Almost every casual game ships with assets somebody bought: a character controller, a UI kit, a particle pack, a dialogue system. That is normal and it is fine — right up to the moment the game is sold.
The standard Unity Asset Store End User Licence Agreement grants the licence to the account that made the purchase. It is not attached to the project, the build, or the game. Selling the game does not move it, and copying the files into the buyer's repository does not move it either.
What that means in practice
When a studio acquires your title, they are acquiring a project that contains material they have no licence to use. The exposures are real:
- The buyer cannot legally ship an update without re-licensing those assets.
- If the asset publisher notices, the takedown lands on the buyer, who then comes back to you.
- An acquirer doing proper diligence will find this, and finding it late costs you the deal and the relationship at once.
Audit the project before you quote a price
This takes an afternoon and it is the cheapest insurance in the transaction. Open the
project and list everything under Assets/ that you did not make:
- Asset Store purchases — check each publisher's licence terms. Some explicitly permit transfer with a whole-product sale; most do not.
- Fonts — the most commonly missed one. A desktop font licence rarely covers embedding in an application.
- Audio — music and SFX libraries usually licence per-project, and "project" means your project.
- Plugins and SDKs — ad networks, analytics, and anything with a per-seat or per-company key.
Three ways out, in order of preference
Replace it. If an asset is small or superficial, swapping it for something you own is cleaner than any paperwork. Budget the hours; it is usually less than you fear.
Ask the publisher. Many Asset Store publishers will grant a transfer or issue the buyer a licence, sometimes free, often for a modest fee. A short email costs nothing and a written yes is worth having.
Disclose it. If neither is practical, list the assets up front with the licence position next to each. Buyers deal with this constantly and a clear list reads as professionalism. Being caught with it later reads as the opposite.
If you are the one buying
Ask for the asset list before you agree a number, not after. "What third-party assets are in this project, and what is the licence position on each?" is a fair question and a seller who cannot answer it has told you something useful.
This is what we do day to day — game development and porting at Factorial Studio.
