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

I have no reason not to believe them. I am sorry if you lost something in all this. I do respect your opinion but I ask the same respect back. Please do not belittle others if they do not agree with you.

 

A couple thousand per employee isn't exactly a spectacular revenue cut when you contrast it to the royalties of UE4.

If you have developers on your team that are know what they're doing and won't simply break more in the process of trying to fix problems. I'm willing to bet most developers won't be able to fix problems with the engine.

 

So, my stance after reading both Unity's blog post on the topic:
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/1...-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/

and

Improbable's first and then second blog post on the topic:
https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/an-update-on-todays-events


So, Unity Tech in the blog post makes clear that no, Improbable did not all of a sudden get their licenses revoked without any warning, they were warned over a year ago that they were acting against the TOS.


While Improbable in their first blog post and initial messaging on twitter and elsewhere had made it sound like this all came like a total surprise to them

Now in their second blog post Improbable says:
"
...
We apologize that this event we instigated has created so much uncertainty, confusion and pain for so many developers who really do not deserve this.
...
"

They go on babbling but that line alone makes me shudder. So they knew full well that they were acting against the TOS (not just about the recently changed one, but against the older version, too and Unity Tech had told them over a year ago). Then when after a year the sledge hammer finally came down, they started an "event", basically a smear campaign based on lies and omitting critical information, acting like this came as total surprise to them and UT is the all evil one for shutting them down all of a sudden.

Note: i find the TOS badly worded and UT will surely (as they also said here and elsewhere in blog comments) update it soon, but that level of intentional mis information by Improbable while at the same time also putting all their users into a scare craze, intentionally making their users think their running projects would get shut down (so as to also have them further increase more negative vibes of course all around the web), while UT told Improbable that would explicitly not be done, yeah, that is just sleazy to the max by Improbable.

When one looks at the reputation damage campaign article Improbable triggered on the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/busines...able-faces-ransom-demands-from-supplier-unity
earlier on, then yeah, it becomes more and more obvious what actually likely happened here:
-Unity saw what Improbable is doing as a platform type thing and likely would charge money for that
-Improbable likely wouldn't pay it and went on ignoring Unity's warnings of a breach of TOS for a year
-Then when the ban hammer finally came down on Improbable, instead of paying up to solve it (no matter if one agrees or not whether they are a platform or not or whether they should have to pay extra or not) or trying to solve it in other amicable way, they went out there and started an "event", really a smear campaign trying to make Unity look like the ruthless guys shutting people down without any warning, and hence causing major chaos across the internet making people all around the Unity eco system very worried.

Yes, Unity has to improve those TOS, that's a separate topic well worth going into, too, but Improbable, what you attempted there is intentional reputation damage not just to UT but essentially causing harm to all your users and also to every single Unity using business, because for a few hours suddenly the internet went into a craze whether one couldn't rely on any Unity using service anymore and that affects every Unity dev using or creating such a service.

In my eyes Improbable can be happy if they don't get sued into Oblivion for this, i imagine Unity Tech wouldn't do it because that would just help Improbable painting further the picture they tried to paint of Unity for half a day there, but yeah, me personally as Unity dev working on Unity using services, i'm quite pissed about this, too.
I had many worried clients, partners and even Investors ask me about this today.

Not cool.

And note before all this i was actually considering using Spacial OS for something in the future.
But come on Improbable, you risk the livelihood of all your users for over a year by knowingly breaching a TOS and not informing your users about this and then when the ban hammer comes down instead of at least then owning up to it right away and doing all you can to fix the situation asap with Unity as to not further risk the livelihood of your users further even more, no, you then try to abuse your users and all devs and the media to start a smear campaign to come out on top.


Like, seriously..

 

Well... obviously? The new version of the engine is treated as a new product. Don't like the new EULA? Then you can't use the new version. But you can still use the old version, because you already agreed to its EULA. I really don't see the comparison here.

