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

Probably true, but only through ignorance. But now we can see the ToS, and realise that it rules out almost any use of Unity for online games, which is a significant thing to realise. Add to that the fact that Unity are claiming to have "clarified" the terms when actually they just extended them, and it's hard to have much goodwill in their direction or any trust that they won't block off other hosting solutions. Photon are reassured by the Unity blog post, but that's not the same as saying they're not technically in violation. And I don't think we've heard anything from Amazon Gamelift yet, or any other such services.

 

is there any short answer somewhere that clarifies what did they actually do?
like, did they had unity editor running in the cloud or what ?

 

So... Improbable and Unity were in discussion to establish a legal agreement over two years ago, but Improbable repeatedly decided they didn't want to pay for it, and used Unity's product anyway.

It's Improbable's responsibility to protect their customers and investors, and they should have entered into a valid and legally binding agreement with Unity to do so. Now their customers and investors are paying the price for their failures, and so of course they'll try to blame someone else.

(...and somehow some of you think Unity is the "bad, greedy" company in this picture?)

 

They are a could service where you can run a headless server + they have an SDK for Unity (and other engines).

The SDK is the part that Unity has a problem with.

 

To be fair I wouldn't call it started. The only one making a racket is Improbable and they also admitted they screwed the pooch.

Where does it end? Probably when something good comes on netflix that's more interesting.

 

What in the...

 

I was referring to Unity not Improbable. I don't really care about the squabble as much as the business model behind the clauses in question.

 

Sorry, I don't even.

 

To be completely fair, businesses kill themselves all the time. Luckily Unity has a vocal and loyal customer base that tries to keep them on track any time they perceive Unity as committing an error.

 

That's my line though. BTW, did you get a lawyer to peep at Unity's ToS? I did. Totally recommend it, since it clarifies what is and isn't an issue on a legal document. Because I am not qualified to do so myself.

I wonder how many people look at legal documents and think that they do not need a lawyer to explain it to them. Perhaps "Legal" means "Interpret it however I want".

I respect your right to feel the way you do - to want clarification, I do too. But for everything Unity's up-coming clarifications do not cover, there will be a thousand more you didn't spot. At any given point, every developer in the world is breaching *something*.

This is by design, so that it becomes impossible to attack the service provider. This is how all modern proactive legal documents work.

I bet I can find at least a handful I've probably violated. S***! Unity has me, I better do something and contact The Guardian for an article about some kind of sound card dispute.

 

I did. He shrugged.

 

What...??? Unity just went off the rails with this entire issue. What are you talking about? Nobody cares if people on the team come from all walks a life, the people at the top making the big choices need to re-think what they consider transparency to the developers using the engine. You don't just change ToS agreements that are of such a large impact like this and think nobody will notice. Somebody screwed up, and I don't mean in a way that they made an error. There is a deliberate intent with this, but sadly for Unity it caused backlash.

Yes, Unity right now is the bad guy, the bad guy to anyone wanting to work on multiplayer games.

People will always remember the few times you screwed up, regardless of hundreds of positive moments. That's just how it is.

My question is why didn't Unity release a public statement about this ToS update prior?

 

So, each indie dev now must have a lawyer somewhere.

 

I just figure you will tell me what I need to know.

 

Luckily I have lawyers available to me, and this ToS isn't just one directional like the "blog" post makes it out to seem.

 

Yes, regardless of Unity.

 

If you have the resources to develop an MMO then I have to imagine you have the resources to make a single visit to a lawyer to confirm that you are perfectly fine to continue developing your project.

 

I'm sorry @hippocoder but I strongly disagree, a small indie developer, those drawn specifically to Unity, shouldn't feel the need to ask a lawyers opinion on ToS; we read and agree to probably well into the hundreds for a wide variety of software in a productions lifetime. They should be transparent and blatant to all.

 

It's not just this part of the EULA though? And also I... did ask a lawyer and the conversation kinda went "this is far too vague to understand due to the lack of clear terminology definitions relating to what qualifies as a platform" to "EULAs and ToSs are difficult to enforce in court" to "the vague wording is concerning regardless."

But it's more than that. There's also the fact that these ToS updates came fairly out of the blue because we never actually get updates about, well, the updates. We shouldn't have to rely on a third party to explain the actions of another third party to us. That is absolutely ridiculous.

