Improbable, Epic Games Establish $25 Million Fund To Help Devs Move To 'More Open Engines' After Unity Debacle (techcrunch.com)

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Improbable, Epic Games Establish $25 Million Fund To Help Devs Move To 'More Open Engines' After Unity Debacle (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Friday January 11, 2019 @02:30PM from the sour-relationships dept.

Lucas Matney writes via TechCrunch: Improbable is taking a daring step after announcing earlier today that Unity had revoked its license to operate on the popular game development engine. The U.K.-based cloud gaming startup has inked a late-night press release with Unity rival Epic Games, which operates the Unreal Engine and is the creator of Fortnite, establishing a $25 million fund designed to help game developers move to "more open engines." This is pretty bold on Improbable's part and seems to suggest that Unity didn't give them a call after Improbable published a blog post that signed off with, "You [Unity] are an incredibly important company and one bad day doesn't take away from all you've given us. Let's fix this for our community, you know our number."

Unity, for its part, claims that they gave Improbable ample notice that they were in violation of their Terms of Service and that the two had been deep in a "partnership" agreement that obviously fell short. The termination of Improbable's Unity license essentially cut them off from a huge portion of indie developers who build their stuff on Unity. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was quick to jump on the news earlier today, rebuking Unity's actions. "Epic Games' partnership with Improbable, and the integration of Improbable's cloud-based development platform SpatialOS, is based on shared values, and a shared belief in how companies should work together to support mutual customers in a straightforward, no-surprises way," the blog post reads.

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Open engines = bad for Nvidia by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 14:34 · Score: 0

It's harder for Nvidia to cripple/shoehorn games if the platforms are open, so a good move all around.
1. Re: Open engines = bad for Nvidia by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 19:48 · Score: 0
  
  Did they not just open source their GameWorks tools as well?
2. Re:Open engines = bad for Nvidia by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 23:35 · Score: 0
  
  Why would nVidia care? When have they crippled or shoehorned anything? Why would they bother? They might just ignore something they don't consider relevant, but that's not the same thing.
  They have the best hardware and a solid software/driver stack, leading to a nearly 80% market share (2018, up from ~60% 2 years ago) just in PC gaming hardware. Business and enterprise stuff (application delivery, CAD, etc) is 100% nVidia. AMD only has a bit of headway in supercomputing and a clear dominance in consoles.
  That's where they get that attitude of "you'll work with us, we don't need to work with you" across the board. Any PC gaming platform or engine would need to support nVidia or it's only going to work with 20% of the market, before even getting off the ground.
3. Re:Open engines = bad for Nvidia by LordKronos · 2019-01-12 03:19 · Score: 1
  
  I'm confused. Why would nVidia want ANY game to perform less than 100% on their hardware? Crippling any given game on nVidia hardware doesn't in any way hurt their competition (ATI)...just the opposite, actually. And as far as I'm aware, they don't have any ownership interest in any game development or publishing company. So I fail to see what the upside is for them to do so.
4. Re:Open engines = bad for Nvidia by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-13 09:33 · Score: 0
  
  It's harder for Nvidia to cripple/shoehorn games if the platforms are open, so a good move all around.
  "open" in this context means the license agreement (to be able to offer it as part of a cloud service), nothing to do with nvidia.
Oh, the irony by macraig · 2019-01-11 14:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

Any executive from Epic games trying to convince gamers or other developers that such an unrepentantly selfish corporation has "shared values" in common with them is a fool who doesn't recognize his own irony even as he creates it.
1. Re: Oh, the irony by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 14:53 · Score: 1
  
  Context?
2. Re: Oh, the irony by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 19:45 · Score: 0
  
  Killing nazi faggots is a PROUD American tradition. We will never stop until every single one of you inbred faggots is hung from your pussy bitch ass neck until your faggot ass is dead, then we burn your inbred corpse.
  No quarter ever, we're coming for your mother.
3. Re: Oh, the irony by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 21:50 · Score: 0
  
  Killing Nazi faggots is easier in Unreal.
4. Re:Oh, the irony by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 23:44 · Score: 0
  
