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Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's not the same, but he's talking about "freely choosing and combining engines". UE was never even an option for indie devs a few years ago.

Besides, Unity clearly stated that Improbable knew about their TOS violation for at least half a year and Unity's reasoning also makes some sense, as Improbable is bundling Unity's SDK in their product. Problem is, that it's too late now because Improbable blew this up from their perspective omitting important information about what was actually going on.

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Freely choosing does not mean getting things for free. You can freely choose to combine technologies/tools, but you must still have licenses for said tools. Unity’s terms out right prevent you from using some tools, regardless of if you have licenses or not.

As an analogy, I have the right to live anywhere I want in my country (where I live is a free choice), that doesn’t mean I can afford to actually do so.

No, Unity's terms state that you need an additional license if you want to use some tools because that's how it's monetized. Remember, Unity's licensing has to be more complex because it supports free usage as well as paid usage and does so all without royalties.

Saying that Unity is wrong because they have complex licensing is just as misguided as saying that Epic is wrong because they charge royalties. Should Unity invest $25 million into a fund for "royalty-free game engines"?

>Unity's terms state that you need an additional license if you want to use some tools because that's how it's monetized

That's a bit dishonest, when they say "you need an additional license" for cloud platforms they mean a custom license that has to be directly negotiated with Unity, it not just something you can click and buy; meaning no transparency and pretty much a closed door.

Are you saying there's no way Improbable could have partnered with Unity? I get the impression it was simply a disagreement about who got what share of the bounty.

We don't know the percentages of the disagreement, maybe Unity asked for 90% or something illogical for Improbable to accept.

I agree. I think there's lots we don't know about this. It feels like "Clash of the corps" rather than "Boo! Evil bigcorp!"

Until we know more I'm hitting the popcorn.

I was replying to Epic not supporting free choice in the past because “UE was never even an option for indie devs a few years ago.”, I should have quoted it to be clear.

I also didn’t say Unity is in the wrong, necessarily.

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