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

This is exactly the doublespeak in the Unity blog that is raising serious concerns over Unity's intentions and honesty.

We can continue to develop our game on a platform that Unity is hamstringing? Anyone with skin in the game can see the broader implications of these conflicting statements.

 

This is incorrect -- SpatialOS was not built on top of Unity, but was able to interact with headless unity server instances. SpatialOS was written in java and has nothing to do with Unity.

In order to most easily work with a Unity game, SpatialOS provided a Unity SDK. The user would compile both the client and the server worker, and then upload it to SpatialOS which would then run the game in their cloud. It used the worker in order to have server authoritative collisions and such. It would also run AI in these server workers.

For Unreal, you would similarly compile your Unreal client and server workers and upload those. In that case, Unity is not involved whatsoever.

 

No. Spatial is NOT built on top of Unity. You don't need to use unity in the slightest. SpatialOS is an SDK which handles networking which just happens to contain a Unity SDK like Photon, SmartFox, Atavism, ect. The Server uses Java for load balancing. You create your Client and workers. Workers are things like Physics, AI, ect. that handles a specific task or tasks. Workers can be created in any language they support as well as Unity or Unreal. You then upload your workers and client to their servers and they handle the load balancing, hosting, and distributing of your client. It's completely free to develop with and once you go live you start paying for the resources your game actually uses just like if you were hosting on Amazon or some other cloud host.

 

I believe no word of this is right.

 

lmao imagine thinking this is at all how the customer/provider relationship should work

 

I would probably not continue. It is too bad Improbable did not communicate with their users either and let them know this was going to happen. I feel very bad for those developers.

I chose not to use SpatialOS after talking to some people there. They were very vague and evasive about costs. That kind of worried me. I do not buy stuff at a restaurant if there is not at least some way to calculate how much it is going to cost. Same is true of tools I use. That is MY experience. I know there are some folks who had a great experience with the company. So not knocking them.

So...my gut said, do not do this. I am glad I did not. I really feel for the people who got caught up in this. Too bad Improbable violated Unity's ToS and put them in this situation.

As for Unity, they did not communicate well either. BTW, you guys are looking at the ToS from December 4th I believe, not the one they are still working on right now. I would wait and see what it says before you close up your games. If you are not happy then, so be it. Talking about Unity games here, not SpatialIOS.

Adding this...If I thought Unity was lying to me, and making crap up, I would not be here on the forums complaining. It is not like they are going to change what they are saying for me. If you really think that, maybe you should change tools. If you cannot trust Unity to give their word to the Spatial users and you cannot trust them to clarify the ToS, then how can you ever continue with Unity? I do not get it.

 

You are also building an MMO. I have no idea what server tech you ended up going with but I would be very cautious your self until the ToS are updated. No matter what Unity said in their blog post right now according to their current ToS just uploading a Unity Headless Server is in breach of their ToS even if that is not what they intended.

 

This is why people are moving over to other options, and the only reason we even respond is because we still love using Unity, but not with the current risk of another ToS clause change that hinders our projects. Unity failed to become transparent about their intentions regardless of any other ongoing drama. It's their job to let people know if such changes will be happening, and if they don't care about feedback, then they should provide a good time frame for current projects to transition over to stay within the ToS with support options to make those changes. Unity failed and has lost my trust. I refuse to waste time and money due to incompetence.

 

I'm still trying to understand how Improbable is worth around $2 billion, with 170-400 employees. Unity is worth over $3 billion with 2,000 employees.

Just look at Improbable's forum compared to Unity. It's a desert wasteland. Look at the size of their communities on Discord or Reddit. Something here is not like the other. Epic's valuation is justified, Unity's too.

 

Valuations are often purely speculative, and not always based on anything resembling real value.

 

What are you talking about? I couldn't find any accounts made in 2019 in the last half of this thread. Where are the fake accounts, and how do you know they're fake? Sounds like a conspiracy theory in itself doesn't it?

