh. These usually fall under a separate physical-goods right rather than the digital tiers, because the economics are different and because a printed figure is arguably the model itself in another substrate. Extended typically covers 2D printed reproductions; physical 3D reproduction for sale is usually a custom conversation.

Generated models are a different chain of title

When you generate a model from your own prompt or your own reference image, you are not licensing someone else’s work. The output is yours to use commercially, and the tier question mostly evaporates. What replaces it is a question about inputs: if you upload a reference image you found online, whatever rights problem that image carries travels straight into your model.

The practical rule is boring and effective. Reference images should be your own photographs, your own concept art, work you commissioned with a written transfer, or licensed stock with a clear derivative-works permission. A generation studio like MeshyFlix gives you commercial rights to what you generate, but no platform can grant you rights to an input you did not have.

Keep records now, not in month eleven

A licence you cannot evidence is a licence you do not have. The audit above took that studio nine days, and most of it was reconstructing purchases from email.

Keep a plain text file in the repo. One row per asset, updated when the asset is added, not later:

asset            | source      | licence  | order id     | date
-----------------|-------------|----------|--------------|-----------
market_stall_a   | meshyflix    | standard | VX-2291-8840 | 2026-02-11
crate_set_01     | meshmarket  | extended | MM-2410-1173 | 2026-03-02
lantern_hero     | generated   | own work | prompt-log   | 2026-03-19
cobbles_tiling   | texturehaus | standard | TH-88301     | 2026-01-08

Also export the actual invoices to a folder you control. Shops delist assets and occasionally shut down. A perpetual licence survives both, but only if you can produce evidence of it, and a dead storefront cannot email you a receipt.

Do and don’t

• Do apply the extraction test before every purchase. It answers the tier question in ten seconds.
• Do buy Extended up front if you know the asset will appear in more than two products. Three Standard purchases usually cost more than one Extended.
• Do record the order ID at the moment you add the file to the repo.
• Do re-check licences before adding modding, UGC or asset-export features to a shipped product.
• Don’t assume “I modified it heavily” changes anything. Derivative works carry the original licence in every tier I have read.
• Don’t hand a client project files under a Standard licence. That is the most common breach in agency work and it is entirely avoidable.
• Don’t put licensed assets into a training set. Both tiers exclude it, and it is the fastest way to end a supplier relationship.
• Don’t rely on a shop account as your archive. Export the receipts.

Where to start this week

Open your current project and list every third-party model in it. For each one, answer the extraction question, then find the receipt. The assets where you can do the first but not the second are your real risk, and buying a replacement licence today costs a fraction of explaining the gap during a publisher review.

Then add the manifest file to your repo template so the next project starts with it. This describes how these tiers are commonly written rather than constituting legal advice, so read the actual text of any licence before a large purchase, and get a lawyer involved before anything with a physical-goods or broadcast component.