Hi
I've been reading a lot through out all the licensing threads, but not sure since there are different answers and types of licenses.
We are using spine in our projects using a PRO license. Our artist made a character with lots of animations for one of our games and he thought it could be something sellable at the Asset Store if we do some reskinning.
Could we sell this characters and include any of the available runtimes on the Asset Store?
Thanks in advance!
I don't see why not in regards to your assets. I expect you wont be allowed to distribute the runtimes, but they are available from this site anyway, just point your customers here. Also, your customers wouldn't be able to modify the runtimes (im not sure why you would want to anyway) iirc you need a licence to do that. you don't need a licence to put spine assets into an engine.
You own the assets you export from Spine and the Spine projects you create, so you are free to sell them as you like.
The Spine Runtimes can't be placed on the Unity Asset store unfortunately, because the Unity Asset store forces anything placed there to be under the Unity Asset store license. The Spine Runtimes have their own license, so it can't just be discarded and put under the Unity Asset store license.
You simply instruct people to grab our official Spine Unity package so they can see your assets work in Unity. If they want to use and distribute the Spine Runtimes in their apps, they'll need to license Spine.
Thanks for the quick response, sorry to hear that though.
Trying to sell those assets under those terms does not make much sense.
I appreciate the effort needed to develop the runtimes, and it's your project and income, so your choice. But I believe a plain 'NO' its a better answer.
Unity forces it's own AS license. You force your own license. I force the customer to buy something from another site in order to work. Hey, it worked for cars, printers and so on, but it just does not make sense on the asset store.
A plain "no" would've been confusing.
I don't think Nate was aware that the Asset Store required submissions to work without depending on external things.
This license arrangement makes perfect sense considering how much more functionality is built into the Spine Runtimes honestly - as well as their open source nature.
That being said, you're welcome to export Sprite Sheets from Spine and sell those on the asset store as things stand now.
Additionally, hey Nate 
Want to make a compiled DLL for distribution on the Unity Asset Store under a different license?
Or possibly a "Spine Runtime License" for $30 for source use?
Great idea Mitch I realy think it would help the discoverybility of spine if some part, in some way, were available on the asset store.
The Unity Asset Store license would replace the Spine Runtime license (and any other license), so it is not possible to include the Spine Runtimes even as a DLL. 
Maybe it would work to sell the exported Spine data as well as spritesheets of the animations? This way the user can see the animations in Unity, use the spritesheets in their games if they like, and they also receive the Spine data in case they want to use the Spine runtimes. I know it's not as nice since you can't show off how your skeletons work with advanced skeletal features, but it would get you visibility in the asset store and could lead users to your external site where you can provide Unity packages containing the Spine runtimes (you'd just need to include the Spine runtimes license).
Glad to see the live community around Spine and the quick support Nate. Thanks
I do not expect to change anybody's thoughts and like I said it's your work Nate, so your call, not mine. I just understand that since your license and Unity's are non compatible, there's no way I can upload full featured spine projects.
Selling spritesheets would leave the best features of spine out and a huge mem load, Do you think customers would like to buy a sports car with just 1st gear? I honestly wont.
Like davidsvon I also believe the AS would give you some exposure to your specific target: game dev tech buyer.
I never questioned the amount of work, the awesome features of spine, or the sense of your license or Unity's, or its price (BTW I do believe its a great price quality ratio). I just wanted to know the feasibility of using Spine features to create content for the Asset Store. In my opinion selling the cool stuff without the cool it's not nice. I have very little resources and using them in managing customer complaints and being a Spine "salesman" does not work for me. So I'll just keep using Spine for our projects and I'll forget the idea to sell it in any asset store.
Just for the record, there a few SmoothMoves asset store items for purchase ($10-15) that simply say "Requires SmoothMoves" in bold letters.
Also this is going to be in the next big push of my updates to the Spine-Unity runtime; the ability to "Extract" a Spine Skeleton with hierarchy and attachments intact for all skin permutations neatly packed into a single object. There are some serious limitations in Mecanim and Unity's Mesh class in regards to SkinnedMesh weighting (maximum 4 bones for deformation) but such is life. Image removed due to the lack of support for HTTPS. | Show Anyway Image removed due to the lack of support for HTTPS. | Show Anyway
So TL;DR it would be feasible to provide a package of pretty damn well animated characters on the AssetStore and also say "Hey, these SpineRuntimes are pretty awesome too!" and provide some Spine source files and advanced animations that require the Spine Runtime (which people can technically download for free to see the difference, but are not allowed to publish legally without purchasing a Spine license).
PS:
Nate doesn't pay me, but he's tried to.
Hi Mitch, Thanks for contributing.
I know there are some people selling packs that require 'Smooth moves', there are some using spine also, and probably customers downloading and distributing runtimes with or without licensing it them. Selling a $10-$15 pack that requires a $60+ addon plus the time I'll expent reading and answering customers seems like a bad business to me, if it works for you or others, great! your time and your business.
About your update, sorry, not sure if I understood correctly:
There are a couple autonomous importers on these forums already, but what I'm after is a tighter integration with the existing unity editor side of things. It opens the ability to simply use Spine as a rigging tool rather than a full animation playback system. The side effect is that you get some autonomous prefabs with mecanim compatible data . But yes, it would be limited to not having built in IK or FFD or color tweening.
Cool! it's a nice move and great news.
For the time being, could you point where to find those importers? maybe could use them as a workaround, no?
There's one other really good one but I'm on my phone and in bed
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3061&p=14899
Thanks to Mitch's genius, you can now put your Spine Unity assets in the Unity Asset Store without including the Spine runtimes:
viewtopic.php?p=19418#p19418
Pull the skeleton data into Unity using spine-unity, then use the new Bake buttons to convert the Spine skeleton data to native Unity GameObjects and Unity animations. You can then control the animations with Mecanim and do all the other native Unity stuff
without needing spine-unity which means you can put the GameObjects in the Unity Asset Store (be careful not to put spine-unity in the asset store!).
There are some differences and limitations: they are GameObjects so you obviously won't have the spine-unity API to manipulate them, curves are plotted so there will be a lot of keys, non-uniform scaling won't be accurate (scale X and Y the same to work around), no flip x/y, no FFD, no color keys, no inherit scale. Still, the resulting Unity prefab is quite usable without spine-unity. You could include the skeleton data JSON so if people need more features they have the option to license Spine and use spine-unity.
Hi All!
We finally managed to import characters and animations for use in Unity, using the nicloay importer.
6 characters and more than twenty animations developed using Spine. You can take a look at the asset here: http://u3d.as/bwq
Image removed due to the lack of support for HTTPS. | Show Anyway
Thanks to the community and especially Nate, Mitch for their support.
Cool!
If I may ask, why did you settle on using nicolays importer?
We tried with two importers:
Pixelballoon - http://es.esotericsoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3061&p=14899
Nicloay - http://es.esotericsoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2012
After several trials with Pixelballoon's importer, we had trouble exporting the skeleton and it's joints. The pivot point would be misplaced, breaking the connection in arms and legs. We tried with nicloays importer and all we had to do, was removing the hip mesh animation and soften the edges in some of the sprites that appeared at export.
Unfortunatelly your 'native unity baking' arrived once we already submitted our pack to the asset store. Anyhow, we would try this new method and post any useful feedback.
Thanks!
