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