Recent ToS update blocks the use of SpatialOS to make games in Unity

I'm genuinely intrigued. What did I post that's wrong?

 

I wonder if that's because Unity's 'statement' was so riddled with contradictions and clearly obvious factual inaccuracies that no-one took it seriously?

 

It wasn't aimed at any one person in particular and it definitely wasn't aimed at you.

Is it any better than the second post made by Improbable where they basically admit they did something wrong but don't provide any actual details about the matter?

 

The biggest question of the day is this: How do you feel inside right now regarding Unity? The cheerful feeling I used to have about the company has turned to suspicion. I suspect they did this because they saw Spatial OS as competition somehow, or wanted some of their cash stockpile. If I see employees of a restaurant argue or yell at another customer, my feeling about that restaurant turn very negative within seconds-- I don't care who was really at fault. My loyalty to them has come into question, not because of the facts, but because of the vibes.

Because I have friends that wont be sleeping tonight, and I spilled Diet Dew on my keyboard and 3d mouse, I'm extra agitated tonight. But I got my stuff cleaned working again, and I can only hope my friends don't have to fold or start over in Unreal. Am I the only one thinking I need to broaden my horizons and step out of the Unity universe and look around? Perhaps I will download UE4 this week. I'm not being sour grapes... Its just that sometimes we need to have our little world shaken to motivate us to expend energy on stuff that might lead to a new path. Today I think I faced reality-- Unity is a company... With lawyers and rules and policies and its not only about the fun stuff once you've invested a lot of time into a project.

 

I still don't see why it's a big deal to Unity what SpatialOS is doing but I guess that is Unity's right to deny access. I went through their build docs and you are just building an assembly from the editor and uploading it to them to spin up and down. It seems like the same sort of thing Playfab custom game servers would do, but maybe Playfab pays Unity money.

 

Man, that is rough!

 

ROFL. I think it would be a good idea to finish posting for the day. (and this is just a friendly advice, you can ignore it if you want, but it's about your credibility)

 

Let Tim Sweeney know he has some cash to get you back on your feet.

 

I would have been tempted to concede that they were genuinely innocent for the situation, but the initial statements in the second blog post feel like they knew they were causing these problems and even if that wasn't the case the latter statements show them admitting to having done something wrong.

Emphasis mine and maybe a little unfairly in one situation. The word "instigate" by the way is a very interesting choice because there are plenty of words they could have used there but the word they used only has a negative connotation.

We have two parties involved in this and each of them is saying something different. I don't see how anyone can point at one of them and say with any level of accuracy that they're lying.

Ah, right, the meme again. Always with the meme. There is absolutely no way anyone who uses Improbable can make any negative statements about the company so clearly anyone saying anything negative has never used the product.

At risk of pissing off @zombiegorilla, that type of reasoning is juvenile. Is it too much to expect more from a developer?

My bank account says no.

 

out of curiosity, what is this "Managed Service" term?
The rest of this ToS point 2.4 is quite clear to me, you cant use Unity for Stream / Cloud gaming (where the game "primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet", this means logic, physics AND rendering are executed on cloud) and imho, hosting headless games on server(3rd party or not, with sdk or not) is not included in restriction since the rendering and some logics are still executed in client side....
It's just the Managed Service thing that I dont get...

 

I want to say it's "a managed service running on cloud infrastructure" based on the way they have the phrase in parenthesis after they make that statement. I wish they would place all of their definitions in the actual definitions section.

Spoiler

 

Aaand... what is this "a managed service running on cloud infrastructure" thing? I'm not really good with server/back end things, and google just dont yield good definition...

 

"you may not use a managed service running on cloud infrastructure (a “Managed Service”) or a specific integration of a binary add-on (for example, a plugin or SDK) or source code to be integrated in the Unity Software or Your Project Content incorporating the Unity Runtime (an “SDK Integration”) to install or execute the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server, unless such use of the Managed Service or SDK Integration has been specifically authorized by Unity."

-doesnt really fit the blog response does it ?

 

So have you used their GDK or SDK or not? Do you even know what you're talking about?

My point is, you're making negative statements without actually knowing anything about it. I, on the other hand, have no loyalty to either company other than the fact that I want to make a game and have used both extensively. I've spoken to both today during this dispute. I'm directly affected. What have you done, or invested in these products as a solution together?

What's your stake in this, other than a forum spat that you seem determined to win to no good end?

 

A managed service is basically just "a service managed by a third party". If you want to host a website, for example, there are two ways to go about it - unmanaged and managed.

An unmanaged website generally requires you to register a domain, point the domain at the host for your website, set up the files and programs that will handle your site (eg Wordpress), and maintain them. Plus you would have to fill in the actual content.