  Honestly, having read Improbable, Epic, and Unity's posts on this, if anything it's shown Unity up to be the most mature, professional company of all of them.
  This should be an advert for anyone to favour Unity and other competing engines over a company like Improbable. How the fuck can you trust a company that looks like it's run by children and isn't willing to fulfill it's legal obligations not to fuck you up if you work with their stuff? Even if you're pissed at a company you should never, ever, ever write such a childish attack as they have, and for Epic to get involved and stoop to the same pathetic childish level is embarrassing. I'd wager if anything it means Epic are scared shitless at how successful Unity continues to be at tearing away what was once it's domination of modern game development.
  How can Unity remotely be called the untrustworthy ones when the people making the complaint are willing to run their service illegaly? You can't trust a company like that, they could go under due to a court order at any moment, if I used Improbable's service I'd be getting off of it ASAP now, because it begs the question, what else are they doing? They could be running pirated OS' or god knows what that as a company could get them raided at any moment if they're that laissez faire about not adhering to their licensing obligations.
  Still, if Epic is defending that kind of thing, I guess they're not bothered about people pirating or hacking and cheating in their games, I mean, they're effectively saying that breaking licensing terms is something that should be looked upon positively here.
5. Re: Oh, the irony by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 02:51 · Score: 0
  
  Unreal is the only place where Americans have killed Nazis. IRL, the Americans saved the Nazis and shipped them to California to jumpstart the American "science".
6. Re: Oh, the irony by reanjr · 2019-01-12 04:15 · Score: 1
  
  From what I can tell, Unity is telling people, "yeah, the license changed, but we're giving you a gentlemen's agreement we're not going to sue". That's not what I would call professional.
7. Re: Oh, the irony by zifn4b · 2019-01-12 05:31 · Score: 1
  
  I have some swamp land to sell you
  
  --
  We'll make great pets
8. Re: Oh, the irony by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 08:31 · Score: 0
  
  How much?
9. Re:Oh, the irony by Can'tNot · 2019-01-13 12:30 · Score: 1
  
  Care to elaborate? The worst I can think of from Epic is that lawsuit with Silicon Knights, and that was decided entirely in Epic's favor. They have nothing like Bethesda's or EA's records for screwing their customers and business partners.
  
  Meanwhile, Unity not only spies on their customers but also spies on their customers' customers. A premium user can disable the first thing, but not the second. That's pretty damning, from my perspective.
Oh damn! by SirAstral · 2019-01-11 14:47 · Score: 0

Okay I currently have a subscription to Unity.
I will be definitely canceling it now and letting Unity know that I no longer agree with it's terms of service.
Fuck that noise!
1. Re:Oh damn! by Xenx · 2019-01-11 15:00 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  TFS was very one-sided and doesn't really cover anything but Improbable's side. I'm not saying you should definitely side with Unity, but if you haven't already read their side of things I recommend you do.
  
  The short of it is that Unity's terms state Improbable needed to be an approved Unity platform partner to host servers for games developed by someone else. The EULA basically only allows for you to host your own servers, or your own instanced servers from a cloud provider, unless you're a platform partner. After a year of failed negotiations with Improbable, they cut them off.
2. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 15:12 · Score: 0
  
  Why would you end your relationship with an engine company because a different company broke the terms of a legal agreement and threw a tantrum with a rival engine company?
  What's "that noise" to you? Have you broken up with your girlfriend after her friend cancelled weekend plans? How dare she and all "that noise."
3. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 15:24 · Score: 0
  
  Unity didn't learn from Flash's demise (Unity has essentially replaced Flash as "shitty-game-platform")
  Unity is free to change the ToS, but when they change the ToS to explicitly cut off someone using their tools who had been negotiating in good faith (we don't know the specifics, but the fact this negotiation went on for months and wasn't shut down after one day suggests there was active negotiation.)
  Flash's demise was the combination of Adobe's arrogance by switching to the subscription model, combined with trying to turn flash into a shitty h.264 video player rather than focusing on what it was good on (games and small vector animations) and not updating the technology for HD/UHD screens. Literately a flash animation from 1999 can barely function at 4K because there's not enough twips to tween animation with, so the animations jump roughly.
  Unity's problem here is that it can literately kneecap any Unity developer, past or present they don't like. There are plenty of "porn" games made on the platform that I'm sure Unity would consider an excuse to revoke the license as well. Improbable may have been technically in the wrong here, but Unity's actions here are basically the equivalent of "throw out your existing work and start over"
4. Re:Oh damn! by StormReaver · 2019-01-11 15:33 · Score: 0
  
