What does "data" inside standalone game mean in the Blender License? The Blender License says that games you create with blender are not covered by their license, however, any "data" inside "standalone" games are subject to the license.


  Games created in Blender (.blend files) are program output and therefore not covered by the GPL. You can consider them your property, and license or sell them freely. With stand-alone games however, any data that is included inside the actual stand-alone executable is covered by the GPL. If this is a problem then you should set up the stand-alone player so it reads from external .blend files. A common practice is to include a “please wait, loading…” scene in the standalone, and read level files externally.


As I understand it, all software is technically "data", so I was wondering what exactly this was referring to. Does it refer to the parameters of the object, like, say, for example, the coordinates of a cube's vertices? Maybe the height of a character, the high score of a player?

Thank you for your time.
If you use an addon to export your game in BGE (Build Game, Game Engine Publishing, etc), the addon will attach your blend file at the end of blenderplayer executable. This way, your blend file is part of the executable, so your blend file must comply the GNU GPL license.

To avoid this, you can keep your blend files external to the executable and simply run them through the Game > Start Game From File actuator, so that your blend files can comply any license you want.

Alternatively, you can run the blenderplayer through command line, with a batch / shell script. I've made this tool using this method, you may find its information useful.