End of the Machinery Game Engine

209 points by eigenbom 3 years ago | 93 comments

The Machinery game engine seems terminated. From email:

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

jwitthuhn 3 years ago |

This looks pretty shady.

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.

Accujack 3 years ago | |

That's not how licenses work. If they change the EULA, users of the software have to agree to it again for it to bind them. Usually what happens if a library license changes is that users are stuck on an old (potentially unsupported) version if they don't want to agree to the new EULA.

I doubt the EULA as written is enforceable.

franciscop 3 years ago | | |

Exactly, this is BS and would not fly in most half-decent legal systems, specially given the timing.

taneq 3 years ago | |

I've always thought this kind of "we can update the EULA" clause pretty much invalidated the whole idea that you should carefully read EULAs. If one of your starting rules is "the rules are whatever I say they are" then there's no point even reading the other rules. In reality, of course, nothing means anything until it's tried in court.

matheusmoreira 3 years ago | | |

There is absolutely no point in reading any user agreements or terms of service. The following statements effectively summarize all such documents:

> 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

infogulch 3 years ago | | |

> If one of your starting rules is "the rules are whatever I say they are" then there's no point even reading the other rules.

MikeBVaughn 3 years ago | |

I was wondering about that. When you go to the Our Machine web page, it shows the EULA having been updated yesterday, which immediately made me suspicious.

anothernewdude 3 years ago | |

So the EULA says that they can ask.

jsheard 3 years ago |

Ceasing development is one thing, rug pulling licensees by demanding they delete the framework they've built their projects on is another thing entirely. The hell happened at Our Machinery?

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.

ivraatiems 3 years ago | |

Not only that, but they'd have to delete and force consumers to delete any copies of games published that use the license, unless I am misunderstanding it. There's no way that's enforceable (IANAL, but good lord).

kragen 3 years ago | |

Maybe this is part of an out-of-court settlement with Autodesk to avoid a lawsuit.

danybittel 3 years ago | | |

Then they need better lawyers.

gabstv 3 years ago | |

They also nuked the forums, discord, every other social.

josephcsible 3 years ago |

Hopefully this will be a lesson that proprietary licenses subject you to rug pulls with no recourse, which FOSS licenses protect you from. Had Machinery been FOSS, then you could at least still keep using the last version of the engine that they did release, and even fork it to continue development yourself.

the_gremlin 3 years ago | |

the funniest thing is that they were going on and on about how they would love to make the engine open-source so it could still be developed in the case they stopped working on it

echelon 3 years ago |

> 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

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.

myrryr 3 years ago | |

Patent / Copyright issues would fit this.

bogwog 3 years ago | | |

> Patent

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)

KronisLV 3 years ago |

> ...you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries.

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).

tebjan 3 years ago | |

Godot is just older and more established, but Stride has a better render engine, software architecture and is a pure .NET project. So the engine and the scripting use the same technology. Godot has a C++ core and only "interprets" the scripting languages, which is conceptually quite different.

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.

MikeBVaughn 3 years ago |

"... 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."

"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.

faeranne 3 years ago |

I'm sorry, is this in any way legal? Did they just tell people to delete their games? Like... I'm pretty sure this kind of rug pull would destroy any company that relies on this engine. 14 days for a full re-write is insane.

myrryr 3 years ago |

I'm guessing copyright or patent issues. That would explain their "you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries."

voakbasda 3 years ago |

How do these developers ever expect to be taken seriously again? This is a reputation killer; no one should ever trust them.

infogulch 3 years ago | |

Probably sold the tech to a buyer who is trying to maximize the value of their purchase, which they think they can achieve by screwing everyone currently using the engine as much as possible and doing something else with it instead. Who knows, maybe its new purpose is to be placed into an incinerator.

dasz 3 years ago |

I'd be interested in the backstory to this. (Like everyone else I guess)

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.

seanstrom 3 years ago |

For a moment I thought this was my fault because I had just asked for a free academic license, and somehow that would be the final straw :(

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.

devd00d 3 years ago | |

You dodged a bullet. Me too. I just started my 3D journey, dabbling with Godot, Three.js and Unity. If I had stumbled upon Machinery and decided to use, I would have been annoyed now.