  The EULA basically only allows for you to host your own servers, or your own instanced servers from a cloud provider, unless you're a platform partner.
  That Improbable agreed to those terms in the first place shows very bad judgment, and shows that Unity indeed is the villain in this story. That Improbable would partner with another villain (Epic Games) shows additional bad judgment. They're really just substituting one abuser for another.
5. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 16:21 · Score: 0
  
  That X agreed to Y terms proves that A is bad.
  Are you drunk?
6. Re:Oh damn! by Kremmy · 2019-01-11 16:30 · Score: 0
  
  Why did Unity sign a partnership with a company that was supposedly violating the ToS?
  It didn't. TFS left out the part where Unity changed their ToS in order to create the situation.
7. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 16:34 · Score: 0
  
  Screw you then, you're not worth 600 million dollars.
8. Re:Oh damn! by Xenx · 2019-01-11 16:35 · Score: 2
  
  The license gives licensed developer free reign to host their own multiplayer servers, or use a cloud solution to instance their hosted servers. Improbable isn't a game developer in this context. Improbable is selling Unity game hosting, and not just the server for the developer to then host themselves. Unity's terms require you to be a platform partner to do this. They need to be a partner because they're specifically selling Unity hosting.
9. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 16:49 · Score: 0
  
  X agreed to Z terms with A, that were changed to Y after the fact. You're too drunk to read the article, I would guess.
10. Re:Oh damn! by SirAstral · 2019-01-11 17:06 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  Unity "Changed" terms mid-way through and is wrecking a businesses viability. That is some pretty harsh action right there. I have very little desire to place my financial risk with a company willing to damage business like this. Unity should have "grandfathered" in businesses already doing something they do not like or gave them a reasonable grace period. The way Unity handled this was not okay in any reasonably objective way in my opinion.
11. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 17:13 · Score: 0
  
  ...in any reasonably objective way in my opinion.
  There was a question of intelligence, and thankfully you have left us no doubt.
12. Re:Oh damn! by SirAstral · 2019-01-11 17:32 · Score: 1
  
  "Why would you end your relationship with an engine company because a different company broke the terms of a legal agreement and threw a tantrum with a rival engine company?"
  If you are not smart enough to figure out why that is a strawman argument then you are not likely able to understand the reason why. It is apparent that you are one of those people that keeps supporting businesses that screw their customers.
  A fool does not learn from their mistakes (very common).
  A smart person learns from their mistakes (usually uncommon).
  A wise person learns from other peoples mistakes (mostly rare).
  I am going for the learn from their mistake with going with Unity while I have a chance to move to another engine before I get too far along in my own project. I was already considering making a change before this anyways... but this helped the decision process along.
13. Re:Oh damn! by Xenx · 2019-01-11 17:50 · Score: 2
  
  I don't know all the details, but Unity said they've been working with them for a year to resolve it.
14. Re:Oh damn! by Xenx · 2019-01-11 18:11 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Again, to be clear for people, I'm advocating people inform themselves and make decisions from that. I'm not trying to tell you which side to pick or who is right/wrong. I just wanted to bring in some additional information from the other side as a starting point for that.
  
  Why did Unity sign a partnership with a company that was supposedly violating the ToS? It didn't. TFS left out the part where Unity changed their ToS in order to create the situation.
  From Unity's response, they were in discussions with Improbable 2 years ago. Improbable went ahead with their plans without coming to an agreement with Unity. Unity has been trying to get them to reach an agreement, or stop, for the last year. Unity also says the recent change to the terms was only to provide clarification.
15. Re: Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 18:12 · Score: 0
  
  "Improbable needed to be an approved Unity platform partner to host servers for games developed by someone else."
  Which is anti-consumer bullshit.
  Good luck to their new partnership. Open = good.
16. Re:Oh damn! by SirAstral · 2019-01-11 20:47 · Score: 1
  
  This may be true, but I was not aware of it until now. I don't begrudge people that get screwed, I only begrudge them when they continue to allow the screwing to keep going on.
  I also have other reasons for considering leaving Unity, but now that I learned this it helps to confirm my decision to move to a different platform before I am also in their shoes as well.
17. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 20:48 · Score: 1
  
  They didn't agree to the terms, the terms were retroactively changed.
18. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 21:35 · Score: 0
  
  its abusers "all the way down" ?
19. Re:Oh damn! by Lonewolf666 · 2019-01-11 23:05 · Score: 1
  
  Unity claim that they gave, in effect, Improbable several months of warning. But even so, I wonder if this sort of retroactive license change is legal at all. We might yet see a lawsuit over this.
  But I think there was also pretty gross negligence on the part of Improbable when they
  1) agreed to a license contract that did not require mutual agreement to change the TOS
  2) used a system where Unity could just revoke the keys and in effect shut down their business
  For comparison, both 1) and 2) are present with one's game collection on Steam too (as well as the question if 1) is legal). On both counts, I hardly trust Steam with the handful of games I "bought" through the service. But building a business on such shaky ground? Never ever.
  
