If it worked as you described, an individual could purchase Essential and create a game to "bind" it to Essential, then sell it to Microsoft (for example) for $1 and Microsoft could distribute it without royalties. It doesn't make sense for it to work that way.
At the core of it: distributing applications which contain the Spine Runtimes requires a valid Spine license. If you have 11 apps and then cross the threshold where Enterprise is required, your options are:
1) purchase the annual Enterprise license and continue distributing any number of apps containing the Spine Runtimes (minimum cost $2200/year for zero users if the Spine editor is not needed),
2) purchase a Spine Runtimes license per product which contains the Spine Runtimes (email us), or
3) stop distributing apps containing the Spine Runtimes (eg develop an in-house solution to replace the Spine Runtimes, or switch to spritesheets/etc).
I've deleted your post and locked this thread. Such aggressiveness is not welcome on a public forum. If you'd like to continue discussion, please email us. I will still try to clarify things for you:
If it worked like you want, anyone could bypass the Enterprise license simply by having an individual "bind" an application and then pass it off to a large company. How your "binding" concept would actually work is vague.
As explained above, you own what you make using Spine, just like you own images made using Photoshop. Spine differs from Photoshop in that all game toolkits can already display images
you don't need a runtime to display your Photoshop assets. Displaying skeletal animations is a lot more complex and so we provide runtime libraries to integrate into your applications. Rather than licensing the Spine Runtimes separately, we provide them as part of licensing Spine, as described in the posts above.
I'll go over the options again:
1) You can choose not to use the Spine Runtimes. If you are contemplating other animation tools, considering that many tools similar to Spine do not provide runtimes at all (or they are of poor quality). Creating your own runtimes (for any animation tool) will be a lot more costly than licensing Spine Enterprise.
2) You can license Spine to use the Spine Runtimes. If you are continuing development with Spine then you'll already have a Spine license so this option is essentially free.
3) Or, you can pay a per-product license fee to license the Spine Runtimes for a single product. This option is standard in the software industry for products which are libraries or components that are integrated into your applications (such as Scaleform). It makes sense if you are going to sell your application to someone who does not have a Spine license, or you otherwise don't want your application encumbered by the Spine Runtimes license.
Again, Spine differs from typical boxed products because Spine provides the optional Spine Runtimes. Spine can be thought of as two products: 1) the Spine editor, and 2) the Spine Runtimes. For convenience for most customers, we provide the Spine Runtimes to anyone licensing Spine. If that doesn't work for you, please consider the per-product Spine Runtimes licensing.
