Gaming
The Game Engine That Asked Developers to Delete Everything
Our Machinery, the small studio behind The Machinery game engine, emailed its users this week with a farewell and a demand. Development is ceasing, GitHub access is ending, all licenses terminate 14 days after the notice, and every user is requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries. Annual license payments will be refunded in full through Gumroad.
The Machinery was a labor of love in an industry of giants, a modular, extensible engine written in plain C, launched in early access last year, praised by developers for its flexibility and hackability. Its credits include Magicka and Warhammer Vermintide, games with real commercial history. The company said continuing in its current direction had run its course, and chose an orderly shutdown over a slow fade.
What turned a sad shutdown into an industry talking point was the paperwork. Users noticed that Our Machinery had quietly changed its EULA shortly before the termination email. The original Section 14 allowed the company to update the agreement at will. The updated version added a new paragraph. Once The Machinery is terminated, users must cease all use and delete every related file. A Reddit user spotted the change through the Wayback Machine, and the discovery spread across Hacker News within hours.
Then came the vanishing act. The company's dev blog was deleted from its website, and its social accounts have been silent since April. The termination email stands as the only public word on the shutdown.
Here is why developers far beyond The Machinery's user base are paying attention. When you license a proprietary engine, you are renting your own toolchain, and the landlord can change the lease on the way out. Contrast that with open source engines, where the code survives its creators by design. Every developer choosing tools this year just got a vivid case study in why the license terms matter as much as the feature list.
The community response has been swift and pointed. The EULA change was spotted by a Reddit user comparing versions through the Wayback Machine, and the story spread across Hacker News within hours, with developers sharing their own stories of tools that changed terms midstream. The full Gumroad refund softens the financial blow, and to Our Machinery's credit the email itself was direct. But goodwill refunds fall short of restoring the weeks of integration work developers invested in a toolchain they must now delete.
The refund is classy and the email is honest. But the deleted blog and the rewritten EULA tell the deeper story. In proprietary software, even the history can be uninstalled. Builders, choose tools you could keep if the company disappeared tomorrow.
Quick answers
What is this story about?
Our Machinery, the small studio behind The Machinery game engine, emailed its users this week with a farewell and a demand. Development is ceasing, GitHub access is ending, all licenses terminate 14 days after the notice, and every user is requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries. Annual license payments will be refunded in full through Gumroad.
Why does this story matter?
The refund is classy and the email is honest. But the deleted blog and the rewritten EULA tell the deeper story. In proprietary software, even the history can be uninstalled. Builders, choose tools you could keep if the company disappeared tomorrow.
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