Epic sets up fund with Improbable for ‘unity disadvantaged developers’
Epic Games has teamed up with Improbable, the developer of the SpatialOS gdk, to set up a $25 million fund. This is aimed at developers who have been “disadvantaged by Unity’s modification of its terms and conditions”.
In a joint message, Epic and Improbable announce their collaboration. The companies cite the concerns of game developers using the Unity engine and cloud-based game development kits, or gdks, such as SpatialOS. Developers fear that their games and projects will be the victims of an ongoing conflict between Improbable and Unity.
“To help developers stranded by the engine’s new terms and conditions introduced today, Epic Games and Improbable have decided to set up a $25 million combined fund to help developers transition to open engines, services and ecosystems,” the companies say. The fund’s money comes from Epic and Improbable’s own funds.
The message refers to a change in Unity’s terms and conditions. In clause 2.4, the document explicitly excludes the use of “managed services using a cloud infrastructure, on which the Unity Runtime is installed or run on the cloud or a remote server.” Unity states that the terms were modified because the previous ones were “too vague.” The exclusion applies to “third party services that want to run the Unity Runtime in their cloud.” In that case, Unity considers it its own platform and needs to apply for a license.
Improbable claimed in response to the change that SpatialOS can no longer be used in combination with the Unity engine. The company also reported that the partnership had ended as a result and that it was not notified by Unity until January 9. In addition, Improbable accused Unity of having “damaged industry-wide projects” with its decision. In particular, the company cites “the extremely vulnerable and small developers, and large projects that have been in development for years” among those affected.
Unity denied the allegations, saying in its own blog post that it had previously warned Improbable about violating its terms of service after Improbable “misused Unity’s technology in the development, sale and marketing of its own products.” After multiple warnings, Unity had decided to revoke Improbables license for Unity Editor at the end of December.
However, developers using SpatialOS have nothing to fear and can move forward with their projects, Unity says. “When a game developer uses a Unity-based game server through their own server or generic service, such as Google Cloud Platform, AWS or Azure, it is covered by our license terms. We have never communicated to any game developer that they should stop using a game that Improbable uses as a service,” the company states.
Improbable now acknowledges that it is partly responsible for creating uncertainty about the conflict and apologizes to the developers involved. The company has indicated that it will sit down with Unity again. To what extent that is possible, partly due to the deal that Improbable has concluded with Epic Games, is unknown. Unity has not yet accepted Improbable’s invitation.