  --
  C - the footgun of programming languages
20. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 00:57 · Score: 0
  
  TFS was very one-sided and doesn't really cover anything but Improbable's side.
  TFS doesn't even cover Improbable's side very well. The article is full of phrases that equate to "we don't know what that means, but instead of investigating we'll assume..." and draws all conclusions from assumptions.
21. Re:Oh damn! by luis_a_espinal · 2019-01-12 02:00 · Score: 2
  
  The EULA basically only allows for you to host your own servers, or your own instanced servers from a cloud provider, unless you're a platform partner.
  That Improbable agreed to those terms in the first place shows very bad judgment, and shows that Unity indeed is the villain in this story. That Improbable would partner with another villain (Epic Games) shows additional bad judgment. They're really just substituting one abuser for another.
  Uh, dude, just no. Stop it.
  If Improbable agreed to the EULA, then Unity is not the villain. One can criticize the EULA for many valid (and invalid) reasons, but if you agree to an allegedly faulty EULA with full usage of your mental faculties about the terms in said EULA, the other party is not the villain. There was no deception.
  Unless we are invoking some sort of "Inequality of bargaining power" context here, I'm sorry, this characterization doesn't fly.
22. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 02:27 · Score: 0
  
  Unless we are invoking some sort of "Inequality of bargaining power" context here
  EULA: A collection of one sided terms often known for taking away more rights from the recipient than giving, even so far as to try and bar you from non waivable rights within your legal jurisdiction, that is often shrinkwraped within the product / service and not viewable at the time of purchase, is non-negotiable, bars class actions via forced arbitration with a preselected arbitrator, enjoins everyone in existence because it does not identify all parties, can be altered at will by it's creator with no notification to you and you automatically accepting the new terms, is legally enforceable, and who's rejection is often either return for a refund, or nothing.
  All of that on top of a product that for all intended purposes is a form of entertainment and really doesn't have competition, because if anything similar came from a different vendor in the same franchise there would be claims of copyright infringement to hell and back. So if you want to partake of the latest entry, click "I agree" or fuck off.
  
  Unless we are invoking some sort of "Inequality of bargaining power" context here
  Yeah, We are. It's a EULA.
23. Re:Oh damn! by squiggleslash · 2019-01-12 02:57 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  It's worse than that in many ways. Part of the issue here is that Unity and Improbable apparently remember everything completely differently, which means anyone "taking sides" here to the extent of saying "XXXX is in the wrong here!" is being premature. Not that I'm saying you can't take sides, but it's probably a case of "The blame and bigger error was committed by X for not taking into account Y" rather than "X are poopyheads who tried to rip off Z"
  Here's what it boils down to:
  Unity had some T&Cs set at the time Improbable started up which were... ambiguous. Improbable interpreted them initially as banning what Improbable wants to do, but felt it was unlikely this was intentional (ie it was just Unity hadn't thought people would be doing what Improbable was doing.) They contacted Unity and apparently got what they thought was a green light from them.
  Unity remembers things differently. It's pretty sure it told Improbable that Improbable's use case wasn't covered by the license and what's more it didn't want it to be.
  So the recent "change" was more of a "clarification" from Unity's PoV. Meanwhile the "clarification" was a wholesale change from Improbable's point of view.
  Does either side have anything to back this up? Unity may or may not do, but Improbable doesn't. Improbable says its confirmation it could go ahead and everything was fine was communicated verbally. So they have no paper or email trail to speak of.
  If both sides are telling the truth, then I'd say Improbable made the critical error here. I know that a sizable amount of business involves verbal OKs and handshakes, but if it ever comes to a licensing issue, writing is the way to go. Don't rely on something until you have it in writing. It's not just a matter of proof, it's also a matter of knowing that the person you're communicating with is making and communicating the actual policy, not merely giving his or her opinion on it. Written communications never exist in a vacuum, copies are given to other internal people who can immediately respond to errors and will know going forward what has been said.
  Does that mean Unity are blameless? Probably not, but it sounds like standard corporate disconnects than anything dishonest. Someone told Improbable something, and apparently didn't tell others within the company what was said. That's not good. But it's not the critical mistake here.
  
