Here's why King gave away its 2D mobile game engine Defold
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Not sure if I agree with the "weirdly overcomplicated system" comment though, it looks like a fairly elegant system to me?
Compared to the competition, such as Corona SDK, King will have to work real hard to build a community and ecosystem around Defold.
In 2016, having a great technology alone is not enough to get traction in game dev, all other parts of the ecosystem matter a lot: language, plugins (own and third party), art assets, tutorials (written and video), books, mind share retaining efforts (podcasts, events and etc).
Unity got this quite right, others are working hard to catch up (Unreal, Corona in 2D space).
Being open source is a huge boost as well, in terms of flexibility of development as well as peace of mind for the third party devs that the owner of the engine won't switch to the dark side with the next leadership change or simply let the technology get obsolete by not releasing new versions any more.
Still, I welcome this, Defold is a cool engine - hope that King open sources this eventually.
> GamesBeat: Is this going to be open source? Hartwig: It’s not open source, but it’s free of charge. There are no royalties or team size limitations. You get all the features on all platforms. For us, the main driver—There are two reasons. One, we believe that opening the engine up to external developers will increase our product quality. That will benefit us internally when we develop our games. Two, we want to support the game industry. We think we can bring a lot of value to the whole industry by helping indie developers create awesome games.