 

Anyone who has been in business long enough learns how to interpret contracts fairly well. It's a necessity. Because contracts are mostly about domain knowledge not legalize. Contract law itself is mostly common sense and knowing a few fundamentals. So any average attorney is going to be less well equipped then you to interpret what might go wrong, unless you just have no clue about your own industry.

Which isn't to say don't use an attorney, just understand what they are good for (legal things not domain knowledge).

 

Everyone saying to just talk to a lawyer, you do understand actual lawyers find the current clause as written overly broad, right? It’s not like lawyers are telling us “oh, that’s crystal clear.” The best I can get is “[specific feature] is probably okay because pretty much everything would be in violation if that were.” Hardly reassuring, and it degrades really fast when you ask about integrating third-party tools into your game. The reality is people are stuck in wait and see mode. If the news broke on a Monday instead of the tail end of the week, I think everyone would be even more upset. But a lot of people have kind of decided to reassess where we stand Monday morning.

 

Because they got $500,000,000 investment capital and Unity wants a part of that.

 

@Laurence_Whaites Have you had your legal team look at the ToS? I'm seeing mostly arm chair lawyers here. Everyone should do that first, then come back.

 

That SpatialOS was fine and the TOS was just changed to put them out of business?

 

If that was true, and a higher up with Unity gave them the okay, then why are they not quietly taking Unity to court? Even if they want to now, they have screwed up by admitting the were part of the situation and using the media instead.

I think that is what makes me back Unity even more. An innocent person has no need to run to the press first because they can have their day in court and if they are innocent, win. People who go to the press usually feel they have no other recourse because either they are guilty and do not want more to be uncovered or they want to use this for marketing/PR.

 

I'm still not entirely sure what Improbable is doing that's against the TOS, or at very least, how it would have been against the TOS prior to the latest change. As best I can understand, SpatialOS server software manages and deploys instances of the end user's own server built in unity or any other software that implements their API. SpatialOS isn't tied to unity at all, and Improbable isn't deploying any unity instances themselves, that's all on the end users. Even if that's breaking TOS, shouldn't the SpatialOS end users themselves in this scenario be the ones that are technically breaking TOS? Revoking Improbable's licenses only prevents them from supporting SpatialOS users, but doesn't stop them from running the service.

Based on what I know, Unity is basically telling us that this is what their TOS says:



I'm also not sure why Photon and other services aren't in breach. They also use a supervisor/hypervisor (not written in unity) that deploys unity app instances as needed. How does that not count? As best as I understand, Photon Cloud scales up and down a dynamic number of unity instances to host dedicated game servers, and uses a load balancer to direct users to proper instances. Even if unity's blog post says otherwise, I'm pretty sure it IS against the current TOS.

 

They are in breach but they do not have 500,000,000 dollars so Unity gives them a pass (for now).

 

Way I saw it, nobody's project got burned, destroyed or killed.

I saw pretty legit statement that Improbable ignored Unity for 365 days. In IT that's a decade sort of speak. Them being brits it seems viable that they thought to ignore EU request for reason,after all they are royal (double joke? oh yeah).

And I saw someone called UE using this fuss to self promote via trollter. Who is this UE guy?

I also really do not think Unity would pull out a law suit for someone breaching that because otherwise, if they have documented record of warnings and talks.with Improbable - brits would loose that court quickly right? And just so it happens that after a year - they only plug out licences. And now second runner lego style game engine backs up brits who faulted their own community by being irresponsible. Who say its someone else's fault.

Yeah go work with THOSE guys!

In normal business its perfectly normal to pay for licences which are designed to pay people and development of same thing you use. Please go build a audi factory and stamp your cars with audi logos and act surprised when you end up in a veeeeery bad situation much quicker than in a year.

Huge fuss for little to no reason. Btw, ask any lawyer - public or ANY type of info black on white is legally binding nowdays..

- ring ring ring
- who is it?
- 21st century, bro!

 

Instead Improbable said "no" and now their customers are the ones who have to deal with it... how nice of them.

