Unreal uses perpetual licenses for their versions meaning this kind of bullshit behavior is not possible
Then it's goofy af to say Godot might make a license change that necessitates using one version in perpetuity-except a version you and others are allowed to modify and distribute.
Isn't Unreal's source open?
(currently there seem to be around half a million users with access)
That's basically what I understand as "getting a license", OTH I accept probably 5..10 EULAs a week without thinking or even reading the text (most of them are not enforceable anyway).
There is nothing unique about German law here. The same is true in the USA and most other countries. If a EULA or any other contract (whether agreed verbally, signed physically, digitally, or via a "click") violates the law, it can be considered invalid/unenforceable. It has nothing to do with how the agreement was agreed to, but with what the agreement contains. (There may be some legal theory that may carry some weight that a contract agreed to via a "click" is more likely to be unconscionable that one agreed to with a physical signature, but that does not automatically make all "click" agreements unenforceable.)
Interestingly, Unity runs afoul of many of those.
You're still welcome to contact them directly and try to get some kind of contract directly if you can't agree to the EULA for access.
I was going to comment that it’s viewable by anyone on their GitHub, but you are correct: you have to be part of the Epic GitHub organisation to access the repo. Getting access is easy, but you do have to agree to their licensing terms to do so. So yes, what you said.
Have you read the unreal engine license agreement? [0]. Section 3.a covers modifications
Edit: I see some language covering this further up.
EDIT: To elaborate, this is an article about a company fucking users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase. Your response is yes but this other company would never fuck users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase.
Well, Epic didn't do that when it went through it's aggressive growth and the last time it dumped it's business model. Instead, they changed their licensing to lower fees, and when you look at what they did across the board, made things better for customers and game developers.
So, all evidence is to the contrary.
Edit: Also, nice strawman.
People, on the other hand, I can trust. Not often, but in cases where a person has made a long series of decisions over a decade or more, you can get a feel for what their value system is. Tim Sweeney is in this category. He was involved in Unreal back when I was in undergrad, more than 20 years ago. So I sort of put him in the same category as Gabe Newell and John Carmack: relatively enlightened game business leaders that understand the true value that gamers and developers derive from the ecosystem. None of them are in to make another dollar in the next quarter: they are focused on long term success and the are passionate about games themselves.
So it's not that you're wrong, it's just that your argument applies cynicism uniformly, and I'm not sure that's fair given the history of those involved.
Holy straw man! And there’s certainly no self-interest involved with me using their engine without giving them a cut under 1 mill right?
You can make this argument about literally anything
It's fine to support them while they are the underdog and are saying and doing the right thing, but don't pretend like they will say and do the right thing forever.
Motivations matter, because they will decide in which direction a project moves over time, or if situations change. Epic is the "good guy" now, but only because they are an underdog. If they become the dominator, they might become the predator which Unity tries to be at the moment.
But if we are honest, such uncertain possibilities don't matter if they are so far in the future. This might be a problem for future games, 10, 20 years down the river..
More then 50% of the shares/votes is owned by a single person. The founder and CEO Tim Sweeney.
Which doesn't really matter unless you'll lose control. If 1 entity has >50% it's pretty safe.
Tim Sweeney founded Epic and wrote the Unreal engine himself. John Riccitiello’s whole career is in management. Even if they’re both entirely motivated by profit, they have different perspectives on how to get there.
Also, Unity is a public company, while Epic is private. Even though Tencent owns a considerable share of the company, Sweeney still holds over 50% ownership. That gives them very different incentives.
Sometimes we forget that executives are people too and they have their own personalities. Tim Cook famously[0] told climate change denialists in a shareholder meeting that “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock”. Sure enough, shareholders are also not solely motivated by profit, and voted with Cook on that occasion. It’s useful to remember that cynicism isn’t the same thing as realism.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim-cook...
Further more, Tim is bound by law to do what is best for the shareholders. Simply put, if Tim favored environmental concerns over profit he would be removed.
Businesses are legally bound to act in the best interest of their shareholders. This is quite an open ended precedent.
You can argue almost anything meets this criterion, in some egregious scenarios a court won't buy it, but they will give you enormous leeway.
There is a lot - A LOT - of room for ambiguity and debate on the specifics of shareholder value and "best interests." The "legal constraints to act in the best interest" is not some set of corporate rules and KPIs codified into our legal code write large. It's not about maximizing a specific KPI over a fixed timeframe.
Not to mention Sweeney is the majority shareholder in Epic's case.
Businesses are legally bound to follow the official decisions of shareholders at official meetings. Anything beyond that is merely "a good idea".