For a managed website the only part you're responsible for is the content. Everything else is handled by the host.

 

Life is good when you have $25m to pump into SpacialOS games that nobody plays. The dev's should claim as much as they can from this hardship fund and run.

 

I'm not on any side, as I'm not working on any projects using Unity or SpatialOS but.......
It's scary to think that Unity would just snap their fingers, and practically destroy projects that people have been working years on. For no other reason than, Unity wanting to stick their sticky little fingers into the cloud services pie. Whether the effect is catastrophic for the projects affected or not, doesn't matter. This is massive, and sets a precedent for how they make changes, why these changes occur, and what kind of changes Unity makes in the future.

 

I see, I've just check AWS and they basically have their own managed service (gamelift?) aside their non managed Amazon EC2 service, so, I can use their EC2 server and not the gamelift using unity as server side, is that correct?

from:
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/1...-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/

Well, there you go, stop assuming and ask them

 

Aw snap
guess I'll ask the email above when I need to, I still have no interest in this matter right now

 

I removed the post because I noticed you saw the blog post. It's mentioned near the bottom of it.

 

Both Inprobable (SpatialOS) and unreal blog post doesn't even have comment section. Only Unity allowing us to rise opinion/disagreement. Should appreciate Unity on this. It's shame both Tim Sweeny and Inprobable ceo taking advantage of this situation.

 

well Good night folks
hope to wake up to a nice new shiny Tos tomorrow... although im a little worried its only going to get half fixed..!

 

Striking a $25 million dollars deal "over night", that sounds totally legit...

 

I think it's safe to say that the writing has been on the wall for some time, especially when you look at their shift toward a subscription model, and all the ad/analytic and cloud-based services they now offer through editor integration. This was only a matter of time.

 

While I dont think Unity is a fluffy bunny in this situation with their ToS/EULA trickery, it sure looks suspiciously weird:

1. Improbable cries in their blog post about evil Unity
2. In a matter of minutes literally EVERYONE on it, and especially one of the UE people who comments on Unity's policy, which, if you look at the history betwee U nity/UE interactions, is a rare case.
3. And then just within 5 hours there is 25 billions found for the noble case "against evil oppressors": https://twitter.com/UnrealEngine/status/1083566179258642432

I feel like what they said about Improbable breaking ToS long beforehand these changes even were planned is a real thing and Improbable just didnt feel like answering for these so they weaseled they way out of the situation.

 

Well I am glad I stopped posting and went to bed, as I have woken up to see that it is as I thought, improbable blew things out of proportion (verging on lies?).

They had a year to sort this out. Enough said. Improbable got greedy and now they are paying, they thought they could piggyback on unity’s 15+ years of work to skip the queue

 

You know, I really don't care about the drama between Unity and Improbable in this mess. Pitchforks or popcorn, none of that helps me or my game. Conspiracy-theories about Epic even less.

I dislike the uncertainty and doubt that casts a shadow over developing with Unity, which comes from their approach to this situation. Change is expected with any software tool over time, including within the TOS-- but changes should come with patch-notes and clear documentation over what's being deprecated and what to expect in risk-assessments of the future. Give us breathing room to make decisions because they have real costs associated. Does it not occur to the lawyers and business negotiators that they are in the business of development tools? I don't care who thinks they are in the right / wrong, this was so terribly mishandled.

I don't think anyone here needs more ambiguity and risk in their game development.

I also personally don't need a lesson of "you're okay so long as you don't do X" with an overshadow of it being Y next year.

I do not care whether Unity feels it should protect itself from one of their developers using Unity to compete with Unity's services. Maybe that seems reasonable to others, but If they feel threatened on that front then they should improve those services. If there are gaps, yeah others will naturally fill those. Gatekeeping in those areas does nothing to improve the product. It's not good for any users / developers to get caught in the middle of this kind of disruption.

So Unity, please fix this. Change your TOS to something more sane and appropriate to better game development, regardless of what other third-party services may do. Show some confidence to give confidence. Make it clear for us and more latitude is better than less.

 

Epic has a bunch if cash to throw around at the moment, makes it really easy to be the 'good guys' no conspiracy needed.

I think in this case Improbable acted worse than Unity but neither acted well.

----

Imagine Unity just simply created a good persistent/massively multiplayer solution.

They could easily beat Improbable if they had a superior product and would likely prosper even if their product was dramatically inferior due to the tight integration and visibility: for all the hype and funding, Improbable was still widely unknown to most of the GameDev community... at least until today.

 

To be honest I would love that and I would use the unity one. I hope some time we will be there and everybody could spawn such connected worlds.

