Unity have changed their terms of service, which has essentially blocked SpatialOS and streaming services

Godot is the future! (and for that matter, all other REAL open source game engines)

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: 14So we won't see any Unity games in Project Stream then?

This would seem to prohibit that yeah.

... Unless licensed to do so. Something that's probably not too hard to obtain, if I am to guess.

Quoting: x_wingIt's a little ambiguous, but in the paragraph it talks about "...transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices", so it shouldn't affect steam links as is not steam the one that is streaming but the user to himself. In other words, the full paragraph refers to what distributors can do, but not what end users can.

If it does not apply to Steam link, what about twitch ?

well, building a multiplayer game should be a massive time and resource investment. Or you lock yourself into an engine vendor like unity3d, lumberjack or hero engine.
Godot is fine but it's no client-server engine.
And that's why I want see more native MMOs on linux. Thank you Albion online and Project gorgon for being there!

Quoting: MaxPower

Quoting: x_wingIt's a little ambiguous, but in the paragraph it talks about "...transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices", so it shouldn't affect steam links as is not steam the one that is streaming but the user to himself. In other words, the full paragraph refers to what distributors can do, but not what end users can.

If it does not apply to Steam link, what about twitch ?

Twitch players are users of the game and have not entered into any license deal with Unity so they should not be included either, IANAL however so don't take it as 100% certain but it would be strange if a license between a developer and Unity would spill over to the end user.

[quote=Nevertheless]

Quoting: CFWhitman

Quoting: NeverthelessIt appears to be an anti-competitive ploy. They now own a streaming service...

If that's the reason, then I think protecting the streaming service will most likely hurt the rest more than it helps.

Wait, what streaming service does Unity own/have, or is this all about future potential?


Last edited by iiari on 10 January 2019 at 7:23 pm UTC

[quote=iiari]

Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: CFWhitman

Quoting: NeverthelessIt appears to be an anti-competitive ploy. They now own a streaming service...

If that's the reason, then I think protecting the streaming service will most likely hurt the rest more than it helps.

Wait, what streaming service does Unity own/have, or is this all about future potential?

According to the article, they bought the streaming part of Multiplay in 2017. (http://multiplaygameservers.com).

IANAL and I didn't read Unity EULA but AFAIK Unity isn't a service and can't be regulated with ToS where you need to accept the changes or stop using it. It's a product and as such it's distributed with a copy of a licence, said licence is acquired for a period of time or for a number of uses and unless it's revoked and then given again in different sounding its terms cannot just change. It seems bullshit when somebody says all games that are already on a streaming service have to stop being streamed because the game engine's licencing changed. They possibly can't update and keep streaming but that's about it.

Other than that, I fail to see how a signal from my GPU that's generated by someone else's software is a subject to their licencing whether I stream it into my own screen or over the network. Nor what kind of input I'm using, local or remote. A streaming service shouldn't even need to get in any kind of agreement with Unity devs just to render the game on their platform before streaming it to their end user, all they should need is one regular copy of the game bought from the developer. If Microsoft had claimed people cannot fax the financial reports they compute in Excel because the recipient party didn't had to buy the Excel's licence from Microsoft to open them, or that users cannot run multiple copies of Excel on their machine in parallel, nobody would think twice about how ridiculous it sounds.


Last edited by cprn on 10 January 2019 at 8:02 pm UTC

Quoting: GuestWhen unity stops being about unity

Have you heard of a company called Electronic Arts? ;)


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 10 January 2019 at 9:14 pm UTC

An interesting sidelight:

I have used MultiPlay servers for over five years for both communication (Mumble) and game servers. I got a notification from MultiPlay last Thursday (1/3/2019) that the servers that I purchase will be shut down on the 28th of February 2019. The email had this link to the MultiPlay Blog:

https://multiplay.com/2019/01/03/important-information-regarding-multiplays-community-server-offering/

There are two takeaways that I get from this post:
1. They have decided to "close our community server offering",
2. Their new business model will focus on "providing services direct to game creators and a better experience for gamers"

I am having a hard time sorting this all out, but my first thought is that MultiPlay (now owned by Unity) is gearing up to be a/the gaming platform for Unity based games.


