game engine illegal?

Unity Engine
1

would it be illegal to make another game engine out of unity? :face_with_spiral_eyes:

2

I was wondering about a similar thing lately :wink: (in my case, a highly moddable game)ā€¦ Unfortunately, the EULA doesnā€™t seem to contain any information about this, at least not obviouslyā€¦ I am pretty sure that there are certain limitations in that respect, especially if you are going to expose pro only features and make them available to other developers this way. I really would like to hear something from a Unity official about this :). After all the common sense should be applicable here and if you really are going to develop anything that is attempting to compete with Unity, you are screwed ;)ā€¦ But if you, for example, only want to create an ā€œengineā€ for a specific use case, letā€™s say 2D games, and you donā€™t expose paid Unity features it should be fine?! Thatā€™s probably also why they separate Editor and Runtime features. As long as you use free runtime features you should run into no trouble?! On any attempt a lot of prominent Unity logos and references might serve you as well ^^. At least it shows some kind of good will and could lead to UT only forcing you to change something instead of directly suing you ^^.

3

I am not even sure that unity would be able to handle this kind of thing but I want to try it since I am going to be making many games of the same type. When I am done with it, I am planning on selling it.

4

Well, with Unity scripting you can recreate the entire Unity application in general, except for Editor only features like Umbra occlusion and Beast lightmapping for oneā€¦ So Unity is well capable of handling it.

5

Well since it doesnā€™t say that we cant in the Terms and Conditions, then shouldnt it be possible without any law involved? I mean I would understand that we need to have it so there is a unity logo somewhere but that would be all.

6

Just write a mail to the unity support and mention ā€œ[License Question]ā€ in the subject for quicker response and let us know what their reply was! It makes no sense to speculate hereā€¦

I suppose they donā€™t need to state this in the EULA. You canā€™t copy their product or even make something similar, I guess this covered by IP or copyright but I am also not very experienced in this matterā€¦

7

if youā€™re going to reskin it and sell it as an engine I would be shocked if you were not sued to within an inch of your life.

However: if youā€™re making something that isnā€™t unity, like click game maker Iā€™m pretty sure that would be OK.

8

You can use Unity as a platform, but you can not resell unity nor are you allowed to offer its download or offer it as part of a download. You can only create an addon to be used within it.

9

I think you could, basically not sell the Unity editor, but build your entire own editor on top of the Unity Engine. Would be possible.
Would also be very buggy, probably Windows only and not at all great to work with.

10

Make it as addon and no problem. You can sell such addon without any limatations.

11

Is that even possible creating a game engine inside of another? I mean, wouldnā€™t it be slow and not so great due to the languages being interpreted and the limits?

It would be easier to do it by yourself, so why would you need to create a game engine inside of unity?

12

It would have many limits but the limits might not matter to the creator as long as it does what it needs to do easier

13

This was their response:

I hate the fact that we cant sell it, what characteristics MUST a game engine have in order to be considered one?

14

I donā€™t understand what youā€™re trying to achieve here. What are you actually going to offer that Unity doesnā€™t already?

If you want to take Unity and build up e.g. a bunch of code for making, say, FPS games (so turning Unity into a kind of ā€˜FPS engineā€™) then you could bundle up all the code you added and sell it on the asset store as an ā€˜FPS engine pack.ā€™

15

And I still donā€™t understand why you donā€™t just ask the support team ;). You would probably already have an answer by nowā€¦ Everything here is just speculation.

16

I did ask the support team and this is what they said:

Hi,

Yes you can create another Game Engine as long as:

  1. You donā€™t compete with Unity.
  2. You donā€™t sell it.

Best Regards,
Ricardo A

17

Game Engine is pretty simple: Platform to create games from

The maximum you can do basically is create a moddable game so it still remains the same game but to a different extend (either like atmosphir and providing the functionality, not allowing users to really create own stuff or by keeping the general game mechanic etc the same offering them other modification possibilities)

Question is really: Why the hell would you want. It takes months to create an editor that can compete even with a fraction of unity so if you didnā€™t totally fail in courses on ā€˜basic smart business decisionsā€™ you would focus on creating a unity extension and sell that, make use of whats present and offer additional stuff on top of it thats not yet present :slight_smile: