
Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more open engines’ - rohmanhakim
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/10/improbable-and-epic-games-establish-25m-fund-to-help-devs-move-to-more-open-engines-after-unity-debacle/
======
Reedx
Epic and Improbable's joint statement: [https://www.unrealengine.com/en-
US/blog/epic-games-and-impro...](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-
games-and-improbable-working-together-for-developers)

That was quick, wow. From Tim Sweeney: _" Haha, actually though I first heard
of this controversy at 1pm, Herman @ Improbable and I agreed on the fund at
6pm, live edited the announcement in Google docs till 7:30pm, released at
8pm."_
[https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/108360085780606156...](https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083600857806061568)

~~~
kayoone
_Whenever someone infringes the rights of independent developers to freely
choose and combine engines, platforms, services (including, self-interestedly
here, Epic’s own services!) the air raid sirens go off and we move quickly._

I find that a bit dishonest tbh. Epic clearly sees the opportunity to gut
punch it's competitor and use it to their advantage and lure devs away from
Unity while getting good press in the process. Not so long ago Epic was
selling their Engine for hundreds of thousands of USD while Unity was already
way more accessible to indie devs. They are insanely rich from Fortnite fame
right now, so for them this is peanuts.

~~~
jorvi
> Not so long ago Epic was selling their Engine for hundreds of thousands of
> USD

? Hasn’t Epic always been quite mod/dev/indie friendly, giving away the Unreal
SDK for free, publishing is free for non-commercial projects and as long as
you weren’t an AAA dev/publisher you ‘only’ had to pay 5% of your profits once
you made over $100.000

~~~
y4mi
You're talking about unreal engine 4 i believe. The parent is probably talking
about the previous engines. They were very expensive

~~~
jon-wood
Extensive mod support has been present in the Unreal Engine since day one - it
wasn't full source access to the engine itself, but people built some really
impressive stuff on top of the Unreal games back in the day.

~~~
jorvi
Red Orchestra and Killing Floor come to mind, both with eventually have become
full-fledged game series!

------
shmerl
There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be
more open than Unity in some ways, but it's still not really open.

And speaking of openness, didn't Epic push exclusivity approach recently in
their store? That's bad.

~~~
aphextron
>There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might
be more open than Unity in some ways, but it's still not really open.

This just isn't possible with game engines. They are the single most advanced
pieces of desktop software in existence. Sure, there are things like Godot
that are perfectly suitable for a simple indie game. But making a AAA game
engine requires the expertise of literally hundreds of top level senior
engineers with advanced physics and mathematical knowledge. There's probably
less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise
to build something at the scale of UE4. Furthermore, open source is really the
exception to the rule in game dev. Practically everything is done closed
source with some kind of licensing fees involved. It's quite a different
culture from web dev.

~~~
meditate
Godot doesn't get much interest from AAA developers because typically they are
interested in shipping on consoles, and it's impossible to support the current
crop of locked-down proprietary consoles in a free and open source engine.
Despite this I am actually very surprised at the speed that Godot has
accumulated features. I think we will start to see it shape up a lot more when
Vulkan support becomes first class. The culture change is happening, give it
time.

~~~
crazysim
Impossible? There's a company offering porting of Godot games to consoles.

[https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/consoles.html)

~~~
meditate
Sure you can port it, but as it stands that code will never be mainlined.
Meaning it will be mostly impossible for AAA developers to come together to
improve it.

------
robterrell
I'm impressed with the speed at which Epic is capitalizing on this. Tim
Sweeney's twitter feed has been brutal all day, and now this. It's possibly
not even real money being spent, if it's just "Unreal dev grants" which I
assume are licenses that probably cost Epic little or nothing, but this will
keep the story alive tomorrow.