  --
  You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
24. Re: Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 05:02 · Score: 0
  
  You need to read the facts. Improbable is in the wrong here.
25. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 07:47 · Score: 0
  
  Except by changing the already signed agreement during negotiations for "clarification" reasons they've already admitted they were wrong. This is a classic case of "I've altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further" thuggery.
  Which if you actually look at those changes, they reek of the "we didn't make enough money off of our initial fleecing of you. So were taking away your rights retroactively and making you pay a subscription to get them back" kind the likes of the BSA uses. Seriously. Take a good look at the licensing requirements for Windows 10 on a virtualization platform and tell me Unity's new terms don't seem similar.
  If they were in discussions on this two years ago, why did they wait until now to change things? If it was their policy back then, and they wanted to hold others to it, why not just update the policy when the issue was revealed to them? They could have resolved this with a simple "Oh, that's not right. Well crap fine, we'll give you what you want until the end of your current license, but be aware during your next licensing negotiations that we will have fixed this issue." Instead they've drug it out for two years, have now terminated the licensing of the other company out of spite, and changed their written policy anyway. While at the same time creating negative PR for their product, a product already rife with it's own PR issues, and damaging their relations with another company who's in the same market as them with a competing product. Great leadership all around...... Who got bonuses for this?
26. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 11:29 · Score: 0
  
  I'm kinda leaning this way. Considering the absolute garbage and semi-fraudulent shovelware that gets produced in the unity engine without any apparent problem from Unity corporate.. This guy must have fucked up /really/ bad to earn their ire.
27. Re:Oh damn! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-13 04:37 · Score: 0
  
  The new terms are the same as the old terms, but rephrased specifically because Improbably had complained to Unity about the clarity of the old phrasing.
Hell yes! FUCK Unity and their C# bullshit! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 15:00 · Score: 0

Unreal uses C++ like a real game engine should.
1. Re: Hell yes! FUCK Unity and their C# bullshit! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 15:10 · Score: 0
  
  Amen to C++, the language of those who get it.
2. Re:Hell yes! FUCK Unity and their C# bullshit! by Phydeaux314 · 2019-01-11 15:15 · Score: 1
  
  Eh, sort of. It's a C++ base, but most UE4 game developers work with blueprints due to the speed with which you can put something together. Visual scripting languages are quickly becoming the standard in game development.
  You'll generally see people putting together custom functions and the like using C++, which are then implemented by the level designer / game designer / artists via blueprints.
  
  --
  Never underestimate the stupidity inherent in all human beings.
3. Re: Hell yes! FUCK Unity and their C# bullshit! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 16:31 · Score: 0
  
  It is a language for people who like to be ass fucked all day and yelled at by their spouse all night.
4. Re: Hell yes! FUCK Unity and their C# bullshit! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 20:15 · Score: 0
  
  Most of Unreal Engine "programming" is done via shitty visual scripting. Drag click click click drag drag click. Unity is much more "programmer oriented".
5. Re: Hell yes! FUCK Unity and their C# bullshit! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 09:53 · Score: 0
  
  Yes and those scripts are why even big budget productions like XCom 2 had egregious performance problems.
6. Re: Hell yes! FUCK Unity and their C# bullshit! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 14:09 · Score: 0
  
  Except that XCom 2 uses Unreal 3.5 which does not use Blue Prints AT ALL
How does Improbable make money? by melted · 2019-01-11 15:19 · Score: 1

How does Improbable make money? Does anyone know? Their website offers no clue.
1. Re:How does Improbable make money? by keltor · 2019-01-11 15:40 · Score: 1
  
  https://improbable.io/games/pr...
2. Re:How does Improbable make money? by 0xDAVE · 2019-01-11 22:08 · Score: 1
  
  They don't actually make any money. The managed to get a military contract last year. Prior to that their revenue was £70K
3. Re:How does Improbable make money? by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 04:52 · Score: 0
  
  Softbank is bank rolling them 502$ million.
  Plus they do government simulation work on the side.
I dunno...this is all a bit odd by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 15:47 · Score: 0