I don't see how developer ability is relevant to licensing.

 

Is there any evidence we have for this other than them saying so?

 

There is something else bothering me about all of this. I just checked to make sure, but I never received any warning about the changes in the ToS. The only recent communication sent by Unity Technologies was about moving their ads selling entity to US.

I don't have the time to check the ToS every day to find out if something has changed. I never gave I proper thought about that, but I can only remember receiving some kind of notice twice (this last email about the move to US and another in 2016 about the change in their software offerings) in the past 3 years. But I am sure there was way more changes this entire time.

I really like Unity, but this makes me worry a bit (at least if their blog post is true I would receive I warning first, but I may not like the ransom to solve the issue, if that ever happens).

I was considering SpatialOS for a future project, but it seems I need scrap that.

 

Well if they don't have the skill atleast they can hire someone to fix that. There are 100s of UE4 engine devs working for free(see their github commit rate from community).
And if they can't even afford to pay someone just workaround it. It is not crazy hard to going around a problem if you can not do anything about it.

 

I thought I explained it quite clearly. If you've encountered a bug with the engine and need a patch to fix it but don't have the ability to implement the fix yourself then you will need to accept the new license to acquire it from Epic.

 

I run a multiplayer VR team platform where we run a copy of Unity3d on the linux cloud server and load the the same Unity Asset Bundle on the server as the clients ("The current world"). I chose this method because:

(1) it followed the Unity3d documented approach using UNET server and client architecture
(2) it meant we get to simulate the entire scene on the server (physics, meshes, networked objects, etc)

We boot the instances on demand when a team wants to meet in VR.

Sounds like Unity's new T&C's means this architecture is dead in the water.. unless Authorized by Unity3d. :-(

 

Sorry, 22. Not 2.2 and I opened up this one.

 

Do we have any evidence that it did not happen exactly as they said it did? I do see that Improbable took responsibility for the "event" so I think based on both of the latest blog posts that Unity came out as the most believable. I am sure that there are documents, meeting notes, and legal docs that all would show that all this is true. Unity would be very foolish to make up a story like this when the evidence is mostly like there in the paper work and a lawsuit would certainly bring it all out Improbable's damage control is not very impressive.

That is my opinion though. I have no reason not to believe Unity, as i said before. I am not fond of conspiracy theories, mostly because they are created to cause fear and confusion.

If you need evidence other than the words of the company, then I am afraid you probably will never see it unless someone takes someone else to court. Let's see if Improbable does that.

 

Again: obviously. Why is this an argument against their EULA?

 

Good luck with your endeavors, don't forget to come back later and tell us how it worked out for you! (And I'm not joking)

 

Plus there are services that let you know when digital and physical documents have been delivered.

My point was that people who truly cared about EULAs would choose a solution where they would never have to worry about it again and Godot happens to be the most advanced and best supported open source engine at this point.

Clearly other people had a similar idea if the below post that showed up shortly after this fiasco started is any indicator.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/aen3bp/because_of_recent_unity_news_godot_spatialos_when/

Then there are people who were thinking about it long before this occurred. Like @HeadClot88.

https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/7b2ta3/spatial_os_for_godot_anyone_want_to_tackle_an/

 

I have a feeling this story is far from over. The interesting part to me is that if Unity is telling the truth, it'll be easy to prove by providing documentation that they notified Improbable if the violation previously, and perhaps multiple times.

If Improbable is telling the truth, it'll be harder to prove that Unity blindsided them with this, unless they have a recent message that clearly states "Hey, this is your first and final notice."

I don't see this having a long-term negative impact on Unity. A lot of "Bye-bye, Unity... Moving to UE!" in this thread, but we see that a lot. I'd put money on the vast majority of those not following through or crawling back the first issue they have with UE.

The whole situation is unfortunate in either case, but it really feels like Improbable pulled something shady here and tried to stir up anger and fear for their own benefit.

 

Have fun reading Unitys EULA everyday.

