I made a video to help Unity devs quickly navigate things before they make decisions. Watch is not necessary I copy paste my video description below with all the links I shown in video. If you like to hear my thoughts or opinion then watch I don’t mind, I don’t use youtube video to make a living.
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This is not tutorial video, also not video to tell you to use UE. It is a video that tell you the information you might need to start and make a decision for yourself. There are plenty of other better tutorial content creator than me, feel free to search for those.
TL;DW: Just click through the links if you don’t want to spend 30+ mins hearing me talking about it.
1:06 Migration Doc: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/unreal-engine-for-unity-developers/
2:18 License Portal: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license
Standard License: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal
EULA Change Log: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula-change-log/unreal
8:16 UE Features: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/features
9:46 Setup Visual Studios: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/setting-up-visual-studio-development-environment-for-cplusplus-projects-in-unreal-engine/
10:46 D3D Crash: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/how-to-fix-a-gpu-driver-crash-when-using-unreal-engine/
14:04 Good Sample Projects to start
17:42 Show Lyra, talk about Blueprint, C++, making your thing in plugins
20:35 Convert Blueprint Project to C++ project.
21:15 Create your own plugins
24:24 Deal with Experimental, Beta features
27:07 Market Place free content and restriction
29:00 UEFN: https://dev.epicgames.com/community/fortnite/getting-started/uefn
30:28 Show UEFN, example island UEFN Doc: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/starting-out-in-unreal-editor-for-fortnite
32:41 Verse Doc: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/learn-programming-with-verse-in-unreal-editor-for-fortnite
34:27 Creator Economy 2.0: https://create.fortnite.com/news/introducing-the-creator-economy-2-0?team=personal
Unity had a very similar clause until it suddenly didn’t
It literally says if you don’t want to accept a new Eula, you don’t have to. I’m not a lawyer but that’s pretty gotcha-proof. There’s no way you can lose that in court.
My original point was, how can that be worse than Unity’s if the clause literally makes it against the contract to ever intend to change the contract?
This was in the Unity 2022 ToS
Unity is trying to enforce the new terms on everyone regardless. I have no experience in law but Ars Technica / Hoeg’s Law seem to think it’s not a clear cut case. There is a class action being taken so we will get to see exactly what the courts think of their shenanigans.
I don’t support the claim that Unreal’s terms are worse than Unity’s.
The Unreal terms are pretty straight forward they have entire section just for this part in “clear” language. I will copy paste below. It’s really not ambiguous compare to the Unity terms. This is why any company that develop with UE will have their own fork/repo and not just develop on the vanilla you download off launcher. And if you are indie without a company or lawyer, you better read the EULA everytime a window pop up to ask you to accept.
Actually, just follow proper procedural, create a proper business entity with proper lawyer review things for you and accountant that help you make sure all your papers are in place.
Unreal terms below regarding term changes, source link in my OP.
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That’s why if you are starting a business(not just game dev), you have to talk to business/IP/patent lawyer about the tech you licensed and review all the terms. You pay them to help you save time on those issues and avoid getting trapped.
And believe it or not, I think Epic’s EULA is reviewed by “many” lawyers to say the least.
Lastly, if you are not satisfied with the standard terms they provided, you can negotiate with them for custom terms between your lawyers.
Or you could stick to software that doesn’t need lawyers or licensing or eulas or negotiations.
If you use Godot, you actually own your copy of the game engine, can do whatever you want with it, and aren’t waiting for some corporation to do crazy nonsense like unity did.
MIT is sort of a “author” protection license, means you if do use and get it, you can’t sue the author for whatever issue arise from it.
It however does not protect your or your company from using it. The Godot Foundation doesn’t even need to protect any entity using Godot Engine other than to ensure Godot can keep going and resolve the IP/copyright conflict if they getting served with a legal notice. (so the main devs don’t have to sweat, until the legal team tell them what to do so Godot dev can resume. (If some merge is indeed violation of IP/copyright.)
Some explanation from Internet people: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/42663/what-if-the-code-found-in-github-with-mit-license-was-stolen-by-someone-and-uplo
So, use your own judgement. I do support open source softwares like I mentioned in my other comments, running a business however is very different beast. Vetting merges is only going to get more serious as Godot grew.