Improbable, Epic Games Establish $25 Million Fund To Help Devs Move To 'More Open Engines' After Unity Debacle (techcrunch.com) 80
Lucas Matney writes via TechCrunch: Improbable is taking a daring step after announcing earlier today that Unity had revoked its license to operate on the popular game development engine. The U.K.-based cloud gaming startup has inked a late-night press release with Unity rival Epic Games, which operates the Unreal Engine and is the creator of Fortnite, establishing a $25 million fund designed to help game developers move to "more open engines." This is pretty bold on Improbable's part and seems to suggest that Unity didn't give them a call after Improbable published a blog post that signed off with, "You [Unity] are an incredibly important company and one bad day doesn't take away from all you've given us. Let's fix this for our community, you know our number."
Unity, for its part, claims that they gave Improbable ample notice that they were in violation of their Terms of Service and that the two had been deep in a "partnership" agreement that obviously fell short. The termination of Improbable's Unity license essentially cut them off from a huge portion of indie developers who build their stuff on Unity. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was quick to jump on the news earlier today, rebuking Unity's actions. "Epic Games' partnership with Improbable, and the integration of Improbable's cloud-based development platform SpatialOS, is based on shared values, and a shared belief in how companies should work together to support mutual customers in a straightforward, no-surprises way," the blog post reads.
Unity, for its part, claims that they gave Improbable ample notice that they were in violation of their Terms of Service and that the two had been deep in a "partnership" agreement that obviously fell short. The termination of Improbable's Unity license essentially cut them off from a huge portion of indie developers who build their stuff on Unity. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was quick to jump on the news earlier today, rebuking Unity's actions. "Epic Games' partnership with Improbable, and the integration of Improbable's cloud-based development platform SpatialOS, is based on shared values, and a shared belief in how companies should work together to support mutual customers in a straightforward, no-surprises way," the blog post reads.
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I'm confused. Why would nVidia want ANY game to perform less than 100% on their hardware? Crippling any given game on nVidia hardware doesn't in any way hurt their competition (ATI)...just the opposite, actually. And as far as I'm aware, they don't have any ownership interest in any game development or publishing company. So I fail to see what the upside is for them to do so.
Oh, the irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Any executive from Epic games trying to convince gamers or other developers that such an unrepentantly selfish corporation has "shared values" in common with them is a fool who doesn't recognize his own irony even as he creates it.
Re: Oh, the irony (Score:1)
Context?
Re: Oh, the irony (Score:2)
From what I can tell, Unity is telling people, "yeah, the license changed, but we're giving you a gentlemen's agreement we're not going to sue". That's not what I would call professional.
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Meanwhile, Unity not only spies on their customers but also spies on their customers' customers. A premium user can disable the first thing, but not the second. That's pretty damning, from my perspective.
Oh damn! (Score:1)
Okay I currently have a subscription to Unity.
I will be definitely canceling it now and letting Unity know that I no longer agree with it's terms of service.
Fuck that noise!
Re:Oh damn! (Score:5, Informative)
The short of it is that Unity's terms state Improbable needed to be an approved Unity platform partner to host servers for games developed by someone else. The EULA basically only allows for you to host your own servers, or your own instanced servers from a cloud provider, unless you're a platform partner. After a year of failed negotiations with Improbable, they cut them off.
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The EULA basically only allows for you to host your own servers, or your own instanced servers from a cloud provider, unless you're a platform partner.
That Improbable agreed to those terms in the first place shows very bad judgment, and shows that Unity indeed is the villain in this story. That Improbable would partner with another villain (Epic Games) shows additional bad judgment. They're really just substituting one abuser for another.
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They didn't agree to the terms, the terms were retroactively changed.
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The EULA basically only allows for you to host your own servers, or your own instanced servers from a cloud provider, unless you're a platform partner.
That Improbable agreed to those terms in the first place shows very bad judgment, and shows that Unity indeed is the villain in this story. That Improbable would partner with another villain (Epic Games) shows additional bad judgment. They're really just substituting one abuser for another.
Uh, dude, just no. Stop it.
If Improbable agreed to the EULA, then Unity is not the villain. One can criticize the EULA for many valid (and invalid) reasons, but if you agree to an allegedly faulty EULA with full usage of your mental faculties about the terms in said EULA, the other party is not the villain. There was no deception.
