Epic and Improbable are taking advantage of Unity with the SpatialOS debacle, seems a little planned
As an update to the ongoing saga between Improbable and Unity in regards to SpatialOS, Epic Games have now jumped in to take advantage of it. To be clear, I don't consider myself biased in any way towards any game engine, especially as I am not a game developer.
As a quick overview of what happened:
- Improbable put out a blog post, claiming Unity overnight blocked SpatialOS and made Unity out to be a real bad company. Improbable then open source their Unity GDK.
- Unity made their own response, mentioning that they told Improbable a year ago about the issues. Let's be real here, revoking the Unity licenses of SpatialOS wouldn't have been a quickly-made decision. Unity have also mentioned repeatedly now about making their TOS (terms of service) a lot clearer.
- Epic Games and Improbable team up to help developers switch game engines.
To assist developers who are left in limbo by the new engine and service incompatibilities that were introduced today, Epic Games and Improbable are together establishing a US $25,000,000 combined fund to help developers transition to more open engines, services, and ecosystems. This funding will come from a variety of sources including Unreal Dev Grants, Improbable developer assistance funds, and Epic Games store funding.
See the full Epic Games blog post here.
I can't help this feeling that Improbable and Epic Games somehow planned this, it feels a little off. To secure a partnership with Epic for rather a lot of money and so quickly, feels like a pretty big PR stunt. Frankly, I feel bad for the folks at Unity as it seems like they've been played here.
Unity does have a lot of issues (especially often on Linux) but this whole situation feels like a made-up farce to make Unity out to be worse than it is. Their terms of service have been pretty poor though, Unity certainly aren't angels and haven't helped themselves.
Again though, this only highlights some of the dangers of using proprietary game engines for your projects. I don't consider myself a zealot in any way towards absolutely preferring open source game engines, especially when closed source alternatives can do a lot of things better, but it should be ringing some alarms bells for developers as a reminder of how they're not really in control.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083600857806061568
Sputnik_tr_02 Jan 11, 2019
Not that Unity are angels, as the article notes. But still.
cRaZy-bisCuiT Jan 11, 2019
Maybe I just don't get it because my English sucks...!?
Last edited by cRaZy-bisCuiT on 11 January 2019 at 12:40 pm UTC
I personally don't understand all this thing about fortnite, I personally consider it a not that good of a game to have so many player base. But when a new thing arrives and the fashion trends move to another place seems like epic will have a shallow grave.
[email protected] Jan 11, 2019
It's called the Chinese revolution.
Quoting: Sputnik_tr_02Epic is playing dirty right from the beginning with their store. I have avoided commenting about Epic when the news about their store appeared here because I did not want to sound like a Valve fan boy but it should be clear for anyone now that even if their store were to suppor Linux there is nothing will benefit the end user here. What they are doing (Exclusive titles and so on) is utter disgusting IMHO.
From the very beginning they've been always creating store features for publishers/game devs, which most of them were basically the removal of user features. It's quite clear that epic is playing hard to take over the market with their engine.
From Valve side, I think that the best answer for Epic would be a Half Life 3... just saying.
By the way, I don't think that an open source engine would have make any difference with the current license situation. From my point of view, even if Unity was open source they could have block the SpatialOS as they did with their license modification.
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