17 ms·
Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more open engines’
- superkuh 8y agoIf a company goes to Epic they'll have to be careful that after success Epic doesn't clone their game but make it perform better and take their marketshare.
- meritt 8y agoI'm not following your logic. Game companies copy other successful games all the time. Why would using their engine make it more vulnerable? They don't own your game nor gain access to your code.
- bmurphy1976 8y agoFortnight copied pubg whining.
- cma 8y agoSeems like all the major game companies have cloned PUBG. Activision with the new CoD, EA/Dice with Battlefield's upcoming battle royale mode, Epic with Fortnite (no gore and targeting a younger demographic and long since expanded into something a good bit different), and now finally Valve, who presumably took 30% of PUBG's revenue instead of the ~5% Epic were paid, without even providing much of the code, have also cloned it with CS:Go's new Battle Royale. You can't copyright a game mode, and PUBG took lots of aspects from others too.
- jchw 8y agoAh yeah, remember when Epic Games stole the concept of a popular multiplayer battle royale game? I'm talking, of course, about The Culling, a game about a year older than PUBG. And other than the 100 player sized games and parachute mechanic, it's frankly not that different from the rest of them. Snark aside, PUBG built a little on the battle royale formula. Fortnite built a little on the battle royale formula. Both Bluehole and Epic Games were madly successful. Maybe PUBG would've done even better had Fortnite BR not done so well as a free to play experience. But it could've also done better if it wasn't a buggy mess for like an entire year after launch, one that costs $20 and never seems to be on sale. There's a reason gameplay mechanics aren't copyrightable. This is how game design evolves. I'd hate to live in the world where ID software permanently owned the rights for making first person shooting games. One could certainly argue there is some conflict of interest in that Epic Games has a conflict of interest because they licensed their engine to Bluehole. But Unreal Engine is a fairly popular game engine, and I think it's unreasonable for them to not be able to be inspired by games written on their game engine.
- nitrogen 8y agoThere's a reason gameplay mechanics aren't copyrightable. This is how game design evolves. I'd hate to live in the world where ID software permanently owned the rights for making first person shooting games Wasn't there a problematic patent on The Incredible Machine that kind of killed that genre for a while?
- reitzensteinm 8y agoWow... yes. Although Jeff Tunnel was really pissed off by it, which as a fan of TIM growing up makes me very happy. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5577185A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5577185A/en https://youtu.be/vXb30FDJqB0?t=393 https://youtu.be/vXb30FDJqB0?t=393
- jchw 8y agoWell, you can certainly patent game design - but you can't copyright it. Copyright is actually a bit scarier imo since it's, for the most part, internationally recognized.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- org3432 8y agoEven if PUBG was Unity and not UE, Epic could have made the game.
- MattRix 8y agoAnyone who calls Fortnite a clone of PUBG hasn't played Fortnite.
- bopbop 8y agoTo be fair, it was the PUBG developers themselves who called Fortnite a clone: https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/09/22/pubg-developer-calls-out-fortnite-for-copying-its-battle-royale-format/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/09/22/pubg-deve... And also Epic themselves stated Fortnite was their "own version" of "Battle Royale games like PUBG" https://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/09/12/fortnite-battle-royale-launches-september-26/ https://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/09/12/fortnite-battle-r...
- oth001 8y agoThe most popular mode of Fortnite is basically PUBG+building mechanic (Minecraft).
- superkuh 8y agoI bought and played Fornite, the actual game, during it's beta for a long time. The battle royale version of it that people now call Fornite only came out much later. I've played Fornite. I've played Fornite BR (at release). They were obviously a clone. What is Fornite now is something drastically different. Anyone who doesn't call Fornite a clone of PUBG obviously only started playing Fornite BR and Fornite BR alone much later.
- stordoff 8y agoOther than the drop and the number of players, did PUBG really add that much _new_ to the film Battle Royale, which clearly inspired them (both in mechanics and skins)? It seems a little unfair to give them sole claim to the idea.
- mch82 8y agoBomber Man introduced 8 and 16 player battle royale in the 1990s. At the end of a match the arena begins shrinking to force players closer together. It also had variable size squad play. I’m surprised Bomber Man is never mentioned as an inspiration for these games.
- stordoff 8y agoI'd never made that connection before, but you're right. There are definitely parallels to be drawn.
- voidwtf 8y agoHmm, It's almost like you're implying that Epic didn't make those improvements available to Bluehole before Epic even released Fortnite. Bluehole squandered part of their momentum by failing to continually rebase and track UE4 improvements that were made specifically for them. Allowed hackers to take over the game, and then cried foul when their player base dropped. Also people seem to forget that H1Z1 had a royale mode before PUBG existed. ARMA 2 also had a mod, made by the same creator, who based the idea off of a movie of the same name.