999900000999 3 years ago |

Well, I can't wait for Godot 4 + C# now.

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.

WorldMaker 3 years ago | |

The thing about Godot is that you are always… waiting for Godot.

rwbt 3 years ago |

Did they get acquired by some big company? Their blogposts always felt like they want to be acqui-hired.

stephc_int13 3 years ago |

This is sad, I've been following their work for some time and I think they were onto something, many good design ideas, very clean albeit a bit verbose sometimes.

I'd like to know what is the underlying issue? Disagreement between founders? Acquisition? Legal problem? Not enough funding? Not enough customers?

charcircuit 3 years ago |

So everyone's games using it will need to be taken down too? That is so strange.

faeranne 3 years ago | |

Section 3.B of the EULA says no, but also that can be changed at any time, so possibly. I have a friend who released a game using Machine earlier this year, and they're scrambling right now to get a lawyer to look at this. Current opinion is that the 14 day limit means they can't work on it anymore, but current game binaries are free to remain online. They're already working to replace the engine, as they have no faith that 3.B won't be expunged as well.

ehnto 3 years ago | | |

Don't you have to agree to new EULA terms? Of course a company is free to update a EULA, but it's an agreement between two parties not a one sided mandate.

scott_siskind 3 years ago |

Anyone got a mirror of a release zip (such as https://ourmachinery.com/releases/2022.5/the-machinery-2022.... ) ?

CraftingLinks 3 years ago |

Probably not the way they hoped to reach HN front page...

Having followed the project from the beginning, the blog, the podcast: I hope they (the people) are ok.

alajmo 3 years ago |

For those interested in the blog posts and other technical information about the engine they shared with the public, check out:

https://books.ourmachinery.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/20220529231010/https://ourmachine...

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

gabstv 3 years ago | |

https://github.com/OurMachinery/themachinery-books is 404

Probably deleted

psydvl 3 years ago | | |

It cached in web archive too

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...

userbinator 3 years ago |

IANAL but that doesn't sound like it would be enforceable at all. Consider that even in the case of something like a (physical) product recall, it would not be legal for them to break into your house to take them back.

mathgladiator 3 years ago |

Holy shit, what madness is this.

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?

enqk 3 years ago |

This only makes sense if they got into legal problems with a powerful entity which would have raised issues with software patents or copyright on the Our Machinery engine.

Presumably also with some sort of NDA attached to it?

nudpiedo 3 years ago |

what happened and what direction is going to take the project from now on? You know, the web page has barely any links at all from a product which seems it was good, if it ever was something else than a landing page.

P.D. add "Tell HN:" to the title or a link to the web page

snickerbockers 3 years ago |

Wtf is/was "the machinery"?

adamdusty 3 years ago | |

Well it used to be a game engine. It was on people's radar because the devs had previous success with a different game engine and they wrote fairly technical dev blogs about the process.

phendrenad2 3 years ago | |

GamesFromScratch has a nice intro that's still up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_8utTBfE-U

kencausey 3 years ago | | |

And the same content creator on this engine today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUJyms9WstQ

ivraatiems 3 years ago |

Can we see a screenshot or some other confirmation that this happened?

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.

zlsa 3 years ago | |

Termination email: https://host.zlsadesign.com/rkHpL6ET5.png

Email about the EULA change that added the termination clause two days ago: https://host.zlsadesign.com/SkfpU6ETq.png

ivraatiems 3 years ago | | |

Thank you!

This is definitely unacceptable. Are you considering legal action?

jsheard 3 years ago | |

Aside from second hand copies of the email, you can see that nearly all links to ourmachinery.com now 404.

They deleted everything besides the frontpage and EULA page, a shame since their blog was a good resource.

japhib 3 years ago |

Was this a hack?