The Guardian newspaper reports that a spat between two companies, Improbable and Unity, has put numerous virtual worlds/games in jeopardy:
[Improbable’s] core product, a cloud-based server system called SpatialOS, allows video game developers and others to build enormous virtual worlds that exist and operate independently of player action.
SpatialOS only works in a finished game when paired with a graphics engine capable of displaying those worlds on the computers, phones or games consoles of players.
On Thursday, the developers of one of the largest commercial engines, Unity3D, told Improbable that a change to the engine’s terms of service was intended to block SpatialOS, and all games created that use the technology – including those which had already shipped – from working with Unity.
“Unity has clarified to us that this change effectively makes it a breach of terms to operate or create existing SpatialOS and Unity games and in-development games, including production games,” Improbable said on its website.
The company added: “Unity has revoked our ability to continue working with the engine for breaching the newly changed terms of service in an unspecified way.
“Overnight, this is an action by Unity that has immediately done harm to projects across the industry, including those of extremely vulnerable or small-scale developers and damaged major projects in development over many years.
“Games that have been funded based on the promise of SpatialOS to deliver next-generation multiplayer are now endangered due to their choice of front-end engine. Live games are now in legal limbo.”
Among the virtual worlds/games which are suddenly impacted by this dispute are Worlds Adrift (which has already launched) and Seed (which is a promising virtual world/MMO still in development).
Frankly, this sort of dispute is one of the reasons why companies such as Linden Lab and High Fidelity build their own game engines, even though that means it often takes longer to add new features. For example, both Sinespace and VRChat are built on top of the Unity game engine (one of the companies involved in this particular fight), which means that they have to carefully check for things that break whenever Unity issues an update to their game engine.
Then again, Linden Lab and High Fidelity need to do that when they update their in-house game engines as well. But at least they have complete control over the situation. I’m sure that the developers of Worlds Adrift and Seed are feeling rather powerless tonight.
Thanks to Gindipple for the heads up!