 

The point i'm making is why should we be needing or even be thinking we need a lawyer to understand ToS. But to answer your question no, to find a lawyer who understands improbable's tech, all possible breaches and is as equally tech-savvy as they are well read is a big ask for a Friday night.

 

This new blog post makes the whole situation even weirder...

So I'm saying goodbye to this thread as there is nothing but speculation left to post
and I have significantly calmed down since yesterday

Having been a Unity fan since 2010 when I made my first cube move
to me this simply marks the end on an era of Unity as the underdog.
They have grown up and are now swimming with the big fishes. Kudos, I say.

So, do I leave Unity? Hell no! Unity is still a killer engine with lots
of very competent and awesome people working on it and the asset store
is simply second to none.

I will still be checking out other engines. It's always good to have
multiple options even if just for learning something new.

We will see what comes of all of this. The companies will probably continue
their dispute behind closed doors from now on.

Cya

 

This forum thread is all over the place(no ones fault, who's going to read the whole thing) but taking someone to court takes years. Improbable said they found out that Unity had an issue with them on Dec 5th, and that after they responded they did not hear anything until January when a customer called them and told them they had been told Spatial was not allowed.

There is a *gigantic* difference if that story is true, but how can we know.

 

The TOS and the fact that Unity can retroactively change them basically gives Unity the right do whatever they want. They could theoretically decide that pro users need to pay a 25% revenue share, update the TOS to match and either you comply or you take your game down (obviously they wouldn't do it, at least not until some far flung future where the company is dying).

But TOS are always massively in favour of the service provider, the issue here is that Unity exercised those TOS in what seems to be a pretty anti-competitive way. It tells us something about Unity that wasn't true say 4-5 years ago. I say 'seems' because of course we don't know how the negotiations went. I see a few scenarios:

1) Maybe Unity came to Improbable with a flat fee, if this fee was anywhere near reasonable I can't imagine Improbable refusing to pay it, they have cash, and a flat licensing fee per year is pretty easy to factor in to their operations costs

2) Maybe Unity came in with a per instance fee, this might be rougher for Improbable as part of their system is the ability for customers to scale, thus customer growth also increases this fee, and would have to be reflected in customer pricing

3) Maybe there were additional TOS that came with the agreement that impeded Improbable's strategic plans or were in another way untenable

The thing is that Improbable has much more to lose than Unity, if Unity came at them with a spirit of good faith the likely outcome would be that Improbable pays up. Hell it doesn't even need good faith, if Unity just came to get their hands on some of those millions even that would have likely resolved itself. But to get to this point it seems most likely Unity came in to bully Improbable out of the market (or at least hamstring them to the point that would be untenable for investors).

Unity sees themselves as no longer needing third-party value added services to bring in customers and improve the experience and instead they want to own all the secondary markets. Accordingly they make it harder for others to compete. Potentially a sound business strategy, but not inline with the values that Unity used to hold.

Of course its entirely possible that the negotiations broke down purely due to the human factor, it does all seem a little emotional.

 

I do not believe this. If Unity actually talked to or sent communication to Improbable a year ago and then again 6 months ago and then finally the hammer, all that is going to be documented.

I have already said all this above so will not repeat it. Problem is that people read the last response and do not bother to read the entire thread....I do not blame you. LOL It is pretty horrible. But lots of good nuggets up there from Hippo and even from Unity...plus a few really well thought out posts from others, both sides.

 

After reading Improbable's "A final statement on SpatialOS and Unity" (and of course after reading Unity's blog posting), I guess we can all sit back and wait until this is settled in court:

Either Unity Technologies will sue Improbable for slander (or libel, or defamation ... I'm not a native speaker, or a lawyer), and given the reaction of the community and other media, they might have a decent case there to press significant charges ... or Improbable will sue Unity Technologies to test how much that EULA really is worth (spoiler: probably not much), and they probably also have a case for damages or can force UT to let them use their Unity licenses again. I'm pretty sure lawyers told both corporations that suing the other is the best course of action. That's what a lot of lawyers do. After all, that's how they earn most money (yeah, I know, there are also good lawyers out there, and yes, sometimes taking something to court really is the best course of action).

