W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development inflection with Godot Engine
W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development inflection with Godot Engine
That's a lot of cash money. I'm still a bit confused at how much of this money will go to the actual engine and how much of it will go to supporting W4 in general, such as allowing devs to publish Godot games for consoles.
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I smell a conflict of interest
This is exactly how Blender operates. A company that raises capital and provides back to the open source version, in addition to the community contributors. If they will enshittify the OSS version because of this, like Redis has been doing, remains to be seen
Less conflict of interest and more just some confusion. They've been honest W4 is not the Godot Foundation, but they claim that W4 will contribute back to Godot development regardless so nobody's really sure how they're spending the money exactly.
The following is just my opinon on all this, but the way that I see it is that W4 represents industry priorities in the engine. In this example, the industry needs strong console support or cloud gaming and is willing to invest in it; or previously DirectX support. The Godot Foundation ensures that godot is able to focus on non-industry needs as well as community management. So they technically both contribute to the engine, but dont really overlap with each other cause they represent different groups who need to do different things with the same engine. That said - interop is needed as well because it is the same engine. ATM I trust juan and crew and the buracracy that is being built around godot to protect it and us while maintaining momentum.
Does seem like a bit of a conflict to me when their whole business is porting Godot games, which means they have a vested interesting in keeping it that way.
There are other companies which have the same business model. The Godot Foundation is what actually moves the FOSS engine forward. Unfortunately it is not possible for the foundation to provide console support.
Unreal engine does it, and I'm pretty sure Unity does as well, though you have to actually pay for licensing and acquire the dev kits themselves. But the support is built into the engine to compile for those platforms once the right compiler is there.
Unity/Unreal can talk business with Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo in a way standalone Godot engine cannot, and should not.
Unity is proprietary and Unreal is source-available; the companies have direct control over how you redistribute their engine (to collect funding). Agreements can be made between them and the console manufacturers. Godot engine is open source (MIT) and appeals to a different kind of game dev, where including proprietary code that requires a license would be an unusual juxtaposition to say the least. If consoles support is important to you then perhaps there is no issue but for others that is repulsive.
It gives unjust power over the devs (think in terms of the recent Unity fee fiasco). I wouldn't contribute to a proprietary project (that's just doing free work for a company) but I'd be honored if an open source project considered my contribution worth something to them.
That's great, you're just locking a large majority of Indie devs away from Godot forcing them to choose an engine that supports pc, and consoles.
Godot engine is licensed under MIT; it doesn't prevent you from bundling it with proprietary software which could support consoles. That should just be a separate thing so both are happy.
I value the software freedom of me and my users. It is the console manufacturers who are locking me out because I don't want to be shacked or take advantage of my users.
@NocturnalMorning @tabular though in the engine world godot is kinda indie comparing to other engines, you know? :)
I mean, I'm an Indie dev. I've tried all three engine, Godot, Unreal, and Unity, and I just don't think Godot is there yet. I used it for almost 2 years before giving it up for Unreal, and I came back and tried Godot 4.0 for a few months. It's a reality that kind of sucks. But I'm going to wait a few more years for Godot to catch up before I try to dip my toe back in.
I don't like the modern gaming industry. It is my hope that one day the norm will be free (libre) software games, using free engines.
I believe it came down to legal red tape more than technical problems? the console companies won't allow the open source foundation to supply the tools, while unity and epic are established corporations with history of working with the big players.