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Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

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Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#171

Post by joshspankit »

labster wrote: post #115
bhouston wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I hate most about this is that it puts unbounded liability onto developers. And Unity can continue to raise the per-installation price as well. If they lose a bunch of customers but want to maintain their current income, why not raise it to $1 instead of just $0.27?

I’m pretty sure that would be an unconscionable contract at $1, not a mere unethical contract. The latter is legal, the former is not.

TIL about unconscionable contracts.

What jurisdictions recognize this term and legally protect those who agree to them?

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#172

Post by joshspankit »

janalsncm wrote: post #3

I posted this a few weeks ago, there’s already a project for tracking the TOS of many companies. This came up when people realized Zoom had done some funny business with their TOS as well. I see Unity isn’t there though, maybe someone should submit a PR. https://github.com/OpenTermsArchive/contrib-versions

Another reply[0] notes something helpful: there is a copy of Unity’s git repo

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517378

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#173

Post by numpad0 »

tjpnz wrote: post #96
numpad0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and/or they wanted to set up existing games. Something like 1 in 5 of top 50 iOS games, free-to-play and majority Asian(Chinese or Japanese), are making banks and on Unity. Personally I’m wondering if Chinese gamedev industry would “buy Godot” or do something to that effect. Japanese publishers won’t be able to do that nor would be willing to pay, so I’m guessing they’ll migrate existing to UE or wind down Unity…

Why couldn't Japanese publishers buy Godot (assuming that they even could)?

I just can't see it happening - I wasn't meaning financial acquisition per se, it could be internally circulated fork a la closed-source Linux Kernel on embedded devices, and Chinese games developers/publishers seem - albeit just impression, to have better vertical integration and open minds toward pulling it, whereas Japanese companies have bad track records on shared codebases.

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#174

Post by Modified3019 »

callalex wrote: post #110
awesomeMilou wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did Unity recently get acquired, new investors or new management? EA's former CEO, John Riccitiello took over last year. He inaugurated himself with quite a few statements, one of which was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32097752

How do these fuckers keep failing up?

Anyone can be a failure, but it takes a lot of work to be a real piece of shit.

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#175

Post by noduerme »

justinclift wrote: post #124
noduerme wrote: post #117

Adobe put a silent kill switch into Flash player, rendering 10 years worth of casual games I'd written immediately unplayable. As a result of Adobe's actions, a whole sector of lone devs and small teams turned to Unity to build games that would've otherwise been built in AS3. I'm glad I didn't end up going that route, but I really feel for the folks who are now getting screwed again.

What was the silent kill switch? Was it a time based thing that applies to everyone or something? Asking because a friend is playing a lot of ancient flash games recently using Ruffle (OSS flash player written in Rust), and doesn't seem to be having problems like that.

The last few major versions of Flash Player had a time-based kill switch that made them stop functioning after a certain date. Adobe didn't announce this until well over 90% of people with Flash installed had been auto-updated to one of those death versions. When they announced it, the date was less than a year away, and plenty of people were in the middle of building large projects that would need to be totally rewritten.

To be clear, Ruffle only [fully] emulates Actionscript 1/2, which was the Flash language prior to 2006. The games you see resurrected in Ruffle are mostly what people associate with the casual single-player Flash games and funky art projects from the early 2000s. Most of my work was in the Actionscript 3 language, which came out in 2006 and featured GPU support, networking via sockets, peer to peer RTMP messaging, and lots of other modern features to make fast 2D/3D gaming and multiplayer possible. With AS3 you could deploy a game with the browser plugin and compile the same code to iOS and Android "native" apps with Adobe Air, which basically shoehorned the plugin into the binaries. Air is still around, but the whole ecosystem is dead.

When Adobe pulled the plug, I'd just spent almost two years building the second entire game engine I wrote in AS3, this one for open/endless isometric worlds with terrain generation, character spawning, physics, particle systems, 3D embeds, networking, chat, lobbies... and our 3-person team had only deployed our first game with it. The idea of rewriting half a million lines of code in Unity or TS+Pixijs or something else... I just gave up on making games after that.

Ruffle is a great project for the older Flash stuff, and they've made some progress with coverage of AS3 now, but they don't support a lot of the critical things needed to run these games (particularly with networking APIs and Stage3D), and they probably never will. None of my advanced work runs under Ruffle, not even my old AS3 website from 2009. In theory I could rewrite that code to work around Ruffle's limitations, but I can't even run the Adobe tools anymore to recompile or modify assets unless I go back to an ancient laptop that never got the death-update.

