You may have seen a lot of feedbacks on the "Free Open source" keywords used in the project description.
I want to clarify this all. Please note that it's an independant project with only one (but really motivated) developer on it!
Free
Some people didn't understand that the engine was free for non commercial use. They expected to have a free access on Steam, and sugested to have a DLC for commercial version then (note: there is no difference of content, this only allows you to publish your commercial games).
I contacted Steam support to see if that's possible to do that and also offer DLC automatically for users that already bought the engine on Steam. This operation will be done as soon as possible.
Until the free Steam release, you can have access to the free version through the offical website here: http://rpg-paper-maker.com/index.php/downloads.
Open source
The engine is using licence LGPLv3 + some parts of the Javascript code are proprietary. This is the current state, but it seems like this doesn't match with the Open source philosophy. That's why I asked to the discord community if it was morally OK to go to a proprietary licence instead. The 1.2.0 version will always have LGPLv3 open source licence and can't be removed, but the next coming updates will now become proprietary.
I would not hide source code, and the engine would still be accessible freely for non commercial use. Free use is really important to me, and I confused it with open sourcing in the past.
Too high price, not enough features
The price will not be reduced now since it can be accessible freely for non commercial use. The price also goes with regular coming updates. The product is not completely finished. There will be much more assets and features coming up.
Proposing the engine for the commercial version now is completely assumed. The only problem here is that communication was bad around the free aspect of the project on Steam and I'm really sorry for that. I firstly wanted to use Steam as a platform for selling some keys, and didn't expect people to wish the free version here too.
I apologize for all these confusions.
Thank you all for your understanding and support,
Wano