Last edited by RFSharpe on 15 January 2019 at 4:41 am UTC

Quoting: RFSharpeAn interesting sidelight:

I have used MultiPlay servers for over five years for both communication (Mumble) and game servers. I got a notification from MultiPlay last Thursday (1/3/2019) that the servers that I purchase will be shut down on the 28th of February 2019. The email had this link to the MultiPlay Blog:

https://multiplay.com/2019/01/03/important-information-regarding-multiplays-community-server-offering/

There are two takeaways that I get from this post:
1. They have decided to "close our community server offering",
2. Their new business model will focus on "providing services direct to game creators and a better experience for gamers"

I am having a hard time sorting this all out, but my first thought is that MultiPlay (now owned by Unity) is gearing up to be gaming platform for Unity based games.

I was wondering how long it would be before something like that happened, it was obvious once Unity purchased them that's the way it would be going.

I now just use https://linuxgsm.com/ on a cheap cloud unit if I want to host a game server.

Quoting: liamdaweI was wondering how long it would be before something like that happened, it was obvious once Unity purchased them that's the way it would be going.

And one could argue, with their subsidies, Epic wants their store to be the platform the Unreal engine...

Unity have responded: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/

Quoting: liamdaweUnity have responded: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/

I think I can see what Unity is trying to get at here;

QuoteAs an example, if you have made a Windows or Linux player build of your game to be an authoritative game server and run that on a server in-house, you can continue to develop, publish or operate your game as usual. If you rent a server or pay for a cloud instance to run the game, you can continue to develop, publish or operate your game as usual.

However, if a third party service wants to run the Unity Runtime in the cloud with their additional SDK, we consider this a platform.

So basically they want their ToS to basically say that you're not allowed to do Game as a Service - or Game-Server as a Service - systems. You're only allowed to run instances of your game on systems that you implicitly own by paying for them, so systems that are owned by other providers aren't allowed to run your game for you unless you - as the games developer - pay them to do so.

Going to be interesting to see how they're planning on writing this in legalese without making it really easy to abuse, as you could easily misconstrue this to mean that players aren't allowed to host their own servers for your games, meaning you have to provide all server hosting if you want to do Unity games.

It's indeed a bit confusing, but I think most of the confusion comes from the fact that most people don't know that Unity is used for far more than just games.

In the case of games, it's not a problem as long as the game developers bought their licenses or stayed with the free version of Unity. Once the game is released, if the game has ads in it (like in most mobile games), then Unity receives some cash.

But if you're doing a regular application with Unity, it's trickier. It will depend on the purpose of this application. Say this application is a VR ad for a car. The car company bought their Unity licenses, they can publish their ad wherever they want, everyone is happy.

But what if the application is a web service allowing game developers to use the Unity runtime for free. The base company paid for one license and no one else is paying a license. As much as free is good, Unity still needs to have a viable business model, and this sort of loophole is a problem for their business model.

That is why basically they're saying that games aren't impacted by the new ToS/EULA, but service providers can't profit off of this loophole anymore.

Unity started to speak with Improbable two years ago! But Improbable stated on twitter that it was a complete surprise for them... I'm disappointed by this kind of behaviour, I must say.


Last edited by Creak on 11 January 2019 at 4:11 am UTC

Quoting: liamdaweUnity have responded: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/

And the return:

https://twitter.com/UnrealEngine/status/1083566179258642432?s=20

Epic vs World!

Will this impact streamed/cloud computers like Shadow? ( https://shadow.tech/ )

I mean obviously the computer being hosted on a VM then streamed to the customer does this count as a streaming service or as a computer?

I fully support this decision.

Offloading significant game rendering to a offsite location could seriously geopardize the archival abilities of gaming and playing content in the future when such services are shutdown.

I don't want to buy into that distopia. Its anti consumer and anti gamer.

Thats not good. Unity is trying to commit suicide a bit, Epic decides to go their own way with less and less linux support, Quake engines have no more linux support and so on...
Is there any commonly used engine left which really supports linux too ?

Hm... isn't "streaming" meant as in transferring game world data to the players? I don't think "game streaming" is meant with this. SpatialOS is not a streaming provider. It is a game server hoster with it's own scale-able network solution for games.

I'm not quite sure why so many people think Unity is doing something evil. What is it that they did?


Last edited by Doc Angelo on 11 January 2019 at 9:38 pm UTC