- dwild 8y agoYeah, that's called the free market. If a company goes to Unity, they'll have to be careful that at any time they'll may remove your right to distribute your own game binaries. They don't even need to clone anything!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ilaksh 8y agoThis is one of the big reasons I am trying to make Irrlicht work out even though it's dated. I am hoping shaders and some other stuff will help upgrade the appearance of my program even in Irrlicht. I mean if they were serious about open engines they might fund a DirectX 12 upgrade for Irrlicht or something.
- slacka 8y agoI've spent quite a few hours with games based on the Irrlicht. Nice to hear it's still being improved. Have you looked at the work the SuperTuxKart devs have done to add shader support?[1] I've played a few round and the new tracks are gorgeous. [1] https://supertuxkart.net/Antarctica:_Technical_Details https://supertuxkart.net/Antarctica:_Technical_Details
- ilaksh 8y agoIt actually looks like they are a good portion of the way towards replacing Irrlicht with their own engine focused on shaders.
- lfowles 8y agoLooks like the focus is more-open engines, not more open-engines reading the source blog post.
- pjtr 8y agoHow does it compare to Godot Engine? https://godotengine.org/features https://godotengine.org/features (Free and Open Source under MIT license)
- growlist 8y agoI really like Irrlicht so nice to see a mention. I played around with it a while back, using GDAL to read raster data and Irrlicht to display/animate it in 3D, and was very impressed by its simplicity even for someone coming to it with no C++. I learnt so much just from a few days hacking. There's OGRE as well of course, but I seem to recall there was some weird preprocesser step to compilation that put me off it: https://www.ogre3d.org/ https://www.ogre3d.org/
- kristianp 8y agoDup of?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- shmerl 8y agoThere should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be more open than Unity in some ways, but it's still not really open. And speaking of openness, didn't Epic push exclusivity approach recently in their store? That's bad.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aphextron 8y ago>There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be more open than Unity in some ways, but it's still not really open. This just isn't possible with game engines. They are the single most advanced pieces of desktop software in existence. Sure, there are things like Godot that are perfectly suitable for a simple indie game. But making a AAA game engine requires the expertise of literally hundreds of top level senior engineers with advanced physics and mathematical knowledge. There's probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4. Furthermore, open source is really the exception to the rule in game dev. Practically everything is done closed source with some kind of licensing fees involved. It's quite a different culture from web dev.
- shmerl 8y agoCollaboration solves this. Instead of reinventing the wheel, collaborating on the engine can pool resources. This works in other cases, so why not with engines? It's not engines that are sold, but games. Having good open engine doesn't prevent developers from selling games made with them. > There's probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4. That's really bunk. I mean "only elite can do it" it claim. Sure, it's not something you can create in one day, but it's not something that out of reach either, especially when people are collaborating on it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rurounijones 8y agoHaving recently discovered the https://unigine.com/ https://unigine.com/ engine which looks fantastic but costs money at even the cheapest level, I would love more open engines.
- charliebrownau 8y agoDo we really need MORE open source engines Maybe we need instead UE4 and Unity to support OPEN API's better like OpenAL OpenGL VULKAN Freesync + Adaptive Sync Proper muti threading etc
- robterrell 8y agoI'm impressed with the speed at which Epic is capitalizing on this. Tim Sweeney's twitter feed has been brutal all day, and now this. It's possibly not even real money being spent, if it's just "Unreal dev grants" which I assume are licenses that probably cost Epic little or nothing, but this will keep the story alive tomorrow.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- zemo 8y agoyeah I mean, it's impressive how they inked a $25m contract on the same day mostly after hours, and had time for their lawyers to write and negotiate the contract and their press people to put out the PR content for it. Like wow, Improbable's lawyers, and Epic's lawyers, and Improbable's PR, and Epic's PR are all so incredibly fast. Especially considering Improbable's own ToS forbids you from selling your game made on Epic's store (https://auth.improbable.io/auth/v1/eula https://auth.improbable.io/auth/v1/eula section 4.4), so Epic and Improbable didn't have a standing relationship but started a new corporate partnership in like six hours. Wow, so fast! or maybe the whole thing was orchestrated? I honestly can't fathom how people are buying the story that Improbable is putting out. It's ludicrous.
- shostack 8y agoIs this related to the "commoditize your complements" article from Gwern? [1] More open game engines = more high-quality games from developers that can be acquired, or lowering the barrier to see what new game types start gaining traction so they can come in with a AAA version of the next MOBA, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc.? [1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2 https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2
- hosh 8y agoI was thinking about that too. I can see Improbable’s complement ... but not so sure about Epic. Then again, I remember the days of ZZT. It wasn’t an open source engine, but there were a lot of games made on that engine. I guess making a AAA version of a good indie concept makes economic sense.
