W4 Games formed to strengthen Godot ecosystem | Hacker News Reader

W4 Games formed to strengthen Godot ecosystem

w4games.com

173 pointslarsiusprime97 comments

By forming a company they can finally provide “official” (though guarded by NDA) console support for Godot. This is by far my biggest issue with the engine and why it’s a complete non-starter for any serious game development.

It also means they could provide paid support when Bad Stuff happens with the engine. For a similar reason I have enterprise support with Unity, and it’s been worth it’s weight in gold.

One of the creators of Godot, Ariel Manzur, already has a company that provides signed developers access to NDA'd console ports of the engine. It's not official in any capacity, and isn't advertised by Godot more than the other companies that offer the same services (Pineapple Works, gotm.io, etc.)

I assume it's going to be the same if W4 ever moves into porting.

I wish these companies would provide more information on the path to exporting for console. I know there are NDAs, but even for smaller libraries like Monogame and Heaps they at least mention that you can access a repo to do console builds. For the Godot path I was under the impression that you need utilise these companies as a publisher in order the build for console, which opens up a whole host of unknowns at the outset of the project.

Indeed, these are for-profit companies who will handle the porting job or assist you in it (they're not all publishers, mind). They could be more transparent, I agree, but as they want to sell a service, public documentation is probably not their priority. That would be the Godot project's role, except as they explained in a recent blog post [1], as a free software and entirely public project (not a company), they couldn't work on console-specific code let alone host it or document it. It could be done in private by volunteers, but it hasn't been the case so far, only for-profit companies did it - likely because of how complex it is, and how tricky working with console manufacturers is.

So the state of Godot on console is out of Godot's hands, and that's why there is no documentation on it right now. But that might change with a company focused on bridging the gap between Godot and console manufacturers, which one of the W4 founders is alluding to [2].

[1] https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...

[2] https://twitter.com/reduzio/status/1556931546665422851

I really hope we got a lot of transparency with this new company. I would very much be happy to pay a company a sizeable amount to obtain the console compatible version of the engine. It just needs to be clear to me what the pricing and terms are when I am evaluating game engines for new projects. Right now it is too risky to start a project in Godot with the hope that a 3rd party will deliver a console port for a reasonable price many months, or perhaps years into the future.

Wait... so PC-only game development isn't serious?

For a Game Studio no, I don't think it is.

For a Game Engine yes, it relegates you to an (albeit still quite large but inevitably an order of magnitude smaller) niche and hinders adoption significantly

Picking a game engine that subtracts hundreds of millions of potential players from your game without huge engineering effort to support a single console? Yea, that's a problem.

Thankfully, Godot is solving it!

There are many successful game genres which are functionally PC-only, because you cannot reasonably play them with a gamepad. See Paradox grand strategy games, for example. Those "potential buyers" never existed.

I play some paradox games on xbox with no problem, they are included with gamepass now

I’m not touching CK3 on Xbox until I get the royal court DLC.

I think a better genre GP could have considered are classic RTS’s. No way AoE is ever playable without a mouse.

CK3/Stellaris proved you could do grand strategy on console.

Halo Wars 1/2 proved you could do RTS on console.

Cities Skylines/Prison Architect proved you could do Sim games on console.

FFXIV proved you could do hotkey MMOs on console.

While you certainly can't forklift existing games like aoe2/sc2 onto a controller, I'm pretty much out of the business of assuming consoles are unsuitable for genres these days

Stellaris was ported to console and works fairly well! I still would rather play it with a keyboard and mouse, of course :)

Best to start small with your first few games regardless. porting is always harder than the industry leads on to suggest and to be frank, your first games will suck a lot. Porting can come after making something people want to play.

But all of that is tangential to why I wouldn't recommend Godot for a first game not unless you are already a competent C++ programmer and are ready to dig into the engine for problem. But I always like when I can chime in on how frustrating the porting process is.

Some big ones I care about are still PC only.

Like iRacing.

This is all so smart. Commercial support and premium features are huge.

