With the Improbable/Unity dispute lingering on, MMOs like Worlds Adrift are literally adrift

Last week, Improbable and Unity stunned the gaming industry with their ugly spat over SpatialOS integration and licensing, as both companies issued statements about their agreements that clarified and contradicted their relationship and even Epic Games got in on the spectacle, teaming up with Improbable to fund affected developers and coax them away from Unity.

A week later, those affected developers are still very much affected. Though Unity told MMO devs that used SpatialOS alongside Unity would be grandfathered into that use, Unity hasn’t as yet unbarred Improbable itself from developing the SpatialOS/Unity integration, which means those devs and their MMOs are still very much left in the lurch. (And that’s without counting the Unity-only teams that are now left wondering whether their projects could be in jeopardy over similar fallout and vague terms in the future.)

One such company is Bossa Studios, which is currently running MMO Worlds Adrift in early access. The game, though small in playerbase right now, is one of the more prominent using both SpatialOS and Unity. Bossa Co-Founder Henrique Olifiers has a new dev blog up today admitting that the future of the game – and whether it will continue to be a SpatialOS title – is still uncertain.

“This storm is still there, though, lingering on the horizon. The dispute between those two companies is not yet resolved. Whatever the outcome, it will affect different studios and games in unique ways, thus it’s wise for us to explain our particular situation and plans going ahead,” he writes.

“Worlds Adrift is the only live game using SpatialOS at this time, with the exception of our friends’ game, Lazarus, which is in closed Beta. Because Worlds is the very first game to use the tech, as it happens, it’s making use of a previous version of SpatialOS (v10) that no one else uses. This version is no longer in active development, and it’s stable. While it’s unlikely we can remain on SpatialOS10 forever, we can do so for now. Thus we are able to brave the storm reefed and consider all the options available without rushing. We have quite the supply of pizza and a lot to fix and expand in the game, so, for now, we’ll do what we do best: continue making Worlds Adrift better.”

MMO readers will also likely be familiar with Fractured, a full-fledged SpatialOS MMORPG that was Kickstarted last year; its dev team pulled the game’s pre-alpha servers down last week amidst the crisis and haven’t made a public statement since (the forums are currently down as well as we type this).