If they are legally bound, there must be either a law or contract, can you cite either?
This stupid meme needs to die already. There is no such obligation, he only has a fiduciary duty to not trash the company and spend the earnings on cocaine. "companies are legally forced to maximise profit" has never been true and this piece of misinformation has been going around for ages now.
And, insofar as such an obligation to “maximise shareholder value” might exist, that obligation doesn’t necessarily translate into “maximise profit”.
The shareholders of a theatre company might care more about breaking even while getting an interesting assortment of plays produced with a great cast than they do about making a bunch of money out of the venture, so an executive who makes a bunch of money by running productions of uninspired cash grab shows won’t actually be maximising value. Likewise, I’m sure that Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds care more about Wrexham AFC’s managers getting good athletic results than they do about making a bunch of money.
And even where it does translate into "maximise profit" because it's what shareholders of a particular company may want, there is no timeframe for it, and there is no way to tell whether any particular decision by the CEO runs contrary to the goal of eventually maximising profits.
Companies can spend all their revenues plus a constant stream of new capital on growing market share or revenue, on charitable activities or the happiness of employees, on huge research and development projects or on restructuring after restructuring and still credibly claim that all of it is ultimately meant to maximise profits.
The point where CEOs and CFOs have to be careful is when the company faces solvency issues. That's where legal limits of freewheeling decision making kick in, because it's where it's no longer about shareholders but about creditors.
As long as the executives are behaving generally how the shareholders want, it's not a problem.
My (IANAL) reading of it is that maximising shareholder value is probably the law, but it's practically unenforcible. Being practically unenforcible doesn't stop CEOs and boards from using it as a guiding principle.
And that's just civil influence, there are legal mechanisms indeed in place if a CEO "trashes a company" and what that means is different depending on the company.
It's more like too hard to be proven in any way. Unless you live in an simulator it's really hard to say which set of decisions is better than another. People often say it is obvious or in hindsight but fact is there are no such hard proofs.
eBay v Newmark
Don’t fall for feelgood greenwashing.
I mean, Apple should just release a new model every five years and really get that footprint down...
Yeah, right now (and I hope it keeps increasing thanks to the Unity news).
I got burnt once (and almost twice) from this in the past. cocos2d-iPhone used to be huge, and Zynga even contributed to it. I released two games using it, and started another one. And then it stopped getting updated (and Apple keeps breaking things like Apple likes to do), so it died on the vine and I had to port to something else.
Currently making a game in Monogame, and while it did get a significant update a little over a year ago, it's had very little activity on it since then and no other releases besides a hotfix shortly after, and zero communication about what's going on with any of their official channels at least. Not great especially since there seems to be spotty support for .Net 6 outside of Windows still, and I keep running into various issues with its 3D support (which it is mainly supposed to be a 2D game, but it does support 3D to a certain extent).
Also while it claims to support platforms like PS4 and Switch, I see almost no documentation on it, and very little documentation on getting Steamworks working with it (I have some basic things working, but I'm having to figure things for Unity first and then porting that knowledge over). Also most of its multiplayer libraries seem outdated, at least the ones I looked up. And the forums/Discord still have some activity on them, but not a ton. Also I'd love to make a game that supported VR (almost switched to Unity just for that alone).
I actually compared its Github activity to Godot a week ago, and Godot looks SO much better supported than Monogame at this point, that I was already considering either porting or making my next game in Godot before this Unity news was announced. But maybe that's just me hopping onto another platform that will have the same problem in 5 years after I've gotten pretty invested into it.
I also know Unity (worked on a game professionally years back) and considered switching to that for my game too, but that mostly got killed by this announcement.
Personally I prefer code-based development (I don't like using an editor too much), so if Monogame was better supported and had much better 3D support I'd probably just stick with it. I thought I was going to when I first started using it seriously three years ago. But I hesitate to keep dumping time into it if they don't maintain it.
Also I made a small game with Phaser.js and was going to do more with that, but even that creator is pretty much the only one maintaining it and they got sidelined by life for about six months (which is fine, but get someone to help keep it going if you can! I know that's hard though). Phaser at least is already close to what I want from it, and doesn't seem to need much else for the foreseeable future.
Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they're doing it because it is beneficial to them. Epic is a multi-billion dollar corporation part owned by a massive conglomerate.
> BS: in reality it's usually one or two guys who actually do the actual work.
Over the last week, Godot had 32 authors pushing 52 commits. Over the last month it had 135 authors. This is not "one or two guys".
> So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support.
Guess what, if a closed-source company decides to stop working on their product you're also stuck, but now you're even more stuck because you don't have access to the source to make your own changes!