 

It seems like from the blog post spatialos issue was running everything on their servers. If they just sold an sdk to integrate but you had to host on your own servers they would be ok. But since they sold sdk and hosted they became a platform.

Otherwise seems like hosting your own stuff using any paid sdk could be considered a platform.

Wether you plan to switch or not we should all download unreal to show a spike in downloads.

I hope unity fixes there tos to clearify what is considered a platform. And the legal reads closer to the blog explanation.

But I can see how spatialos model could be considered separate from aws etc.

 

Just an aside, with no intention of derailing the flow of the conversation, I just want to echo this:

There's just cause for disagreement and spikes in emotion. I (mostly) don't have a horse in this race, but I love observing this community. Moderators and users are doing a good a great job here. Remember, if the sky is falling and you wake up tomorrow with your head still intact, you can weather this.

 

You can at least concede that UE has a more generous EULA in this respect, no? Because that's all they're saying. Being stuck on an old version of an open source engine is a much better position to be in than having your current product suddenly be in violation of the EULA and be forced to change it or take it down (in some instances, taking it down being the ONLY option).

Yes, there are less robust engines with even more generous EULAs, but if someone wants a feature-rich engine with a more generous EULA than Unity's, UE is a very legitimate option.

The comments here, made by people that enjoy using Unity and would love to continue using Unity, are made in the hopes that Unity adopt Epic's more generous terms. You'd benefit from that as well.

 

In any case, why not use Xenko game engine which is fully open source with MIT license? No restrictions whatsoever. You have control over all aspects of your game and it uses proper .NET, not a proprietary mono runtime. In fact the whole engine is written in C#... Also the rendering is multi-threaded by default and can be customized as you need.

Afaik Xenko was developed over 10 years by a sub section of Silicon Graphics, it went open source just last summer...

 

I'm not that worried about that. I go through that approximately once a year. Sometimes I forget things and then I post stupid mistakes about it.

Be careful with this. You can't even log in into your account. So you can't use your own assets from the Marketplace (if you don't want to accept their new EULA). I guess the game deployment in the UE store will be tight to the same, so you can't deploy your games (not even the older ones). So it's not that clear cut. Just saying. Not that I have anything against Unreal's EULA, other than the usual too tight and too defensive, but I have problems with all of the EULAs in the world I think.


Just to be clear: I have problems with Unity's EULA and would like to see them to change it to be more clear.

 

No. I'll concede it has a more flexible license, but calling it generous is too much of a stretch.

 

This is a good reason for Unity to clarify the EULA so it's not as difficult to parse. (I find it confusing to read too)

However, they say that if you're running a game and hosting your own servers, then you're all good.

They're not even stopping people from using SpatialOS. The dispute is strictly between Unity and Improbable.

 

J_P_ said more generous, not generous.

The point being, the specific issues being raised at the moment with Unity ToS are not present in the UE4 ones. Saying "if you really cared about licenses you wouldn't go to UE4" is whataboutery.

 

Yes, and I'm saying it's "more flexible" not "more generous". One word mistakenly left out doesn't change my statement.

I'm not contesting that.

 

Fair enough. The missing word changed my reading of it.

Then I'm not sure what point you're making.

 

I read it as the "event they instigated" was the uproar that followed their original blog post and not the breaking of any TOS. Seems to me as though you have your own interpretation of it and are running wild.

 

"However, if a third party service wants to run the Unity Runtime in the cloud with their additional SDK, we consider this a platform. In these cases, we require the service to be an approved Unity platform partner."

If I run a Unity game server on Amazon's cloud I'm ok. But if I use one of Amazon's SDKs, for example, S3 for cloud storage it is now a platform and I cannot do so unless Amazon has negotiated a deal with Unity? Seems like this is the same scenario that got SpatialOS in trouble. If so this will go well beyond Spatial OS and Photon Bolt.