Also, if you read the ToS and believe everyone's opinion in opposition to such terms is nothing more than conspiracy theories then I would strongly question your ability to comprehend how vague and open-ended the wording is, and how changing such rules on a whim affects man hours and money invested into projects that fall under violation without any intent on their part to do so.

 

They're a startup "unicorn". They got a ridiculous amount of investor funding because they sold an idea well. That's basically it. Much like Magic Leap really. Which I'm definitely not saying is a good thing!

 

Right, but Magic Leap is a justified Unicorn to me. It has around 2,000 employees, and a TON more social presence, and my mother has heard of them.

 

Is it though? For all that money and staff they've not achieved all that much.

 

I did not post that because I agree with it, only that you are adults and can make your own decisions.

I have been working with Unity for a while now. I have met some of their people in person at Unite. I really believe in this company. Is it perfect? No, but then no company or person is perfect. For me, this is the best fit. I will be said to see people leave, although I have not seen any of my forum pals complaining here so I am sure they will be here with me.

Unity has not lost my trust. I do not follow anyone blindly, as many can tell you. But I do not bite my own foot off to make a point either. My clients use Unity, I use Unite, my team uses Unity. I trust them to make things right in the ToS and if they do not, I will do as they asked and contact them and ask if our game will be a violation. I do not believe it will. You can hold me to that, okay?

 

So true! Hi Chingwa!!!

 

OMG, James. You know me well enough to know better. I will be careful and do what I need to do. I think maybe you are a bit biased. I did not realize you went back to SpatialOS. Sorry if this hurts you.

 

Improbable are the ones at fault here and are the ones guilty of hamstringing developers. They violated Unity's TOS, thus causing all of this.

To say it is Unity's fault is simply not right. None of this would be happening if improbable kept to the terms. The additions to the unity TOS is because, most probably, of what improbable did.

If you take the f***ing pi*s and get slapped for it how can you then blame the hand that slapped you?

 

The whole debacle makes me uneasy and lose complete trust in Unity.

 

Did they? We actually don't know because Unity didn't say *how* they violated the ToS and we have only their word that they did. And Improbable saying the opposite. So far, there's no way for us to actually know.

 

Unity's ToS now contains an extremely problematic clause. I encourage them to rectify it, and it sounds like they're working on it. Blame doesn't change that either way.

 

https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/11/improbable-a-final-statement-on-spatialos-and-unity

 

I would love to have a link to this because none of my searches for implementation details gave results beyond the usual marketing information.

 

Well it's a shame they didn't act even when told last year and in several meetings since, then, isn't it? Once someone's been told several times and they still do not listen, then it ceases to be a legitimate concern and more of a legal concern.

Can dress it up any way you want but... if it was really the case that they were telling the truth, they can easily make Unity play ball with a lawyer and it's trivial to do so if they are in the right. But they won't, and prefer to just keep on dragging this out.

I couldn't possibly invest in a company which first responds with a mass of drama and PR news reports, along with a sudden (and it was sudden, wasn't it?) offer of 25m investment to move to UE4. 25m doesn't occur suddenly in the space of one day when you wake up. No, it's a long time coming, a long time planned and these shenanigans are schoolboy business moves.

A real company, one that knows what is the right and wrong conduct for business, would've headed this off a long time ago, and never even needed to blog about it.

100% I go on record saying I will never do business like this. When I do business, it's only for mutual benefit, never one or the other. I find it shocking the conduct by the SpatialOS company.

Even at the late hour when Unity cancelled their licenses, I bet you any money I could've reached out and appealed to Unity for a small interim deal to give time to migrate to a custom hosting solution. There's always business to be had.

But...

But when you - in the same day - explode with bad press, blogs, corrections for previous blogs, accusations that Unity prevents your existing games working - and other malicious damage as well as partnering immediately with a competitor, going on record that you want to migrate customers from one service provider (Unity) to another (Epic) then ... that's actually shockingly bad.