~~~
zemo
yeah I mean, it's impressive how they inked a $25m contract on the same day
mostly after hours, and had time for their lawyers to write and negotiate the
contract and their press people to put out the PR content for it. Like wow,
Improbable's lawyers, and Epic's lawyers, and Improbable's PR, and Epic's PR
are all so incredibly fast. Especially considering Improbable's own ToS
forbids you from selling your game made on Epic's store
([https://auth.improbable.io/auth/v1/eula](https://auth.improbable.io/auth/v1/eula)
section 4.4), so Epic and Improbable didn't have a standing relationship but
started a new corporate partnership in like six hours. Wow, so fast!

or maybe the whole thing was orchestrated? I honestly can't fathom how people
are buying the story that Improbable is putting out. It's ludicrous.

------
rwilkinsons
Much as this whole situation is pretty scary from Unity - Improbable's TOS
aren't much better -
[https://auth.improbable.io/auth/v1/eula](https://auth.improbable.io/auth/v1/eula)

Section 4.4 says you can't launch any game on their tech without speaking to
them first, and you have to get explicit permission to not use Steam, or their
"content launcher"

~~~
sharpneli
Oh wow.

I wonder if Epic noticed that. Because that's bad for their own store.

~~~
dkersten
Maybe someone should tweet at them or something and see.

------
shostack
Is this related to the "commoditize your complements" article from Gwern? [1]

More open game engines = more high-quality games from developers that can be
acquired, or lowering the barrier to see what new game types start gaining
traction so they can come in with a AAA version of the next MOBA, Fortnite,
Minecraft, etc.?

[1] [https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2](https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2)

~~~
hosh
I was thinking about that too. I can see Improbable’s complement ... but not
so sure about Epic.

Then again, I remember the days of ZZT. It wasn’t an open source engine, but
there were a lot of games made on that engine.

I guess making a AAA version of a good indie concept makes economic sense.

~~~
ReptileMan
Epic are gunning at steam. They want more quality games on tgeir store, no
matter the engine. Forfeiting UE revenue for distribution cut makes sense

------
brylie
I hope they invest some of the funds into Godot engine:

[https://godotengine.org](https://godotengine.org)

~~~
chairmanwow
This project has actually really matured in a fantastic way! I have been
toying around with it in the past few weeks and have been incredibly impressed
with their progress! I would definitely want to use Godot for a serious
project. Although I am a bit nervous that things become more challenging in
more complex projects. Anyone have any experience here? I poked around for
some serious Godot projects and haven’t really seen anything too large.

------
ezekg
This seems incredibly sketchy, almost like it was a coordinated campaign
against Unity. I'd like to hear more from Unity's side because the speed at
which Epic capitalized on this is suspect.

~~~
yzb
This is similar to the MongoDB vs Amazon feud: Unity took a bad decision to
protect their product and now they are paying the consequences.

------
vanous
If you are like me wandering what is SpatialOS, from
[https://improbable.io/games](https://improbable.io/games) :

SpatialOS provides managed cloud services that solve common technical and
production challenges when you’re creating, iterating on and hosting
multiplayer games.

SpatialOS: the cloud platform for real-time multiplayer games, built with any
game engine.

------
ilaksh
This is one of the big reasons I am trying to make Irrlicht work out even
though it's dated. I am hoping shaders and some other stuff will help upgrade
the appearance of my program even in Irrlicht.

I mean if they were serious about open engines they might fund a DirectX 12
upgrade for Irrlicht or something.

~~~
slacka
I've spent quite a few hours with games based on the Irrlicht. Nice to hear
it's still being improved. Have you looked at the work the SuperTuxKart devs
have done to add shader support?[1] I've played a few round and the new tracks
are gorgeous.

[1]
[https://supertuxkart.net/Antarctica:_Technical_Details](https://supertuxkart.net/Antarctica:_Technical_Details)

~~~
ilaksh
It actually looks like they are a good portion of the way towards replacing
Irrlicht with their own engine focused on shaders.

------
rurounijones
Having recently discovered the [https://unigine.com/](https://unigine.com/)
engine which looks fantastic but costs money at even the cheapest level, I
would love more open engines.

