Comment by sharpneli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sharpneli | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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.

> 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.

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.

They state: “At the core, the Streaming and Cloud Gaming Restrictions terms are still the same as before. We received feedback that the language was ambiguous, so we updated our Terms of Service to be clear on our distribution and streaming restrictions.”

Which I highly doubt. But IANAL. It just seems silly that it went “your in breach of our conditions!” “No we aren’t” “Yes you are (also we just now changed them”.

Could have gone like:

"You're in violation of the ToS."

"Our legal team looked it over. We don't think we are."

"Well here's a more clear version of the ToS. You definitely are in violation."

Unity might think they only changed the wording, but they feel they kept the spirit of the original ToS.

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