That's actually amazingly bad form, and nobody will trust them or do business with them again. I recommend investors pull away from companies that are so swift to bite the hand that feeds them. All in 12 hours.

 

I am not biased at all. As you know my youtube channel is about all MMO Middleware built for Unity. SpatialOS included though up to this point it's been heavily focused on uMMORPG. However Unity is supposed to be about Innovation. Instead they are attempting to remove an innovative company so they have less competition with their new Multiplayer Service. What's next? This is a far reaching example but let's say they decided to start charging extra for More advanced Terrain capabilities... Will they then change their ToS on a whim to make using things like MapMagic, Gaia, ect. a breach of their terms and start going after them as well? Where does it all end?

 

You know what my favorite part of that blog post is? Where they quote the Unity Terms of Service and say "as is plainly visible" as if anyone is able to understand the Terms of Service. We've had many people in this thread repeatedly say that they didn't understand it and yet Improbable is claiming it's easy to understand. Did a lawyer write that blog post?

 

I'd love to be wrong on this point, so if a fixed ToS comes out I'll be pleasantly surprised, but I suspect that the clause will remain similar, because making a large number of games be potentially in violation is the only way to keep SpatialOS in violation.

Even pre-update, that part of the ToS was somewhat ambiguous (and I remember people being nervous about it at the time). I would guess that:

1. A year ago, Unity told Improbable they were in violation and needed a custom license.
2. Improbable looked at the ToS, concluded that legally they were no different many other forms of dedicated server, and no way was Unity going to ban those, and thus refused.
3. Unity kept pressing the point, and Improbable kept ignoring it for the same reason. But they did take it somewhat seriously, so they made a contingency plan involving Epic, hence why that was ready so quickly.
4. Unity wasn't bluffing - they made many types of hosted server against the rules in order to target Improbable, but with the intent not to enforce it against anyone else.

Many of Improbable's staff may have legit been surprised - negotiations like this often stay at the upper levels. Or maybe it was pure PR. For me, that doesn't matter, we're not using SpatialOS anyway - the ToS going forward is what matters.

 

So this reminded me of a business I bailed on a few years back. At one point I was ready to take the now defunct GameMachine open source platform that I created and provide hosting service for it. And of course it had a flow of building the server and uploading it. That's the only flow that works.

I'm pretty sure that service if I offered it would have made it a platform. I put close to 2 years into the design and development of GameMachine. Unity didn't contribute any direct value to that project. GameMachine would have existed with or without Unity. I simply chose to focus on the most popular game engine.

To charge licensing fees for value added services like that is bad. It's a lose lose for Unity developers. I guarantee this is going to discourage investors from investing in value added services for the Unity ecosystem. 6 years ago I had commitments for a seed round on that venture. Now there is no way I could get that. Unity sent a very clear message on how it's going to deal with value added services it goes into competition with. As a developer I view those as what they actually are, extra value. Services that Unity either doesn't provide or simply doesn't do as well. If Unity wants to compete outside it's core competency, it should do that on an even playing field. It doesn't have to, but it's the only way developers win.

The only part of the squabble itself I care about is how badly Improbable handled this. They screwed themselves, their customers, and the part of this I care about just by association.

 

What does Improbable violating the ToS have to do with legitimate concerns I and others have raised with the wording of said ToS?

 

Because there is nothing wrong with the ToS. Could you explain exactly what is wrong with the ToS?

 

umm... The current ToS stops us from uploading ANY headless servers to the cloud for hosting... Yeah ok Unity stated in their blog post that it's fine but a blog post doesn't count. The ToS must be clarified as well.

 

That doesn't explain what Improbable's violation has to do with my concerns.

Regardless, people have been discussing said concerns for 12 pages, in plenty of detail., myself included. Are you really saying that no reasonable person could have a legitimate concern about the rewording - or even the original wording - of that clause? No reasonable person could read it differently to you? No lawyer or judge could read it differently to you? That every person who has expressed concern in here is just straight up wrong, and it's as simple as that?