- ReptileMan 8y agoEpic are gunning at steam. They want more quality games on tgeir store, no matter the engine. Forfeiting UE revenue for distribution cut makes sense
- Reedx 8y agoEpic and Improbable's joint statement: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-and-improbable-working-together-for-developers https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-and-impro... That was quick, wow. From Tim Sweeney: "Haha, actually though I first heard of this controversy at 1pm, Herman @ Improbable and I agreed on the fund at 6pm, live edited the announcement in Google docs till 7:30pm, released at 8pm." https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083600857806061568 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/108360085780606156...
- CreepGin 8y agoI've been using Unity on and off since 2008. All I can say is that the whole day's events were just bizarre. There's this thread on the Unity Forum with close to 500 replies as of now. In the thread are mostly people lashing out at Unity. Mr. Sweeney also linked this thread on twitter saying this thread is "full of highly intelligent indie devs having an insightful debate about engine EULAs and their legal ramifications". I must have a very different set of eyes than Mr. Sweeney here. But the first 200 or so replies were made before Unity could even post a response. They were mostly speculations and mods asking people to calm down and wait for an official response. This is mostly because Improbable's first blog post did not give any specifics and made it sound like Unity pulled the plug overnight (later according to Unity, Improbable knew about the TOS violation for over a year). So then Unity made a response blog post. Improbable made a 2nd blog post. And Epic made their 25mil announcement. Then, that Unity thread has pretty much turned into a conspiracy thread fueled by the f#$@ed up timing of everything. "Highly intelligent" and "insightful debate" would not be my choice words to describe that thread. And lastly, I want to say, even if Mr. Sweeney had all the good intentions, it was really painful to see Epic capitalizing on Unity in such quick manner and intensity. I was actually in agreement with his tweets before he posted the lame thread link and announced the 25mil fund to help people transition from Unity to UE4. https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083580407541583872 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/108358040754158387... https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/unity-blocks-spatialos https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/unity-blocks-s...
- Flenser 8y ago
- adtac 8y agoAs someone who's completely unversed in game engines, will this result in better native Linux gaming support? That's honestly all I care about.
- tehbeard 8y agoLinux gaming support is really at the mercy of the engine Devs wanting to do it. There isn't enough of a market share for it to be "obviously viable" (i.e. stupid not to do it) last time I looked into the numbers.
- nearbuy 8y agoThere was actually a post about this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18845205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18845205
- LolNoGenerics 8y agoPlus the mercy of 3d card companies to make their linux driver's suck less.
- Hydraulix989 8y agoBoth Unity and Unreal Engine are multiplatform enough to support compiling a Linux version of your game just by clicking your mouse -- everything just works out-of-the-box with no extra work needed. That's why there have been so many more Linux games on Steam in the last few years than there ever have before (I remember 10 years ago when the iD Software games were pretty much all we Linux gamers had). It's AAA games that use their own engines and developers that are too lazy to click the Compile for Linux button in Unity that are holding us back.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago> everything just works out-of-the-box with no extra work needed I would be extremely surprised if that was true for anything other than relatively simple games. No matter what cross-platform abstraction you use, you can never totally get away from dealing with the actual platforms.
- brylie 8y agoI hope they invest some of the funds into Godot engine: https://godotengine.org https://godotengine.org
- chairmanwow 8y agoThis project has actually really matured in a fantastic way! I have been toying around with it in the past few weeks and have been incredibly impressed with their progress! I would definitely want to use Godot for a serious project. Although I am a bit nervous that things become more challenging in more complex projects. Anyone have any experience here? I poked around for some serious Godot projects and haven’t really seen anything too large.
- rwilkinsons 8y agoMuch as this whole situation is pretty scary from Unity - Improbable's TOS aren't much better - https://auth.improbable.io/auth/v1/eula https://auth.improbable.io/auth/v1/eula Section 4.4 says you can't launch any game on their tech without speaking to them first, and you have to get explicit permission to not use Steam, or their "content launcher"
- sharpneli 8y agoOh wow. I wonder if Epic noticed that. Because that's bad for their own store.
- dkersten 8y agoMaybe someone should tweet at them or something and see.
- russley 8y agoThey mentioned in one of their blog posts that they noticed similar unclear wording in their own ToS and are looking into resolving it.
- vanous 8y agoIf you are like me wandering what is SpatialOS, from https://improbable.io/games https://improbable.io/games : SpatialOS provides managed cloud services that solve common technical and production challenges when you’re creating, iterating on and hosting multiplayer games. SpatialOS: the cloud platform for real-time multiplayer games, built with any game engine.