Unless we are invoking some sort of "Inequality of bargaining power" context here, I'm sorry, this characterization doesn't fly.
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It didn't. TFS left out the part where Unity changed their ToS in order to create the situation.
Re:Oh damn! (Score:4, Informative)
Why did Unity sign a partnership with a company that was supposedly violating the ToS? It didn't. TFS left out the part where Unity changed their ToS in order to create the situation.
From Unity's response, they were in discussions with Improbable 2 years ago. Improbable went ahead with their plans without coming to an agreement with Unity. Unity has been trying to get them to reach an agreement, or stop, for the last year. Unity also says the recent change to the terms was only to provide clarification.
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Unity "Changed" terms mid-way through and is wrecking a businesses viability. That is some pretty harsh action right there. I have very little desire to place my financial risk with a company willing to damage business like this. Unity should have "grandfathered" in businesses already doing something they do not like or gave them a reasonable grace period. The way Unity handled this was not okay in any reasonably objective way in my opinion.
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This may be true, but I was not aware of it until now. I don't begrudge people that get screwed, I only begrudge them when they continue to allow the screwing to keep going on.
I also have other reasons for considering leaving Unity, but now that I learned this it helps to confirm my decision to move to a different platform before I am also in their shoes as well.
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Unity claim that they gave, in effect, Improbable several months of warning. But even so, I wonder if this sort of retroactive license change is legal at all. We might yet see a lawsuit over this.
But I think there was also pretty gross negligence on the part of Improbable when they
1) agreed to a license contract that did not require mutual agreement to change the TOS
2) used a system where Unity could just revoke the keys and in effect shut down their business
For comparison, bot
Wasn't the issue that Unity changed the EULA (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Why would you end your relationship with an engine company because a different company broke the terms of a legal agreement and threw a tantrum with a rival engine company?"
If you are not smart enough to figure out why that is a strawman argument then you are not likely able to understand the reason why. It is apparent that you are one of those people that keeps supporting businesses that screw their customers.
A fool does not learn from their mistakes (very common).
A smart person learns from their mistake
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Eh, sort of. It's a C++ base, but most UE4 game developers work with blueprints due to the speed with which you can put something together. Visual scripting languages are quickly becoming the standard in game development.
You'll generally see people putting together custom functions and the like using C++, which are then implemented by the level designer / game designer / artists via blueprints.
How does Improbable make money? (Score:2)
How does Improbable make money? Does anyone know? Their website offers no clue.
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It's about time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's about time (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree, but keep in mind that developing a game engine is a lot of work, and while I have decided to stop using Unity myself, it has helped a lot of indies get their work out there as well.
In many ways some people feel like they have little choice in the matter and wind up making a deal with the devil.
Unity is quickly becoming a bad business model for many of the reasons you mentioned. Open source has its own problems too, but greedy platforms are starting to to hurt the environment enough to encourage a switch to it.
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On Github, but not really "Free" - https://www.unrealengine.com/e... [unrealengine.com]
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You do realise that you sound like a preacher of a cult?
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We don't know, nor do we care about your shitty little irrelevant game that on Googling it looks so utterly terrible, that you should be ashamed not proud to put your name to it, even your website is literally fucking terrible. Everything you've put forward has highlighted why open source is often a joke in some areas; the problem is I could spend about £100 and knock up your entire game in a weekend in Unity and still have it much better, and it looks like you've put years into it.
Have any open
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You sir, win the Internet with that comment. I hope the OP of your reply has a strong constitution.
Dropping the mic with "year of Linux on the desktop" shows your age. That's been the White Whale of Slashdot for decades
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No (s)he absolutely doesn't. (s}he is clearly an complete dick and nothing more. And (s)he already knows it. I'm fed up of these gutless idiots that think they're "big men" because they snipe acidic rhetoric at someone else's well-intentioned efforts while hiding behind AC. Where's the much better game that AC wrote then?
Slamming someone's community project just because it doesn't have the same standard as a game that takes millions of dollars of professional man-hours and resources, is nothing more than ut
Unity's take (Score:2)
Unity's take can be read at blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/ [unity3d.com]