 

Really though. What are the chances of that?

 

My thoughts the next day:

The experience devs had with Improbable yesterday seems like it should have been avoidable - it seems there was no need for games to go offline and so forth. Now whether that was down to a legal interpretation of the terms on Improbable's part, or an attempt to work up publicity for what was going on between them and Unity, I'm not sure. But it's a shame that happened the way it did.

However - regardless of what went on with Improbable, or Epic jumping in for the PR opportunity, the issue of the ToS stands on its own as a real issue.

The blog post is welcome in terms of clarification of intent, but the terms actually need to reflect that.

I think Unity also needs to clarify more. What is a 'platform'? What is a 'managed service'? I roughly get what is intended, and that 95%+ of games are irrelevant in this discussion, but it seems like some types of game could blur into that territory and wind up with a problem.

What would I like to see?

• Just a simple, unrestricted right to distribute and run instances of my game wherever I want. No vaguely defined caveats.
• If that's impossible - sad face - then for projects - be they games, tools, services - that could fall foul of the boundaries Unity wants to establish, I think it would be useful to have a transparent licensing terms so people know what the worst that could happen is if they do end up in a situation like this. Don't have it hidden behind closed doors.
• 'Something' to reassure us about the scope of retroactive terms changes that can be possibly applied. Or a way to license Unity with fixed terms (be it through one of the paid options or whatever). The most disconcerting aspect of this is that one can proceed with a project without interference on an existing assumption about fair use, but then later have that totally up-ended.

 

Hmm...so if I understand correctly:

so Improbable does:
1) they rebundle your game made in Unity with their additional SDK
2) they host this bundled game with a managed service
3) they sell this combination as a service

In Unity's eyes, they are partly developing and creating Unity games and therefore partly require Unity licenses. These licenses are the special ones you have to negotiate for. You as the actual developer may be seen as a part of the final game that Improbable delivers.

I can sort of understand that reasoning.

But the other problem is that the terms of service say (may not be significantly related to Improbable and SpatialOS):

>you may not use a Managed Service or an SDK Integration to install or execute the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server, unless such use of the Managed Service or SDK Integration has been specifically authorized by Unity.
>Additionally, you may not integrate the Unity Runtime with a Managed Service or SDK Integration and offer that integration to third parties for the purpose of installing or using the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server.

where "Managed Service" is "a managed service running on cloud infrastructure"
and where "SDK Integration" is "a specific integration of a binary add-on (for example, a plugin or SDK) or source code to be integrated in the Unity Software or Your Project Content incorporating the Unity Runtime"


I would say that third party game server hosting (there's many of them) violate the first sentence - they are often a managed service running on cloud infrastructure, which executes the Unity Runtime on the cloud. None are listed in the given authorized services list.

And the second sentence seems to prohibit steam attaching their standalone SDK (which you can't license/download afaik) to dedicated servers and redistributing that. Steam is not listed in the authorized services list.

 

Well, I think you primarily run your game on your pc, not on steam's cloud, so that rules out steam from the restriction.

What I think is :
The point 2.4 here is all about Streaming and Cloud Gaming restriction, i.e the game is primarily runs on cloud, imho that means input processing, game logics, physics, and rendering, is all run on cloud, and client only stream the video/image result. Third party server hosting only handling the game logic(and maybe physics) part and all the rendering and some input processing is still done at client side, so I believe this also ruled out from the restriction...

 

Yeah that is part of my confusion as well. Half of the 2.4 section is clearly about this and targeted at the game-in-the-cloud companies. But then the half I quoted doesn't seem to be targeted at those, so I'd like some clarification on that.

And to be clear; I'm 99.5% sure Unity is not intending to prevent dedicated server redistribution through steam, and Unity isn't trying to get third party dedicated server hosting to get licenses. It's just that the legalese reads like that (at least for me, not being a lawyer).

 

The end of clause 2.4 is:

It is at best unclear as to whether Steam comes under that wording.

SpatialOS is not a game streaming platform (for example, doesn't render server side and stream video to clients), so your reading of this does not concur with Unity's. I'm not saying you're wrong to read it that way by the way - just pointing out it's unclear.

EDIT: To clarify, I don't for a second think Unity would ever try to stop people using Steam. Just worrying that the wording can be read to allow such madness.

 

Use cryengine. It's not as difficult as it used to be. It supports c# now! It also has spatialos implementation on github.

 

The only thing I can think SpatialOS does do, similar to Steam, is allow the developers to distribute the client builds via the spatialOS runtime, providing a link to the built client wrapped within a spatialOS harness app. Is this where Improbable fell foul?

