"Non-commercial liscense"

[Miyase Mihiro]

A lot of game assets on the lemmasoft forums have creative commence licenses, witch allow you to use those under a couple of terms. Almost all of these licenses have the rule "No commercial purpose".
Lets say u make a game with some of these assets, but accidently make a few pennies on donations/add revenue.
Those that count as commercial purpose or not?
In other words, will u be breaking the terms?

[Mammon]

I think most people who use those CCs put the line at no asking money for the download. Having your project on itch.io with possible donations or even with a recommended price but where people have to pay a minimum of $0.00, having a patreon or doing a kickstarter, all those things are allowed as long as there's no paywall before downloading/playing the game. Some people may indeed put the bar a bit lower, but I doubt that they won't mention this in their description if that's the case.

You might want to read through these Creative Common descriptions a bit more carefully, because if the asset's posts don't mention anything then you can use that general description. Which I think will support what I said above, perhaps with a no-profit clause. (That you don't make more money off the game than you put into it. Considering that investments into further projects and a minimum wage for you and your fellow project members is included in that, it's virtually unheard of for a free Lemmasoft project to really go over that threshold.)

[Imperf3kt]

Ad revenue is nothing to do with your game, unless it is part of the game, but even then, it is not enough to make the game a "commercial" game. Your game is commercial when you force players to pay a fee in order to download the game or download DLC. A donations button or "pay what you want" system where the minimum fee is $0.00, does not count as commercial.
Disclaimer: IANAL & TINLA

[LateWhiteRabbit]

Ad revenue is nothing to do with your game, unless it is part of the game, but even then, it is not enough to make the game a "commercial" game. Your game is commercial when you force players to pay a fee in order to download the game or download DLC. A donations button or "pay what you want" system where the minimum fee is $0.00, does not count as commercial.
Disclaimer: IANAL & TINLA

Also, IANAL myself, but ad revenue sounds iffy. I think most courts would find that qualifies as 'commercial' since the game is driving the ad revenue. It's like trying to claim you aren't running a bar because admission and drinks are free, then making money from bands booking the establishment to play to the crowd of patrons you've attracted.

I forget what it was, but wasn't there a game that got in trouble on Kickstarter because of assets or a license that was only supposed to be for non-commercial, and the rights holder and Kickstarter both agreed using Kickstarter to raise money for the project was a violation of that.

If there is even a chance you'll make money off a project, stick with assets that allow commercial-use. Those are still relatively easy to find, though not as abundant. And the commercial license on a lot of assets isn't that bad. I make art and program, but I'm pretty hopeless with music and sound, so I've bought commercial licensing for sounds and songs before, and it hasn't broken the bank. Non-exclusive commercial licenses are actually fairly cheap all things considered. (Meaning the creator is free to sell their work to other developers and not just you.)

[Karl_C]

"NonCommercial interpretation" :

The NonCommercial (“NC”) element is found in three of the six CC licenses: BY-NC, BY-NC-SA, and BY-NC-ND. In each of these licenses, NonCommercial is expressly defined as follows:

“NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.”
The definition is intent-based and intentionally flexible in recognition of the many possible factual situations and business models that may exist now or develop later. Clear-cut rules exist even though there may be gray areas, and debates have ensued over its interpretation. In practice, the number of actual conflicts between licensors and licensees over its meaning appear to be few.

Source: wiki.creativecommons.org

You also have to keep in mind, that:

The NC licenses may not be compatible for remixing with many works. For example, a person may not remix BY-SA content (such as Wikipedia content) with BY-NC content.

I agree with LateWhiteRabbit: "If there is even a chance you'll make money off a project, stick with assets that allow commercial-use." Google received just over 75 million DMCA-(Digital Millennium Copyright Act) related takedown requests in the month of March 2016...

[papillon]

Intentionally inserting ad-based stuff into your game definitely makes it count as commercial to me, as you're intending to make money with it.

A website with some free games on it where people have the option of donating directly to the website running and not specific to the one game, that's much more grey area. I would probably consider that still non-commercial, not everyone would agree with me.

Taking donations SPECIFICALLY for the game is again bumping into commercial territory, so a PWYW download for a game with no-commercial-use contents is not appropriate IMO.