- jononor 8y agoThis is just Epic trying to get some good press. Instead Steam/Valve should fund open-source game engines and development tools. For them it is a complement to their business model, so the incentives are aligned. And they can ensure a smooth path to market for the game developers. Everyone wins (well, maybe except for Epic/Unity).
- dana321 8y agoI think unity just shot themselves in both feet
- FrankDixon 8y agoprobably, but it's not clear that they're not in the right: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/ https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improba...
- sharpneli 8y agoIf we look at the old terms of service that Unity claimed to be also forbidding them (see the 2.4, that was recently changed). https://web.archive.org/web/20180616042117/https://unity3d.com/legal/terms-of-service/software https://web.archive.org/web/20180616042117/https://unity3d.c... IANAL but for me that looks like also banning the usual method of implementing your games server in Unity if we think it also bans SpatialOS. For me the old terms look like trying to get more money from services like PlayStation Now. However if they really did forbid SpatialOS then that means every single mobile game with server implemented in Unity are also breaking the TOS and should be shut down asap. Rergardless this debacle proves that Unity is more than willing to interprete their TOS quite liberally if they smell money. So if you build a big MMO that rakes in billions you should expect Unity to barge in and use that, or some other, part of TOS to demand more money from you. EDIT: My hunch in how this went down. Year ago unity told them that 2.4 breaks the TOS and wanted more money. Improbable said "Nuhhuh, can't you read?" until Unity changed their TOS and said "Yeah! It does!". So if Unity ever says that you break their TOS and they want money it's better to pay them regardless of what the TOS says because otherwise they just change the TOS retroactively.
- talltimtom 8y agoThey state: “At the core, the Streaming and Cloud Gaming Restrictions terms are still the same as before. We received feedback that the language was ambiguous, so we updated our Terms of Service to be clear on our distribution and streaming restrictions.” Which I highly doubt. But IANAL. It just seems silly that it went “your in breach of our conditions!” “No we aren’t” “Yes you are (also we just now changed them”.
- zemo 8y agoImprobable's story doesn't add up. Improbable acted as if Unity changed their terms overnight, but that's not accurate. This is Improbable's original statement: https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/unity-blocks-spatialos https://improbable.io/company/news/2019/01/10/unity-blocks-s... > Due to a change in Unity’s terms of service (clause 2.4) The text they're talking about is dated December 5th. This capture was taken while that Improbable blog post was fresh, on January 10th: http://web.archive.org/web/20190110175721/https://unity3d.com/legal/terms-of-service/software http://web.archive.org/web/20190110175721/https://unity3d.co... So section 2.4 is at least a month old at this point. They said nothing to their customers for over a month? Then they created a storm in a teacup, and a bunch of developers freaked out and took their own games down on their own account without ever receiving any sort of notice with Unity. Improbable intentionally manufactured a panic: none of these game developers were contacted by Unity or asked to take their games down. Section 2.4 is nearly identical in the February 2018 ToS by Unity as well: http://web.archive.org/web/20180616042117/https://unity3d.com/legal/terms-of-service/software http://web.archive.org/web/20180616042117/https://unity3d.co... So Unity's response (here: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/ https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improba...) that they talked to Improbable and told them they were in breach of the ToS over a year ago is supported by the actual history of the ToS. Consider a few things: Improbable is not actually an innocent little lamb here: they have raised over $600m of VC money. Their Series B was over $500m: https://improbable.io/company/news/2017/05/11/improbable-raises-502m-series-b-funding-round-led-by-softbank https://improbable.io/company/news/2017/05/11/improbable-rai... And then there's the other thing: SpatialOS is NOT an open system. The fact that they're playing up their openness is the definition of smarm: the form of virtue without the substance. They have an open source client but the server is not open source. You can't run your own SpatialOS instances. If you integrate their GDK into your game, you can ONLY use their managed services to host your multiplayer server. It's purely a vendor lock-in model, they just pretend to be open source by having open source clients. None of the articles that have written about this have had anything to say about Improbable's ToS, none have reached out to Unity for comment, and none have reached out to any of the game developers whose games "were affected", when none of the games were issued any sort of notices by Unity and none of the games had any reason to be taken offline. Everything about this story has been driven entirely by Improbable, without any scrutiny whatsoever, but if you look more closely at what's going on, there are a lot of stones to turn over.
- ezekg 8y agoThis seems incredibly sketchy, almost like it was a coordinated campaign against Unity. I'd like to hear more from Unity's side because the speed at which Epic capitalized on this is suspect.
- yzb 8y agoThis is similar to the MongoDB vs Amazon feud: Unity took a bad decision to protect their product and now they are paying the consequences.
- Animats 8y agoOK, what does "more open engines" mean? UE4 is open source, with payments required if you have significant revenue. That's fine. Improbable is closed source running on Google servers with a big markup; you're just the client. Does this mean Improbable is opening up the back end? Or what?