TermsOfService Alternatives

TermsOfService reviews and mentions

• Unity U-turns on controversial runtime fee and begs forgiveness
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023

  > The amount of mental gymnastics on display here (not to mention bloodthirstiness) to not acknowledge that the new terms are genuinely a huge improvement and likely palatable to the majority of game actual developers in crazy.

  A huge improvement relative to the current pricing policy in effect (the status quo), no. A huge improvement relative to the previous incoming pricing policy, yes. But that's only the half of it. The other half is that Unity cannot be trusted to abide by its own terms of service. I don't need mental gymnastics to decide that Unity will never be palatable again.

  Unity's terms as of October 2022 included the line:

  > If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. [1]

  But in April 2023, Unity silently rewrote the terms, and one of the changes was removing that self-obligation. [2] Ctrl-F for "notif" and you won't find a match.

  > I have a few friends who work on relatively medium-scale game development operations and every one of them is basically saying “oh thank god, we can work with this”.

  It's good that Unity decided not to screw your friends after all. But "oh thank god, we can work with this" suggests an aftertaste of dread. I don't make games, but if I did I would not want to rely on the company which gave me such dread.

  [1] https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService/blob/71...

  [2] https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService/blob/ma...

• Unity Editor Software Additional Terms
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Sep 2023
• Unity says “listening” on fee change, will “update in a couple of days”
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Sep 2023

  > Even the apology misses the most important fact, which is not necessarily the cost of the change itself, but the demonstration that Unity is willing to change terms AFTER you've shipped software using their engine. That's a massive breach of trust as well as a massive risk.

  And the obvious fix to that is to put out an announcement saying "Sorry about that, you can trust us, if you release a game using Unity you can stick with that version of the ToS instead of us being able to foist new terms on you whenever we want."

  Except.... Unity did that already last time they made company destroying ToS changes, and then just went back on the promise and said they're forcing the new ToS on everyone. So why the hell is anyone supposed to trust whatever apology they put out this time?

  Updated Terms of Service and commitment to being an open platform (2019) https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-an...

  > Retroactive TOS changes

  > When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS.

  > In practice, that is only possible if you have access to bug fixes. For this reason, we now allow users to continue to use the TOS for the same major (year-based) version number, including Long Term Stable (LTS) builds that you are using in your project.*

  > Moving forward, we will host TOS changes on Github to give developers full transparency about what changes are happening, and when. The link is https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService.

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