------
zemo
Improbable's story doesn't add up. Improbable acted as if Unity changed their
terms overnight, but that's not accurate. This is Improbable's original
statement:

[https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/unity-
blocks-s...](https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/unity-blocks-
spatialos)

> Due to a change in Unity’s terms of service (clause 2.4)

The text they're talking about is dated December 5th. This capture was taken
while that Improbable blog post was fresh, on January 10th:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20190110175721/https://unity3d.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20190110175721/https://unity3d.com/legal/terms-
of-service/software)

So section 2.4 is at least a month old at this point. They said nothing to
their customers for over a month? Then they created a storm in a teacup, and a
bunch of developers freaked out and took their own games down on their own
account without ever receiving any sort of notice with Unity. Improbable
intentionally manufactured a panic: none of these game developers were
contacted by Unity or asked to take their games down.

Section 2.4 is nearly identical in the February 2018 ToS by Unity as well:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20180616042117/https://unity3d.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180616042117/https://unity3d.com/legal/terms-
of-service/software)

So Unity's response (here: [https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-
to-improba...](https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-
improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/))
that they talked to Improbable and told them they were in breach of the ToS
over a year ago is supported by the actual history of the ToS.

Consider a few things: Improbable is not actually an innocent little lamb
here: they have raised over $600m of VC money. Their Series B was over $500m:
[https://improbable.io/company/news/2017/05/11/improbable-
rai...](https://improbable.io/company/news/2017/05/11/improbable-
raises-502m-series-b-funding-round-led-by-softbank)

And then there's the other thing: SpatialOS is NOT an open system. The fact
that they're playing up their openness is the definition of smarm: the form of
virtue without the substance. They have an open source client but the server
is not open source. You can't run your own SpatialOS instances. If you
integrate their GDK into your game, you can ONLY use their managed services to
host your multiplayer server. It's purely a vendor lock-in model, they just
pretend to be open source by having open source clients.

None of the articles that have written about this have had anything to say
about Improbable's ToS, none have reached out to Unity for comment, and none
have reached out to any of the game developers whose games "were affected",
when none of the games were issued any sort of notices by Unity and none of
the games had any reason to be taken offline. Everything about this story has
been driven entirely by Improbable, without any scrutiny whatsoever, but if
you look more closely at what's going on, there are a lot of stones to turn
over.

~~~
1auralynn
Agreed. I have a platform that runs a headless version of the Unity editor on
an EC2 instance, and I read their terms of service ~2 years ago that indicated
that it might not be totally "ok". I then chatted with the guy from Unity who
handles these kinds of licenses/partnerships and he said basically once real
money starts coming in, then we'd put together some kind of licensing deal.
Until then, totally fine.

My suspsicion is the price was too steep for Improbable, but they should have
been talking to Unity about costs from the beginning. Even I have a backup
plan.

And Epic... I didn't like the way they rolled out the "free" version of UE4,
perfectly timed to fuck with Unity and this certainly feels similarly sleazy.
Back in 2006 when I was first attempting to do some 3D interactive projects, I
couldn't even EVALUATE unreal engine without paying something like $500. Unity
was a miracle.

------
dana321
I think unity just shot themselves in both feet

~~~
FrankDixon
probably, but it's not clear that they're not in the right:
[https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-
improba...](https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-
blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/)

~~~
sharpneli
If we look at the old terms of service that Unity claimed to be also
forbidding them (see the 2.4, that was recently changed).
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180616042117/https://unity3d.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180616042117/https://unity3d.com/legal/terms-
of-service/software)

IANAL but for me that looks like also banning the usual method of implementing
your games server in Unity if we think it also bans SpatialOS.

For me the old terms look like trying to get more money from services like
PlayStation Now. However if they really did forbid SpatialOS then that means
every single mobile game with server implemented in Unity are also breaking
the TOS and should be shut down asap.

Rergardless this debacle proves that Unity is more than willing to interprete
their TOS quite liberally if they smell money. So if you build a big MMO that
rakes in billions you should expect Unity to barge in and use that, or some
other, part of TOS to demand more money from you.

EDIT: My hunch in how this went down. Year ago unity told them that 2.4 breaks
the TOS and wanted more money. Improbable said "Nuhhuh, can't you read?" until
Unity changed their TOS and said "Yeah! It does!".

So if Unity ever says that you break their TOS and they want money it's better
to pay them regardless of what the TOS says because otherwise they just change
the TOS retroactively.

