End of the Machinery Game Engine

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.

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.

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

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).

"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.

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...

https://github.com/OurMachinery/themachinery-books

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.