Unity’s Vision:
Democratize game development and enable everyone to create rich interactive 3D content.
It became apparent in the recent gambling thread, linky, that Unity had made some very substantial changes the EULA for Unity4 that had largely gone unnoticed by the community. These changes are:
Thoughts?
Depends on the prices of these licenses.
Can someone summarize the impact of the changes?
Damn. They’re pulling an Apple on us…
Do you have any specifics about the exact changes? I don’t have time right now to pursue the EULA.
Gambling doesn’t bother me. That’s just keeping the lawsuits away.
Embedded… what does that even mean?
Cloud restrictions though…
http://unity3d.com/company/legal/eula
It’s near the top an in english not legalise. [Added link to OP]
My personal concerns are:
A) They’ve taken away options that I’ve plans for. Clients have asked about gambling games, I have a couple game/app idea’s that seem to fall under embedded, and streaming is a cool idea that’s becoming increasingly viable.
B) There is no real rationale for these changes… so what is this a precedent for? Will MMO’s, Non-game apps, simulations, Ooya etc. be treated differently in the future?
The only real problem I found was this
What I get from this is I can’t work with a service like Onlive . I don’t get the reason for this , its still a pretty small market for doing this , it involves numerous cost such as VM’s ect .
Now what I understood is that the prior license was something like .
If you buy Unity pro you can do just about whatever you want WITH THE CONTENT YOU CREATE Assuming you don’t mess with the Unity engine itself .
While the gambling is something I understand , this looks like Unity is trying to target bigger companies with the resources to set up steaming services .
To fix this Unity should be upfront on what companies its trying to get money out of . Something like an exception to the new changes( minus gambling) for companies with a gross income of less then 5 million .
If your game is big enough to be accepted by OnLive and such, I can’t see why bother on
buying Unity’s open source or not…
However, we see a future prototype of one more ‘Epic Games’ rising here folks, we can clearly see UT’s plans for next 10 years, just take a look at overall picture of everything they’ve done last years… The failed rise of upgrade prices, etc…
Enjoy Unity Pro while you can.
Yep, you must be real big to afford to pay $50/month: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/161643-Kickfolio-allows-iOS-apps-to-be-played-in-the-browser
The argument that unity is trying to target big companies is bogus for three reasons:
What about all the big companies not making these apps? There’s plenty of money on iOS and in MMO’s.
For at least two of the three options, the entry level is very low [possible exception gambling].
The people it impacts the most are the small guys who are now restricted from developing these apps - big companies are in a better position to meet whatever terms U3D decide to impose on the alternative licenses.
I guessed its big guys Unity’s trying to get more out of . You can’t milk a dry cow, a small dev is lucky if they can afford Unity pro as is .
I really don’t like the streaming restriction though , since its VERY hard to get average joe to install the unity web player, streaming is just another possible way to deliver content
A “small dev” either doesn’t need Unity Pro or can afford it. I’m sorry but if a game is going to take thousands of hours to make, $1500 is practically irrelevant.
The only people I hear complaining about the Unity Pro price are kids.
Then we should say no - we had a deal with unity and now they’re trying to renegotiate behind our backs.
We pay a flat fee to use unity to create our content - regardless of our success or failure. Unity shouldn’t tell us what we can or cannot do, or try to extract additional revenues by restricting our distribution/platforms arbitrarily.
Well, our money will only effect them in like a year or too when Unity 5 comes out so what do you propose we do?
I didn’t know about that 
The most effective thing to do to change this IMO, is simply to state your opinion and get others to do the same. A lost sale or two isn’t going to impact Unity, but it’s own community public voicing concern could be fairly important. Unity has made promises to us, do you feel it’s living up to its side of the bargin?
http://feedback.unity3d.com/unity/all-categories/1/hot/active/remove-new-40-eula-restrictions
It really depends on where your at . Like after i’ve invested money and time into learning Unity I don’t want to say screw it’s time to drop everything and switch Engines
Gambling can rot for all I care; but requiring end user to have Unity Player as only source of interaction with the product is kinda dumb.
Anyways, cloud gaming is doomed by bandwidth caps so I personally don’t care much about it too…
You do know that bandwidth caps increase substantially faster that monitor resolution?
I’m not a fan of gambling myself, but that’s not the issue being raised.
I’ve read a paper somewhere stating that by 2014 or so, most phones will be smartphones… And connected to internet 24/7. This is real market projection;
If DNS clusters do not scale up fast enough, AT&T says that is the case, won’t be room for everyone and those bazillion smartphones are already sucking all bandwidth they can. Lag spikes will be unsolvable problem unless cloud provider has a server close to your town, this already happens on online games, playing at 50- ms is hard to get if server is far from your city, and that is just for input… What about input + video stream… Most internauts simply can’t play. I know internet of big cities from rich countries are very good, but for the world in general, cloud gaming will never be a reality and ppl will still be stuck in WoW / LoL servers.
Take a look at what happened to Diablo3’s launch, DNSs already suffer too much.
@topic, I understand this is about freedom, but what can you do but not upgrade? We shall never forget UT is a business like any other, not our friend.
@BrUnO, if you want to talk technical merits, I’m more than interested to have that discussion in another thread. Suffice to say the idea that lag or bandwidth is an ‘unsolvable problem’ is laughable. Furthermore, not only does DNS not come into the equation, cloud based gaming would likely reduce DNS load.