Thanks so much for supporting The Machinery.
Unfortunately, we’ve reached a point where it’s no longer possible for us to continue in the current direction. Per Section 14 of the End User License Agreement, the development of The Machinery will cease, we will no longer offer GitHub access, all licenses are terminated as of 14 days after the date of this notice, and you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries. You will receive a full refund of your annual license payment through Gumroad.
We really appreciated you being a part of the Our Machinery Community. We hope we have been helpful in some way to your development needs.
-Our Machinery
The current EULA on the website includes a bit that says they can terminate your license and ask you to delete all source and binaries entirely at their discretion[1].
The latest copy on the wayback machine from May does not have that bit.[2]
1. https://ourmachinery.com/eula.html 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20220529230958/https://ourmachin...
So they used the 'we can update the eula at any time at our discretion' clause to add a 'we can tell you to delete your source and binaries' clause and then immediately invoked it.
I doubt the EULA as written is enforceable.
> you own nothing
> you have no rights
> you promise not to try and exercise any right you think you have
> you agree to binding arbitration with the firm we pay, just in case you ever get it in your silly little head that you do have rights
> you cannot do anything the company doesn't like
> the company can do anything it wants whether you like it or not
> the company is not responsible for anything ever
> the company makes absolutely no guarantees about anything
> the company owns everything
The Machinery was a young engine but it had pedigree as the spiritual successor to Bitsquid, which did ship in a number of commercial games until it was killed by Autodesk after they acquired it. The main developers went on to found Our Machinery.
If I had invested a year into building a game on their engine, and they told me to delete my game, I would sue. This is serious monetary harm being inflicted upon developers.
If they're going to drop the engine as a product, I would expect a perpetual "same-version, no further support" license offered to existing users. That's the bare minimum these folks could do.
This way of handling things is screwing over anyone that bet their project on the engine in the biggest way possible. It is not trivial to change engines while in flight. They're asking people to do a complete rewrite.
And if they're really closing up shop, why not release the engine as open source? Are they getting bought out silently?
Makes no sense.
That's very concerning if true. Are there any game engine patents significant enough to cause something this catastrophic?
I hope instead that it has to do with issues related to whatever contract they signed when they sold Bitsquid to Autodesk. (e.g. a non-compete clause or similar)
This is pretty weird.
Then again, in regards to the engine itself dying, I feel like this is inevitable for many of the projects out there. For example, there was the Xenko engine which was later renamed to Stride: https://www.stride3d.net/
It's actually a nice project, has lots of great features and feels like it should be a more open alternative to Unity, whilst being similarly easy to use. However, compare the attention it is getting in comparison to something like Godot:
- https://github.com/stride3d/stride
- https://github.com/godotengine/godot
On OpenCollective, Stride has an estimated annual budget of around 12k USD, whereas Godot gets around 15k USD per month on Patreon. Stride has a bit under 100 contributors, Godot has almost 2000. Godot gets hype on various game development subreddits regularly, yet Stride gets no such love.Ergo, it's probably pretty easy to draw a trajectory of what the next 10 years might bring for either, with one probably getting more features and development and becoming a mainstay of the indie scene, when compared to the other.
But the great thing is that if whatever engine you use has an open license, you cannot have it be taken away from you (as long as you have all of the actual executables and don't depend on external services).
If you simply want to develop "standard" games, this might not be important to you. But if you are a .NET developer and you want to integrate anything from the .NET ecosytem, Stride is what you want.
Also, Stride has probably the best shader system in the world.
Plus you need to use a PC to develop.
Now I'm thinking Unity assets could be adapted to work with Stride since both use C#. If so, switching from Unity to Stride won't be so bad.
"We hope we have been helpful in some way to your development needs."
That's a load-bearing "some way," if I've ever seen one.
I use Godot and now I'm wondering if this can't happen at Godot as well. Perhaps it's time to switch to Unity. You pay but at least they have sort of stood the test of time.
What they could theoretically do is stop developing it, or change the license for all newer versions of the engine to one that would force you to pay to use it (or similar). In which case Godot would most likely be forked on the same day and a big part of the current developers would just move over to the fork.
No, it most definitely is not time to do that. This can't happen to Godot, since FOSS licenses are irrevocable. It can happen to Unity. You'd be moving from a zero chance to a small but nonzero chance if you did that.
Seems like I dodged a bullet. I was looking at this a few months ago. Decided to play with love2d instead. Did a few projects in it. Then I got into unreal engine. A further distraction via cryengine used up the remainder of my time. I was about to get into the machinery in September.
Wow. Godot was to be October. So yeah. Bring that forwards.
That EULA is likely a bad idea in general. It's also most likely against the law in some jurisdictions. The backstory would be of interest mainly for probably avoiding these Devs in future if there wasn't a good reason for the debacle. Sour taste all round.
I was very excited to start reading the C code and was hoping a Nim port would be possible. Sad to hear I’m this late to the party because now I can’t even enjoy the blog posts.
After trying Godot 3.5, it felt like an inferior Unity.
The 4 alpha feels great.
My big fear with Unity isn't a total collapse, but gradual suckification of the engine. For now it's still the easiest way to build amazing games, but things are changing.
I'd be surprised if Godot or another FOSS engine wasn't dominant by 2025, or at the very least viewed as Blender is compared to Maya.
I'd like to know what is the underlying issue? Disagreement between founders? Acquisition? Legal problem? Not enough funding? Not enough customers?
Having followed the project from the beginning, the blog, the podcast: I hope they (the people) are ok.
https://books.ourmachinery.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20220529231010/https://ourmachine...
Probably deleted
And if you accurate and patient enough, I think, you can manually copy latest state of repo
http://web.archive.org/web/20220801082043/https://github.com...
On the list of things to worry about, this was always like #100. #1 was a lack of updates, but a rug pull? I mean, what the hell?
Presumably also with some sort of NDA attached to it?
P.D. add "Tell HN:" to the title or a link to the web page
Not saying it didn't, but it'd be a great way to tank a competitor's business if it were fake. I wanna be sure before I get a pitchfork out.
To the extent this is legitimate, it definitely seems like grounds for a lawsuit. IANAL, so can't say if it'd succeed, but I am not convinced the last-minute EULA change would save them.
Email about the EULA change that added the termination clause two days ago: https://host.zlsadesign.com/SkfpU6ETq.png
This is definitely unacceptable. Are you considering legal action?
They deleted everything besides the frontpage and EULA page, a shame since their blog was a good resource.