 

https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/10/...lion-fund-to-transition-devs-away-from-unity/

Yeah, well, whilst you lot tell me how terrible I am for being annoyed at what Unity have done to my business, I think I'll seek life elsewhere.

 

Unity did the right thing. There was a lot of aired dirty laundry that is unfortunate, but Unity has explained their situation while the lawyers are redoing the TOS.

Going forward though, Unity needs to ensure that the TOS isn't arbitrarily changeable. Historically we've had massive changes in the business model at a particular version of the platform - not just in the midst of things. If I've adopted 2018.3, I expect the TOS to be consistent throughout my use of that version because I agreed to those terms when I adopted that SPECIFIC release. If Unity wants to change things for 2018.4 or 2019.1 - power to them, I can at that point choose to simply not move to the next release. But it is not acceptable for me to accept a ToS for 2018.3 and then have it change while I'm using 2018.3. I'm actually sure there is a legal argument to be made if they do that.

Further, there needs to be a blog post and notification of changes to the ToS up front. This would have allowed this whole thing to be explained up front and without the need to air the dirty laundry - something that just always feels unprofessional. As a community, we've always received some notification of big changes in the model or the license and people have had a chance to have a big bitch-fest on the blog and the forum so Unity could hear the feedback and respond to the issues BEFORE the change actually went into effect. Unity needs to make sure the procedural approach that we've come to expect returns to being the norm - not the exception.

 

I told you so that this whole thing was orchestrated by Improbable and Epic... I wish I would have this success with the lottery.


Up until now I was looking at Tim like the geekiest nerd in the entire herd, but today he just stepped up somewhere around the good old William Gates. This is amusing.

 

You can dismiss it in that way if you like. Perhaps there's even a kernel of truth in it but the fact remains, I'm staring at a game build I can't launch. A build I spent years and a lot of money on that had no indication of being a problem for Unity, see the Bossa Studios Unite presentations, suddenly being yanked out from under me. Even if Improbable have played their hand well in this, which I'm not even sure is true, it has massively exposed a flaw in Unity's approach to third party use of their engine in a way I cannot risk my business on.

 

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-and-improbable-working-together-for-developers

Unreal is defiantly taking advantage...

 

You are free to go wherever you want but nobody is pulling anything under you. You have been played, my friend.

 

**Edit: Sorry I misunderstood the licensing

 

I'll ignore the glib tone in your response because I'm certainly not celebrating. I've sunk a lot of time an money in to Unity and this is definitely not a good thing. I was fully committed to Unity and have been an advocate for the engine for years.

However, I've also been using SpatialOS from its early conception. I understand its technology, have dug deep in to its SDK and fully get where it ends and Unity begins. There's no 'being played here' other than Improbable fighting a rear guard action that's completely understandable from my point of view: why not try and shift people away from an engine that is prepared to go hardcore over a shady licensing issue and on to an engine that makes my business way more money? UE4 makes Improbable orders of magnitude more money than Unity does.

The only thing I'm happy about is that I now see a way out for my business and the people I employ. Earlier in the day it was looking touch and go.

 

I understand your worries and concerns, but i'd suggest to stay calm and see how this progresses over the next few days before you give up on years of work over what could turn out to be a lot of fear mongering over fake news where all sides might realize the best way to save face is to appease devs to the max now.

 

Yours is a reasonable point. However, when I spoke to people at Unity today, most of them had no idea what had even happened. Unity's blog post only piles on the damage. From my perspective and with such a flexible (for Unity) ToS I genuinely can't trust them ever again. I can no longer believe that they'll 'do the right thing': if they unilaterally decide to classify something as against their ToS in the future, then all they have to do is rewrite the paragraph, publish it and then claim you've been in breach all along. I'm genuinely shocked more people aren't running for the hills.

And for those underplaying this today, three live games temporarily shut down and lots of studios went in to full blown panic. It's not JUST because of SpatialOS, it's because of what Unity did with their ToS in relation to headless servers and how they handled the comms.

