Improbable Blog

Improbable'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

> 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

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

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/) 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:…

Improbable | Multiple Software Engineers & Head of Security | Full Time, ONSITE LONDON, UK
(http://improbable.io/life-at-improbable/)

Improbable is developing an operating environment that makes building simulated worlds possible. Worlds which can be run in real time, simulating the behaviours and interactions of millions of entities. Spaces with their own rules and properties that a multitude of people can simultaneously change, explore and visualise in as many different ways as developers can imagine.

We are hiring across multiple teams within the business including:

- Building our base real-time distributed simulation platform

- Applying our real-time distributed simulation platform to gaming

- Building revolutionary new online games backed by our simulation platform

- Applying our real-time distributed simulation platform to other verticals

Also, Head of Security: We are currently looking to make a critical first security hire around whom we can build a team as we scale. Our codebase is a large-scale, cloud-agnostic, distributed system with a complex combination of Go, JVM technologies and C#.
This team will be responsible responsible for auditing the system’s current security architecture and will also be responsible for security design / implementation in future to ensure our data and execution environments are safe. Our current needs surround security auditing, pen-testing, vulnerability testing / research, encryption and authentication with great freedom to…

I'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…

Improbable's statement says clause 2.4 [0].

Here's [1] what it says now:

> 2.4 Streaming and Cloud Gaming Restrictions.

> You may not directly or indirectly distribute the Unity Software, including the runtime portion of the Unity Software (the “Unity Runtime”), or your Project Content (if it incorporates the Unity Runtime) by means of streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices without a separate license or authorization from Unity. Without limiting the foregoing, you may not use a managed service running on cloud infrastructure (a “Managed Service”) or a specific integration of a binary add-on (for example, a plugin or SDK) or source code to be integrated in the Unity Software or Your Project Content incorporating the Unity Runtime (an “SDK Integration”) to install or execute the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server, unless such use of the Managed Service or SDK Integration has been specifically authorized by Unity. Additionally, you may not integrate the Unity Runtime with a Managed Service or SDK Integration and offer that integration to third parties for the purpose of installing or using the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server. For a list of Unity authorized streaming platforms, Managed Services and SDK Integrations, click here.This restriction does not prevent end users from…

What, they're not mentioning "Metaverse" and "NFT", and they don't have a blockchain? They're missing the hype train.

Right now, there's a huge boom in "blockchain metaverses". Search for "metaverse" in News for info.
The idea is to have a virtual world in which you can buy scarce land and maybe scarce objects. There are at least a dozen of these things. As virtual worlds, they're awful. The graphics are bad, the worlds are tiny, you can't do much, and nobody goes there. It's all about selling land and "rares". There are at least two such things where they skipped building the virtual world and just sell land on a map. On top of this fluff, there's now a virtual land real estate investment trust.

I want to see a good big "metaverse". Right now, 19 year old Second Life is still the best recreational virtual world, despite a lack of forward progress in the last few years from Linden Lab. Roblox is getting steadily better, moving past their blocky origins. IMVU is trying harder. Epic keeps talking up the "metaverse", but all they have shown so far is a level editor for Fortnite.

Improbable [1] raised US$400 million to build a back-end system for really big virtual worlds. It even works, more or less. But you have to host on their servers (Google's, actually) and the thing is so expensive to run that the three indy games that used it all went broke.
Since they raised too much money, they now have two in-house game studios, which have shipped nothing.

[1]…

I'm glad someone referenced the classic AI of a PacMan Ghost ;) Id's Doom from the early 1990s is another deceptively simple yet surprisingly engaging instance:

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Monster_behavior

An agent's set of possible actions is conditioned on its environment, other NPCs as well as the players actions. Even for a finite number of variables you can quickly see how the problem becomes computationally expensive for a single agent.

You want to to build unsharded persistent worlds with complex character behaviours and allow millions of online simultaneous players all sharing the same game state? Then you need to take a page from architects building scalable cloud computing infrastructure and applications that serve billions of request per second with low latency.

Companies like improbable.io are abstracting game state and logic with SpatialOS. But I think there is still a lot of room here for some startup to combine "Unreal Engine + AWS". Creating a true "cloud native game engine". Even if its just HTML5 based and targeting games such as Slither.io.

Quest - An iOS "io" Game from Improbable

https://improbable.io/games/blog/quest-an-ios-io-game-from-improbable-io