Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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))
I don't know all the details, but Unity said they've been working with them for a year to resolve it.
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.
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.
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.