I feel really sorry for Joachim because he's an awesome guy, and I'm pretty sure he has at least 10 genius ideas floating in his mind that he'd rather work on implementing, instead of having to deal with this legal/PR mess. Many of us know kind of similar situations, even if at a significantly smaller scale. And I don't know anyone who enjoys these kinds of interruptions of our creative flow. It's like having to do taxes. In fact, I feel really sorry for all the cool people at Unity Technologies that are engineers and/or artists and really just want to create the most awesome game engine so they can marvel at what other creative people do with their tools. For the corporate suits ... I sometimes wonder if those even should be living on this planet.

I don't know anyone personally who is involved with Improbable. I can relate to what Teila shared - but for me, that's just hearsay. My assumption is that they probably hate the situation just as much as the great people at UT. The good thing is that neither of those two will struggle to pay a team of lawyers. Most likely, they both have teams of lawyers already employed. So, at least it's not a "big guy vs. small guy".

For me, the takeaway in all of this: Don't ever take VC-investments. It may give you a significant boost in growth - but you pay a price, and frankly, growth is overrated. Growth is what tumors do, it's why the AI in The Matrix would associated the human species with viruses, and I can't blame them. That said, I'm fairly certain that you can work in one of the offices of UT that are spread across the world, as an employee, and barely notice ... but the way UT communicates and also how UT does business certainly has changed, and from my perspective, not in a good way. UT has had that corporate smell for many years now, and honestly, to my nose, it's a stinkin' smell - and it seems to get worse every year.

For me, UE4 isn't significantly more attractive than Unity ... after all, it's owned to a large part by Tencent. My favorite timeline that I'm sure exists in some alternate Universe that we unfortunately cannot easily switch over to is that Gabe from Valve bought UT back from the VCs, got Nicholas back on board, and UT is now owned 100% by its original founders plus one other guy that also owns his own company. Or, make it a cooperative fully owned by its employees. Unfortunately, it's much more likely that Unity will have an IPO, and then, things will be even worse than they already are. Then, the shareholders are the most valued "customers".

As much as I like Valve, I'm not sure I'd even consider using Source 2. But I may start following Xenko more closely. This does look promising. Silicon Studio, the corporation behind Xenko is also public - but they open sourced the engine, so from what it looks like, the engine now belongs to the public. Two times "public", meaning entirely different things. Languages are funny ;-)

I remember the days when Torque was the "big guy" and Unity was the niche engine.

These things change over time.

For the time being, I hope UT fixes up their ToS/EULA and I will keep on using Unity because it's an awesome engine, I really like many of the people working on that engine, and also, learning a new engine and porting over what I already have simply would take too much time ... but given how much porting is already involved in taking a 2017.4 project to 2018.3 and using the new render pipelines ... you know ... moving to another engine is probably "only" 10 or 20 times as bad ;-)

 

I'll start by saying I'm not affected by current events and I have no stake in this conflict, also not going to move to other engine. Now that out of the way, I do have few thoughts about the issue.

1) I do wonder about something that somehow no one else seems to talk about: Lets forget for a moment about whole spatialOS issue, and focus on new/edited ToS.

What happens to your Unity game if/when Unity suddenly decides to stop working with approved Unity platform partner that you happen to use? Unlikely, sure, maybe, but not impossible, and the question remains, what then? Who will cover dev time investment lost integrating old platform and required to integrate new one, and possible (temporary) loss of service.

To me whole idea that Unity can decide who is allowed to provide cloud services to your game, just because they offer integration with Unity is very risky territory.

2) Unity claims they knew for a year that SpatialOS is breaking ToS terms, and I'm not going to question that. But I do have to ask, if they knew for that long then why no warning to developers using SpatialOS? From my understanding those developers must have valid Unity licenses so they are paying Unity clients. Even if this is fully Improbable fault, you still had knowledge that could prevent your clients from potentially getting really screwed, why keep it to yourself for a year?

 

Not sure if you saw this, this was what Improbable posted today: https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/11/improbable-a-final-statement-on-spatialos-and-unity

It basically calls Unity a bunch of liars and gives a lot of specifics about how they say they got to this point. I'm curious to see what Unity's response is, maybe at this point they just both call each other liars and leave it at that?

 

Truth is if there wasn't the writing on the wall, why would Unity even be talking to these people? That is the question.