Unity really haven't said much, that's strange. For them, this is the PR equivalent of stepping on a dog turd, slipping/falling, and then ending up with skidmarks up their back.
There's got to be some kind of more reasonable explanation to this? It just doesn't make sense. I don't want to believe it's the way Epic/Improbable make it out - but Unity don't seem to have a good alternative explanation for pulling Improbable's license, so...what am I left to think, given that?
Statement of bias here: I work with UE4.
It's about time by Jastiv · 2019-01-11 17:17 · Score: 3, Insightful

Proprietary software has no place in game development or anywhere else. Soon people will see see the light the way Torvalds did after the Bitkeeper fiasco. Sooner or later, those proprietary licenses will come to bite your in the rear, whether you are an individual or a corporation. Its better to just spend the money upfront for a free software replacement than have to deal with proprietary licenses. With free software, once you have the software written, you can do whatever you want with it. For those who don't already know. I am one of the developers of the the free software game Wograld. (a 2d multi-player rpg not based on unity(obviously))
1. Re:It's about time by SirAstral · 2019-01-11 17:39 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I agree, but keep in mind that developing a game engine is a lot of work, and while I have decided to stop using Unity myself, it has helped a lot of indies get their work out there as well.
  In many ways some people feel like they have little choice in the matter and wind up making a deal with the devil.
  Unity is quickly becoming a bad business model for many of the reasons you mentioned. Open source has its own problems too, but greedy platforms are starting to to hurt the environment enough to encourage a switch to it.
2. Re:It's about time by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 22:01 · Score: 0
  
  No dummy. They're throwing money at indies to move away from Unity to Unreal engine. Not an "open" engine.
3. Re:It's about time by dunkelfalke · 2019-01-11 22:13 · Score: 1
  
  You do realise that you sound like a preacher of a cult?
  
  --
  "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
4. Re:It's about time by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 23:32 · Score: 1
  
  We don't know, nor do we care about your shitty little irrelevant game that on Googling it looks so utterly terrible, that you should be ashamed not proud to put your name to it, even your website is literally fucking terrible. Everything you've put forward has highlighted why open source is often a joke in some areas; the problem is I could spend about Â£100 and knock up your entire game in a weekend in Unity and still have it much better, and it looks like you've put years into it.
  Have any open source games ever actually been succesful? The entirety of the game world is built on proprietary software. Even the Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake engines, the closest things to succesful open source games weren't opened sourced until like 5 years after their release.
  So sorry, but you're living in complete and utter fantasy land. There's a shit load of open source engines and games, and all of them are non-entities that no one other than those who have specifically looked into it have ever heard of.
  Even Ogre has been around 18 years, and in that time it's managed a grand total of 7 games in it's showcase, only two of which anyone might, just might, if they look at every game that comes out, might, just, at a push, have heard of.
  Open source has it's place in games, with OpenGL and such, but the idea that games should be open source is an idea that's been about as successful as the year of Linux on the desktop.
5. Re:It's about time by bigmacx · 2019-01-12 01:44 · Score: 1
  
  You sir, win the Internet with that comment. I hope the OP of your reply has a strong constitution.
  Dropping the mic with "year of Linux on the desktop" shows your age. That's been the White Whale of Slashdot for decades
6. Re:It's about time by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 07:33 · Score: 0
  
  He's a Stallmanite.
7. Re:It's about time by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 14:11 · Score: 0
  
  https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github
8. Re:It's about time by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 14:14 · Score: 0
  
  Like how MongoDB is forcing Devs to provide ALL of their site assets if they create an API that uses MongoDB?
9. Re:It's about time by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 14:20 · Score: 0
  
  Unreal Engine 4 is open source
  https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github
  and so is Amazon's Lumber Yard(CryEngine)
  https://github.com/aws/lumberyard
10. Re:It's about time by JustNiz · 2019-01-13 03:56 · Score: 1
  
  No (s)he absolutely doesn't. (s}he is clearly an complete dick and nothing more. And (s)he already knows it. I'm fed up of these gutless idiots that think they're "big men" because they snipe acidic rhetoric at someone else's well-intentioned efforts while hiding behind AC. Where's the much better game that AC wrote then?
  Slamming someone's community project just because it doesn't have the same standard as a game that takes millions of dollars of professional man-hours and resources, is nothing more than utter dickwadddery.
11. Re:It's about time by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-13 09:51 · Score: 0
  
  Proprietary software has no place in game development or anywhere else.
  Actually it completely dominates almost the entire game development business. Saying it "has no place" there just because you might not like it is just nonsense.
  