 

That is a matter of opinion. I've layed out my case why it's bad for developers, and there is a lot of history in the tech industry to support my opinion and a substantial number of developers that agree with me. Go outside the game industry and I'd guess it's actually a majority.

 

It prevents you from doing that on a managed service. The clear intent here is they want to license all managed services, not games that manage everything themselves.

 

What's wrong with the ToS is that after 12 pages in this thread, 4 blog posts and numerous reddit posts, no one understands how it's possible that Improbable is in violation of the ToS while other similar services (like any cloud service) aren't.

Unity has said multiple times that they are working on revising the ToS to be clearer though, so I'm satisfied with that. (for now)

 

The coincidence is still too great that Unity got serious about it's network game hosting service right at the same time this happened. Maybe it is for that alone that people tend to believe the SpatialOS story over Unity's. They certainly still have very different stories and the latest one by Improbable leaves very little to the imagination.

 

Ummm, yeah. Good to see you again, James. Hope it all works out for you.

 

Hiya Teila!

 

My bad. I could have sworn Improbable was an off shoot of Bossa Studios which made World's Adrift, which I know uses Unity. I also thought I read somewhere that SpatialOS was based off of Unity. Obviously I was mistaken.

 

Another user posted the same response so I will just respond to one of you. My mistake. As I said I have little knowledge of SpatialOS. I can see what all the fuss is about now. Thanks for the detailed explanation!

 

Hey everyone, our team has been working round the clock to adress some of the concerns seen here as well as throughout the rest of our social media and community channels. We should have an update for you here shortly.

 

I don't see Photon or any other companies even reacting. Bossa, who heavily use SpatialOS didn't react either. Let me tell you why, they had lawyers check.

Use a lawyer.

It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of agreements:

A) Create a new platform that only serves Unity's own customers, while using Unity's own technology. This is a typical platform. You can do it but you need an agreement. If you don't agree you can probably try causing drama and make some PR company mistakenly call it a graphics dispute. But it would still be illegal.

B) Run your server in the cloud headless for your gamers. This is not a platform, it is a multiplayer service to the developer's own customers - the gamers. This what everyone here is already licensed for.

It would get sticky if you needed to force people to use asmdefs and scriptableobjects so you can get around compile time issues and circumvent a few things. But nobody is doing that, right? Right?

 

Excellent. It makes more sense than pretty much anything I have read yet.

 

Agreed. Whether you think Unity 'wins' the argument or not, the terms seem out of touch with developers. It's there to protect them from a future they can't predict. They can't have some company streaming interactive access to the editor, etc, but the terms seem to cover too much. They are stubborn about some backwards things like this sometimes, such as 'Disable Hardware Statistics' which they eventually relented on, and the dark skin, which they still haven't...

 

I would argue it makes zero sense though.

Photon reacted and there's parts about Bolt that are unclear. Bossa reacted as well (to tell us that Unity assured them they're fine, somehow).

A. Doesn't describe SpatialOS at all (only serves Unity's own customers? And having an SDK is using Unity's own technology?

 

According to Improbable they have no such agreement with Epic. They also claim they had "senior level" approval from within Unity that it was in "agreement" before Dec 5th when the rules suddenly changed with the TOS change.

It will be interesting to see the rebuttal *popcorn*

 

this thread has been a fun read.. thank you all for the entertainment!

IMO, Unity screwed the pooch with my trust with the whole subscription debacle after hiring that guy from EA... i was like "o boy, here we go!"

too bad too, I enjoyed the IDE and being able to program in C#.. lolz

 

@hippocoder's post is the best one in the thread. A lot of armchair lawyer gamedevs in here and online. No one would have even bat an eye on Unity's new TOS if it wasn't for posts and media outreach by improbable, which caused undue FUD.

 

No this is not typical at all unless you confine the context to game engines or other industries with little to no competition. There are hundreds of software products that can be run as a managed service made by companies from the size of Microsoft on down and almost none of them use this model.

 

Wouldn't that explain why Improbable is the only company getting into trouble?