~~~
dwild
> For me the old terms look like trying to get more money from services like
> PlayStation Now. However if they really did forbid SpatialOS then that means
> every single mobile game with server implemented in Unity are also breaking
> the TOS and should be shut down asap.

> Rergardless this debacle proves that Unity is more than willing to
> interprete their TOS quite liberally if they smell money. So if you build a
> big MMO that rakes in billions you should expect Unity to barge in and use
> that, or some other, part of TOS to demand more money from you.

Everyone that defends Unity here seems to forget that, which is 100% of the
issue here. When Unity warns them a year before or whatever won't change a
thing, theses terms are so wide that everyone using it on their servers are in
danger and this is the true issue.

There's not a single time frame that would allow any game to move out of
Unity, even more so a whole platform like SpatialOS that would imply many
games. That would be incredibly expensive too.

Personally you would have told me the same a week ago, I would have said I
trust Unity not to do that to their customers, now because of Improbable, I
know this is false. Now I know that if they see more money to be made, that I
would actually actually lose the rights over my games binaries.

~~~
WorldMaker
Right, the clock starts ticking when they make the TOS violation public
knowledge, not when they privately confer about it, because it is only when it
is public that how wide they are interpreting the TOS violation and how it may
affect _everyone else_ can be seen, including whether or not they plan to
enforce it equally (which can be a determiner in courts if the TOS is
enforceable at all if they are only picking and choosing violations per whim
as opposed to equally enforcing all of them they become aware of, though
IANAL).

Even from Improbable's standpoint it made at least some sense for them to
assume it was just personal bullying until the very minute Unity made it a
public issue.

------
jononor
This is just Epic trying to get some good press.

Instead Steam/Valve should fund open-source game engines and development
tools. For them it is a complement to their business model, so the incentives
are aligned. And they can ensure a smooth path to market for the game
developers. Everyone wins (well, maybe except for Epic/Unity).

------
Animats
OK, what does "more open engines" mean? UE4 is open source, with payments
required if you have significant revenue. That's fine. Improbable is closed
source running on Google servers with a big markup; you're just the client.
Does this mean Improbable is opening up the back end? Or what?

~~~
Matterrr
It's not open source, it's source-available, which is almost irrelevant in
terms of openness and freedom

~~~
Animats
You mean UE4, or Improbable?

------
adtac
As someone who's completely unversed in game engines, will this result in
better native Linux gaming support? That's honestly all I care about.

~~~
tehbeard
Linux gaming support is really at the mercy of the engine Devs wanting to do
it. There isn't enough of a market share for it to be "obviously viable" (i.e.
stupid not to do it) last time I looked into the numbers.

~~~
LolNoGenerics
Plus the mercy of 3d card companies to make their linux driver's suck less.

------
kristianp
Dup of?:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400)

~~~
shinymark
No, this is new drama as of this evening. Related, for sure, but this is
escalating quickly!

------
superkuh
If a company goes to Epic they'll have to be careful that after success Epic
doesn't clone their game but make it perform better and take their
marketshare.

~~~
MattRix
Anyone who calls Fortnite a clone of PUBG hasn't played Fortnite.

~~~
bopbop
To be fair, it was the PUBG developers themselves who called Fortnite a clone:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/09/22/pubg-
deve...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/09/22/pubg-developer-
calls-out-fortnite-for-copying-its-battle-royale-format/)

And also Epic themselves stated Fortnite was their "own version" of "Battle
Royale games like PUBG"

[https://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/09/12/fortnite-
battle-r...](https://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/09/12/fortnite-battle-
royale-launches-september-26/)

