[echelon]

> 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]

Patent / Copyright issues would fit this.

[bogwog]

> 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)