Unity changes terms to permit Improbable use but ‘does not consider them a partner’

It appears that the Unity-Improbable dispute has come to an end. Unity co-founder Joachim Ante has just announced in a blog post: “Improbable is no longer in breach by providing you a service, and that we are able to reinstate their licenses.”

Unity will be altering its terms of service to permit the use of Unity with any third-party service. “The TOS update highlights that developers can use any third party service that integrate into Unity,” said Ante, adding that “some of these services will be supported, others will not.”

And Improbable’s Spatial OS will certainly fall into the latter camp. “…we do not consider them a partner, and cannot vouch for how their service works with Unity as we have no insight into their technology or how they run their business.”

Unity says the change is a result of “listening to the community” which it says felt the ToS were too restrictive. “When you make a game with Unity, you own the content and you should have the right to put it wherever you want. Our TOS didn’t reflect this principle – something that is not in line with who we are.”

It’s also promising that developers that stick with the same version of Unity will, to some extent, be able to stick with the same version of the ToS, so they know the terms they are signing up to when they start development will stay the same.

It also promises to allow third-parties the ability to deploy their services alongside Unity: “We will integrate our own services, but we will not block developers from using competitive third-party services.” 

We’ll update as soon as we hear back from Improbable.

About Seth Barton

Seth Barton was the editor of MCV and MCV/DEVELOP from 2016 until 2021 and oversaw many changes to the magazine and the industry it reported on. Before that Seth toiled in games retail at Electronics Boutique, studied film at university, published console and PC games for the BBC, and spent many years working in tech journalism. Living in South East London, he divides his little free time between board games, video games, beer and family. You can find him tweeting @sethbarton1.

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