Anyway, I want clear ToS and I hope this whole thing makes Unity aware that they need to keep their noses clean. It's a nice wake up call, even though nothing particularly amazing happened.

 

One thing to note about Photon. Photon Cloud uses one of the Clients as a server for the session. No Headless Unity Server is being ran on Photon's hardware. The load balancing stuff comes into play with Photon Server which is a self hosted platform that you host for your game on your own hardware. They don't do any hosting for you when using Photon Server.

 

Perspective is interesting:

Unity Says "More than a year ago, we told Improbable in person that they were in violation of our Terms of Service or EULA."

Improbable says: "during Improbable’s very early commercial discussions with Unity, it was suggested that we might be in breach of Unity’s terms of service"

Both can be true

 

Unless one has documentation of what happened, which is very probable since big companies have lawyers who would have insisted, then yes, it will just all go away or someone will threaten a lawsuit.

Waiting for that ToS and then I will happily go back to working on our game. In the meantime, we have a VR game to finish and that should keep us busy until all this is done.

Important not to lose site of all the things you can do instead of focusing on something that is out of your control. If the ToS is not clarified and if it does not allow us to make our connected games, then I will be right there with you, crying my eyes out.

 

I would love to see similar solution like Epic does: versioning their EULA. At least.

 

It's really not that simple, let says Unity has documented proof they sent the TOS warning 6 months ago as per their blog post. Then Improbably says we got word from a senior person that it was not the case (as per their blog post), and that person denies it, it doesn't end there. Unity doesn't win because they have documents. If Unity continued to negotiate with Improbable for 6 months without further mention of the TOS, then its reasonable to conclude the issue was settled.

I mean stupid of Improbable not to get something like that in writing, but very plausible as the companies were 'friends' at the time and Improbable was very much in start-up mode.

Deals of this size don't have lawyers sitting in every meeting with people documenting every word, you generally only bring lawyers in once general terms are agreed.

 

LOL
I think if they sent them letters to cease and desist that is meaningful. And from what Unity said, that happened. Do you know they continued to negotiate with them? Or is just cause you were told they did.

As for the verbal confirmation...why would something that important not be asked for in writing? If I have a service call and someone tells me that everything is fixed, I want them to send it to me in writing. I want to KNOW that I can use that to show that I was told it was fixed in case it is not fixed.

I am just some lady making games, not some 2 billion dollar company. You know they had lawyers.

They can take Unity to court. Let us see if they do.

 

You don't understand. Unity can't win. It's that simple. Even if, they don't have the proper hat.

 

I've worked on or been privy to deals many times larger than this, sometimes there's lawyers in the room, very rarely. All contracts, etc, will go to legal, and if there's disputes over terms that can't be quickly resolved, then definitely the lawyers will start all their shenanigans but this is not how most contract negotiations go down.

If this was a legal dispute then sure, thats a different story, but it wasn't, it was a contract negotiation where Unity used the TOS as a lever. It may now turn in to a legal dispute, who knows.

EDIT: By the way I don't think it was mentioned they sent a Cease and Desist letter, informing them in writing does not imply this, could have simply been something along the lines of: "Hi Jim, thanks for providing the technical details. Unfortunately after our assessment we have determined your system is in breach of the TOS. Lets discuss how we can resolve this when we meet on Tuesday"

 

A clause in the ToS that allows changes to the ToS at any time is standard practice across the entire software industry. The reputation of the company and the knowledge that the company would be unlikely to try to sabotage their own market position is really the only thing you can depend on regarding the future of the ToS, and more importantly the way the company will enforce the ToS.

 

That was my point, the TOS are often like that, but Unity has exercised them in a way that I find distasteful: they have burnt a bit of that reputation you mention.

Although do note the distinction with for example UE, where the TOS you agree to are the ones that bind you. If they change the TOS you do not have to agree, and you can keep using their software (without support/services).

 

It’s also worth noting that while a company may change or modify its tos, they may have trouble enforcing it if it is a significant change to the product, how it was marketed and what it promised initially. Unity could modify the tos to say they get a percentage of your sales if you make a multiplayer game. But they wouldn’t be able to enforce it, and if they did, (via license revocation), they would be legal hot mess very quickly. We have to assume they aren’t going to risk their business over tos shenanigans.

 

Wow really ... !?