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#176

Post by saladprince »

tomnipotent wrote: post #76
zerocrates wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder just how much this change is geared at capturing value from what's already out there, i.e. the retroactivity is the point.

> geared at capturing value from what's already out there This sounds like a plausible motive. There's a handful of huge games using Unity that together generate upwards of 20bln annually, such as Pokemon GO, Honor of Kings, and Genshin Impact. I'm guessing their soundbite of "developers being excited" over the change is with those behemoths in mind, and not the other games that are barely making ends meet. These par…

Just so you know Genshin and Star Rail is using a heavily customized Unity Engine under Unity China. Unity China is a separate entity from Unity Technologies. They (mihoyo) is also a major shareholders in Unity China.

https://blog.unity.com/news/unity-forms-new-venture-to-manag...

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#177

Post by harles »

danielbln wrote: post #144
brundolf wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll see I guess! But even if it's not illegal the shortsightedness is staggering, which makes me question if leadership would have even foreseen legal problems

Well, about that: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unity-software-incs-president...

I saw that, but I honestly think it’s a non-story. That’s ~$80k of stock. I sold more of my company’s stock the last quarter (just as part of my vesting schedule) and I’m no exec. I’m sure that’s just a small part of his vest for the quarter - possibly even less than 10%.

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#178

Post by justinclift »

noduerme wrote: post #175
justinclift wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the silent kill switch? Was it a time based thing that applies to everyone or something? Asking because a friend is playing a lot of ancient flash games recently using Ruffle (OSS flash player written in Rust), and doesn't seem to be having problems like that.

The last few major versions of Flash Player had a time-based kill switch that made them stop functioning after a certain date. Adobe didn't announce this until well over 90% of people with Flash installed had been auto-updated to one of those death versions. When they announced it, the date was less than a year away, and plenty of people were in the middle of building large projects that would need to be totally rewr…

Thanks, that's useful info.

Hopefully Ruffle keeps gaining traction and eventually is able to run all AS3 stuff.

There were some really interesting things that worked well in Flash, that HTML5 has never really seemed to equal.

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#179

Post by fennecfoxy »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #64
bhouston wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those 27cents per install are a lot of money for those type of games and will even make some business models no longer feasible. Exactly. So if they did this in an upfront way, they would have said that starting with Unity 2024 there is this new cost structure. Then game devs can make informed choices if they want to build those types of games on the platform. This retroactive stuff is insane and I cannot figure ou…

> This retroactive stuff is insane and I cannot figure out how a company can make that type of move if they care about their users. I can't even understand how it can possibly be legal. How on earth is it even possible to say "your game which was released before we updated this license is subject to the updated version"? IANAL but that sure seems like something which would require both parties to agree to the updated…

waves in the general direction of the housing market, politicians being "lobbied" (bought) by companies, rampant destruction of the environment by industry; but paper straws for us, the numerous tax havens and the lack of any reform from Panama papers, government "contractors" padding their purses with tax money (see projects like crossrail), privately owned utilities completely mismanaged and corrupt (see Thameswater)

We live in a dystopia lmao. Of course stuff like this is possible. Unity took one leap forward and pissed everyone off, they'll "fix" it by taking one or two steps back and then everyone will forget about it, just like we forget about everything else.

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#180

Post by sn41 »

lucb1e wrote: post #90
sn41 wrote: post #8

Just a side thought related to this: can there be a community supported initiative to parse what TOS documents of different companies mean, and specifically, what to watch out for in each company's TOS vis-a-vis what is the norm in a certain industry? Right now, the "gotcha" power is entirely one-sided. A wiki-like approach towards documenting TOS might make the user better aware of what to really watch out for when…

(TL;DR: this describes an old project of mine which tried to do something similar, which may be useful as inspiration for such a project. More testing is needed to say whether simple string replacements work sufficiently well, but initial results were promising. These days, LLMs are probably even more promising.) I tried making this once for employment contracts, which would string-replace difficult phrases with a ve…

Very interesting :)

In legal settings, I would rather trust your approach than an LLM. Your approach has "backtraceability" - you can build a log of how each transform worked, from the original, to the final : it's a series of localized transforms.

LLMs (at least to my understanding) cannot have that, because it is based on a global approach. So there is a good chance that, what it spits out might be readable, but it's one-to-one correspondence with the original legal document may not exist. So it may lead you to a false sense of security.

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