 

I don't think that I would be able to tell you anything to change your mind, so I'm not even trying. I'm just stating that my view of this whole situation (as a complete outsider with considerable business experience) is different.
Unity has a lot of problems, including with their EULAs and sometimes with their operation as well. On the top of this, they're putting insane amount of work in their solutions and they didn't entirely gave up on their Indie-roots.
As a complete outsider (with a Plus subscription, which I'm not even have to have, but I think Unity deserve my money) I think you're overreacting and Improbable and Epic was playing you and a couple of others as well.

 

Maybe you're right. I hope so. If all this can de-escalate and Unity and Improbable can come to terms in a way that doesn't severely hurt my bottom line AND Unity can publish some ToS that doesn't make me worry for my future... then I'll be happy. Honestly, I'd rather just get on with making great games and not have to hold crisis meetings all day and plan for the worst.

 

LOL! Tim Sweeney just tweeted a link to this thread:

https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083580407541583872

 

Or Epic Games has the world's fastest management and legal departments.

 

My suspicion is that Improbable and Epic already have contract and they intentionally fused the situation this way. Basically blew the whole situation out of all imaginable proportions. It's not a coincidence. I doubt that any kind of immediate future would be in Unity + SpatialOS. My guess is, they will agree that they don't screw over the already existing or in late development projects, but I don't see they would agree on anything after this stunt with Tim. Although I may be wrong here.

At least they are working on it, as always. Although I wouldn't hold my breath. ToS is always worrisome and source of (sometimes founded sometimes unfounded) anxiety. You should use your best judgement for yourself and for those whom you're responsible for. And I won't tell you to trust Unity. I'm telling you I do. because they screw up sometimes, but I see the work they put into it and even to correct their way sometimes when they make mistakes.
Not that I have anything against UE, I don't, it's just I don't see the evilness of Unity they're painting.

To me it was strange seeing Tim commenting minute by minute the whole thing, I immediately thought that something is fishy. You can read that here.

Edit: also: Hi Tim!

 

That's the scummiest S*** I've read all day. It's most likely that Epic and Improbable planned this whole thing together.

Here are the facts:

1) 99% of people complaining in this thread probably would never run into licensing issues with Unity.
2) Whatever the issue Improbable had with Unity took place over the course of 1 to 2 years. Unity did not pull their plug overnight.
3) Unity confirmed that they are working on clearer TOS. (See the end of Joachim's updated blog post)

Here are my opinions:

1) Improbable wrote 2 dramatic blog posts that blamed everything on Unity and conveniently left out all the specifics to make it appear Unity pulled the plug overnight and that Improbable didn't do anything wrong.
2) As far as Unity Licensing goes, I think Unity as a company should have the right to decide whether or not third party companies can provide Unity as a Platform.

 

Yeah, erm, none of your post is based on fact. I'm not even going to bother....

 

That's okay. Most people in this thread didn't care about facts either as can be seen by how many jumped to conclusions before Unity gave their side of the story. Even after they did they just threw their statements out with the trash showing they didn't care about anything other than a one-sided beat down on Unity. I'm seriously surprised any of them are still posting.

 

I'm beginning to think Unity has been played hard. Also looks like they fumbled right into it too with their predictable too-corporate mindset.

 

Act like adults... keep it civil and relevant and skip posting conspiracy theories. Doing so will get you thread ban. First and last warning.

 

Welp. None of this matters now since I am forced to switch engines. Who's right or wrong? I couldn't care less.
I literally cannot continue to work on my dream project using Unity.

What comforts me about the ToS of the competitor is that I'm sure that this can't happen with them, because it is written with the consumers in mind.

Thank you all for coming to my humble thread.

 

Honestly there isn't a whole lot left but conspiracy theories. We could wait and see if Improbable releases another blog post but if they're smart they won't keep talking about this topic and will just point at the monetary bonus to moving to UE4.