Unity Engine ToS change makes cloud-based SpatialOS games illegal

damn. I was looking forward to playing Worlds Adrift someday. Hopefully they can get this resolved.

Thank you! Actually explains what Spatial OS is, why it is used, and what changed in Unity’s ToS that affects it.

I sort of find it poetic. If you decide to build on a commercial platform like Unity's you're subject to the whims of Unity Technologies.

It sucks, but game engines are by far one of the riskiest investments I've seen across technical subfields.

You have all of this engine-specific knowledge, and all of a sudden moving engines is near impossible. Tons of common things across major game engines, but in practice it's not so easy to move here or there.

It's not like a database, where maybe some data type quirks are a bit different, and hopefully you can just change the underlying implementation behind your DB abstraction. Change a connector or something of the sort.

With game engines, you'd have to reexport models from sources, textures might be treated a bit differently, map formats might have to be scrapped all together or converted using some at-the-moment nonexistent scene converter. There's a lot involved.

I’m pretty aghast at this move by Unity. They have made it clear they have a managed cloud hosting infrastructure in the works, but explicitly blocking others from providing it as a service strikes me as a “we really need this revenue and will do anything to protect it” move.

PlayFab is unmentioned but they will also be affected by this move as they offer a dedicated server hosting service among their offerings.

Even more frustrating is that Unity’s offering is not even in beta yet. Details have been sparse, though I expect to hear more at GDC this year.

I’m surprised the developers can’t simply reject the changes to the Unity TOS and keep using an old version of the engine (especially for production games!)

Anyone know why that’s not an option?