Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

End of the Machinery Game Engine

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 101 posts

End of the Machinery Game Engine

#1

Post by eigenbom »

The Machinery game engine seems terminated. From email:

Thanks so much for supporting The Machinery.

Unfortunately, we’ve reached a point where it’s no longer possible for us to continue in the current direction. Per Section 14 of the End User License Agreement, the development of The Machinery will cease, we will no longer offer GitHub access, all licenses are terminated as of 14 days after the date of this notice, and you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries. You will receive a full refund of your annual license payment through Gumroad.

We really appreciated you being a part of the Our Machinery Community. We hope we have been helpful in some way to your development needs.

-Our Machinery

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#2

Post by josephcsible »

Hopefully this will be a lesson that proprietary licenses subject you to rug pulls with no recourse, which FOSS licenses protect you from. Had Machinery been FOSS, then you could at least still keep using the last version of the engine that they did release, and even fork it to continue development yourself.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#3

Post by jsheard »

Ceasing development is one thing, rug pulling licensees by demanding they delete the framework they've built their projects on is another thing entirely. The hell happened at Our Machinery?

The Machinery was a young engine but it had pedigree as the spiritual successor to Bitsquid, which did ship in a number of commercial games until it was killed by Autodesk after they acquired it. The main developers went on to found Our Machinery.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#5

Post by MikeBVaughn »

"... all licenses are terminated as of 14 days after the date of this notice, and you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries."

"We hope we have been helpful in some way to your development needs."

That's a load-bearing "some way," if I've ever seen one.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#6

Post by jwitthuhn »

This looks pretty shady.

The current EULA on the website includes a bit that says they can terminate your license and ask you to delete all source and binaries entirely at their discretion[1].

The latest copy on the wayback machine from May does not have that bit.[2]

1. https://ourmachinery.com/eula.html 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20220529230958/https://ourmachin...

So they used the 'we can update the eula at any time at our discretion' clause to add a 'we can tell you to delete your source and binaries' clause and then immediately invoked it.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#7

Post by MikeBVaughn »

jwitthuhn wrote: post #6

This looks pretty shady. The current EULA on the website includes a bit that says they can terminate your license and ask you to delete all source and binaries entirely at their discretion[1]. The latest copy on the wayback machine from May does not have that bit.[2] 1. https://ourmachinery.com/eula.html 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20220529230958/https://ourmachin... So they used the 'we can update the eula at any…

I was wondering about that. When you go to the Our Machine web page, it shows the EULA having been updated yesterday, which immediately made me suspicious.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#9

Post by echelon »

> all licenses are terminated as of 14 days after the date of this notice, and you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries

If I had invested a year into building a game on their engine, and they told me to delete my game, I would sue. This is serious monetary harm being inflicted upon developers.

If they're going to drop the engine as a product, I would expect a perpetual "same-version, no further support" license offered to existing users. That's the bare minimum these folks could do.

This way of handling things is screwing over anyone that bet their project on the engine in the biggest way possible. It is not trivial to change engines while in flight. They're asking people to do a complete rewrite.

And if they're really closing up shop, why not release the engine as open source? Are they getting bought out silently?

Makes no sense.

Post reply on HN