 

Possibly. Unfortunately neither they nor Unity have provided any specifics as to what the violation is.

 

I'm really curious how people here would run their companies. Going by most of the comments, I would imagine something like this:

Company A: "You're breaching our license conditions. Please change that."

Company B: "No!"

Company A: "Okay, sorry for bothering you."

If Improbable really breached the license (and I suppose they did and Unity told them, they would be pretty stupid to lie about that), what was Unity supposed to do? Just accept it? And we will never know in what way they breached the contract, that's not something you make public.

I think there are 2 discussions ongoing, that shouldn't be mixed.
Unity may have bad or unclear ToS and should improve that as soon as possible, but of course they have to act, if their conditions are not met.

At my line of work we have enough (really big) customers that ignore all our messages (usually for not paying the license fees) and then act surprised when we take away their licenses. This affects their clients, sometimes in a really bad way, but that's on them. We can't take responsibilty if they ignore all of our warnings.

I totally understand how this might raise insecurities for people that are using spatial os, but I really can't comprehend how you can ignore that Improbable screwed up big time.

 

Well I deleted my first post, I didn't expect Improbable's blog post to be so dishonest. Having said that I still think Unity should redo their ToS, at the moment it seems designed to allow them to do whatever they want. Needs to be written in more plain English like Joachim's blog. Unity should email everyone when they update their terms and explain what's changing.

 

At this point in time this whole blog post thing doesn't really matter. Because they aren't legal documents. They won't really matter if Unity decides after years that dedicated servers are no longer legal.

What really matter is - an actual ToS, which is infinitely vague, and allows Unity to sue any your product as their whim.
And unless ToS changes again, I don't think I'll feel any safer using Unity.

Don't get me wrong, I've got 4 years spent with Unity, from hard learning hobbyist to a full-time game dev.
If Unity didn't had HPC# and I didn't had projects behind me which is a tremendeous time investment - I would've surely transition to something else right now.

Open source probably is the way to go, Godot or Xenko (now that I've know about it, which even has nested prefabs and scene streaming out of the box!).

Unfortunately, I cannot go this path. My company runs Unity, my home project runs Unity, and so must I.
Because I love the engine itself, it's the shady buisness like this that ruins great companies.

Although, I will definately won't suggest Unity to anybody else anymore, that's for sure.

 

I completely agree that there are two separate discussions. The thing is (while I can't speak for anyone else) I'm not ignoring that Improbable screwed up (and they did) - I just don't care.

Improbable's conduct doesn't have any bearing whatsoever on me as a developer and a business owner. Unity's ToS on the other hand has an enormous bearing.

There's no value in us trying to arbitrate a squabble between two massive companies. There is huge value in encouraging Unity to clear up their ToS.

 

This, extremely this.

All this really shows is: haters gonna hate.

People are just showing themselves for the disloyal customers they are. If it takes a bit of hearsay to make you literally switch your entire game engine and likely therefore all your middleware, then you are not taking this art form seriously nor are you a likely business minded person.

EDIT: the points on TOS are however valid

 

A year of verbal notice and later 6 months of written notice seems very fair. Whether it is a good ToS or not, it is beside the point. Waiting till the very last moment on Improbable part is not smart. Then to come up with 25 in funding by the next day?

 

Yeah, this reeks of forward planning yet was pitched as an overnight "we totally didnt know" thing. Not liking improbable much right now.

 

Sick burn.

 

I wouldn't trust any side, really. There's not enough evidence to be certain to say anything. Everything else is a speculation at this point. And I mean like all blogposts and tweets.

ToS change is real though. And it was done in silence, without any transparency.

Was it changed today to support the "It's okay to host Unity on your own servers"? I haven't read ToS today.

 

Well I know next to nothing about improbable, whereas unity is a company I have supported and has won my trust over the years since 2008, so I will trust them unless given a good reason not to. A competitor throwing around this PR, a good reason is not.

 

So the silent ToS change. Cloud services / multiplayer page appearing out of nowhere at the same time competitor service gets barred. Won't that be a good enough reason?

There's that money smell that comes from not really customer friendly companies, like EA.
Because this is about that cloud services pie money. I'm pretty sure it is.

Trust is hard earned, and lost quite easily.

 

Have you read improbables own TOS? I would be much more likely to jump on this RAHHHH TOS bandwagon if they didnt have the same type of TOS inconsistencies etc. Even they admitted as such in their latest blog post.

So no, the TOS is not enough for me actually, nor my studio. We have liased with our legal advisers and company lawyer, and we are using that advice as basis to continue using unity.

As for conspiracy theories, Im not partial to that, sorry. Sure, its fishy, but it means nothing right now.