  Sooner or later, those proprietary licenses will come to bite your in the rear, whether you are an individual or a corporation.
  But if you're interested in being honest about it in the overwhelming majority of cases they don't, stories like this are the exceptional circumstance.
  A license for say UE is a lot cheaper than the costs to develop and maintain your own competing engine so you can focus on delivering your game experience and you're extremely unlikely to run into issues with licensing. If you could just get it all for free and for no cost with no restrictions then that would be great, but there is a reason you can't and that is that developing and maintaining and engine is a costly proposition.
  
  Its better to just spend the money upfront for a free software replacement than have to deal with proprietary licenses.
  That is very disingenuous. There is a lot more to software than just an upfront cost, there is ongoing maintenance to support new hardware, platforms and features along with bug and security fixes and these absolutely have a non-trivial cost associated with them.
  
  With free software, once you have the software written, you can do whatever you want with it.
  Again that is disingenuous, depending on the license you may end up having to release your whole game for free along with redistributing the engine source code.
12. Re:It's about time by stoborrobots · 2019-01-13 13:21 · Score: 1
  
  On Github, but not really "Free" - https://www.unrealengine.com/e...
  
  --
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13. Re:It's about time by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-14 04:10 · Score: 0
  
  That sounds like a personal attack, not an argument. His premise, that corporations are profit generators, and will screw you with any ambiguity in their licensing if they can, is solid. It reflects reality. The alternative he presents, that spending money on developers to adapt FOSS is cheaper than lawyers in the long run, also has merit. That's a lot better than any cultist can do.
It's business, by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 17:52 · Score: 0

Clearly Epic is taking advantage of Unity screwing over their customers, the game devs that licensed their engine.
It's business.
Unity changes their terms to screw their licensee's, Epic takes advantage of that to attack Unity. Unity are to blame here, they were the ones who changed the license terms after the fact and then cancelled the game license of existing products licensed under the old terms.
Todays its the cloud terms, tomorrow it will be something else, you cannot use Unity's products like this, devs need to move on.
Eww by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-11 22:00 · Score: 0

I farted and it was really wet and nasty. Kind of like Unity.
Wasn't the issue that Unity changed the EULA by rsilvergun · 2019-01-12 02:16 · Score: 1

after the fact, likely as a money grab for future cloud gaming profits? I'd thought Unity normally charges per developer fees. It looks like they want to start charging per user or per processor fees like Oracle & IBM do.

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What year is this?! by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 03:36 · Score: 0

It's 2019 and people are still using EULAs?! Come to the 21st century. Software is Free.
Unity sucks anyway by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 05:59 · Score: 0

Every single game using Unity is plagued by performance problems.
Anybody choosing it as their game engine for their project should just move to a better one, and they won't miss it (actually, this might save their project from failure).
Godot - Open Source Unity-Esque Game Engine by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 09:11 · Score: 0

I'm surprised that slashdot didn't mention Godot -- https://godotengine.org/
Its compact and lightweight and as outlined here -- https://godotengine.org/features Godot can deploy to iOS/Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, UWP, BSD, Haiku and to the web.
This is what people should be supporting. You can grab the precompiled binaries on the site, or hit their repo at https://github.com/godotengine/godot and deep-dive to see how it works.
I've used Unity before, and Godot really impressed me with how fast you can get things going. Supports GDScript which is a python-esque language. If that isn't your cup of tea, it can also support C# 7.0 using Mono, Visual Scripting node-layouts similar to Unreal Engine, Python, Nim, D and other languages (via community supported plugins).
Try it out, its what Unity and Unreal Engine should be.
Unity's take by chris-chittleborough · 2019-01-12 15:24 · Score: 1

Unity's take can be read at blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/
You realize 'more open engines'... by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-12 20:25 · Score: 0

Just meant 'Move to Unreal Engine 4' not move to something like OpenSceneGraph/Delta3D, Irrlicht, Ogre, Godot, Torque, etc?
Personally I went 'meh' as soon as I read that it was just one proprietary vendor trying to lock people in after another's misstep. If they really wanted people moving to a 'more open engine', they would open source their own engine under favorable licensing terms for Improbable's business model (and maybe others as well) and then explain how they would make money off the resulting open source release. But much like Microsoft was 'more open' than IBM, so too is Unreal Engine 'more open' than Unity.
Kek.