Over time Godot will eat into both Unity and Unreal. No indie developer will want to hitch themselves to these locked down commercial engines. Only big gaming firms will do it, because they want the support and maturity. Or niche businesses, such as ArchViz. They have teams to do license negotiation.

For indie devs, this is the first time you can "own your entire codebase" while including a technically capable and sophisticated engine that wasn't written in-house. This gives them free reign over how to distribute their games and code. They can even give their players full access to the code itself, which is a game changer for preservation and modding.

As Unity and Unreal mindshare drains, Godot will pick up serious steam. An entire ecosystem will form. Godot will catch up, feature for feature.

Epic Games is currently chasing {games, film, archviz, automotive, Geo/GIS, etc.} with Unreal Engine, meanwhile small and nimble startups will leverage open source Godot to fully throw themselves at each of those markets. They'll do a better job than Epic could ever do with their divided attention.

Godot is going to change the future of several industries. It may slay the game engine giants.

Google, Amazon, and Apple will begin contributing to Godot. If the writing isn't on the wall for Unity and Unreal by that time, FAANG support will make it crystal clear.

W4 Games needs to make sure it protects itself from AWS Luna, Google Stadia, etc. so that it can set terms for those platforms favorably in the future. That way it can continue making money from building up this incredible platform.

>As Unity and Unreal mindshare drains, Godot will pick up serious steam.

Any reason to think Unity and Unreal mindshare drains?

New game developers picking up things for the first time will hear about Godot's advantages and choose it over Unity and Unreal, since it's arguably a better fit for where they're at. Over five to ten years, this will have a non-negligible impact on the pipeline of engineers and games.

Apple also has a huge beef with Epic Games, and I wouldn't put it past them to give giant grants to Godot. They can make use of the output for their own needs.

I've read that Godot doesn't support consoles (out of the box) because it can't integrate NDA'd console SDKs and tools. But why can't the Godot IDE use a plugin architecture that delegates to console SDKs and tools that the game developer has installed on their own machine?

It's that it can't sign the NDAs in the first place. From what I understand, getting godot to output graphics on a switch or ps4 or whatever isn't the hard part. It's meeting quality control metrics from nintendo, sony, etc. When you partner with a company for porting, it's their experience that you're getting more than code.

Incumbent consoles should stop using this dinosaur approach with NDA for their SDKs. What century are they from? There is zero point in any of that.

It’s legally required by Sony, Nintendo, etc

Exactly what I'm saying. It's a completely dinosaur idea. There is no need for them to do it.

Probably makes emulators take a bit longer to come out. If they were open I'd expect emulators to come out before the consoles did.

Emulators don't stop them from selling games really. That whole paranoid lock-in mentality isn't helping them. Sony started to realize that to some degree and now sometimes even sell their games on GOG.

Steam Deck basically uses Linux with open stack to run games and is selling like hot cakes.

A TL;DR from one of the founders on godot's subreddit:

New company independent from Godot, funded by venture capital (so has enough money to build products until it can actually make money).

This company will build products and propose services which are yet to be announced - there's a hint that one product will be console ports.

This company will provide funding to the Godot project so more contributors can be hired, and will also donate its own employees' work time for significant contributions to Godot (we'll soon announce some).

But as importantly, it will provide the level of commercial support that bigger studios need to be able to switch to Godot.

https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/wk5ji6/hello_world_w...

> funded by venture capital (so has enough money to build products until it can actually make money)

What a dumb move.

> more contributors can be hired

Game development is in the dictionary definition of the mythical man month.

> But as importantly, it will provide the level of commercial support that bigger studios need to be able to switch to Godot.

Nobody is going to do that.

You know how Hacker News is really negative about stuff that turns out to be a huge success? There should be a name for the opposite, where a bunch of nerds get really excited about something that will definitely remain insignificant.

> > But as importantly, it will provide the level of commercial support that bigger studios need to be able to switch to Godot.

> Nobody is going to do that.

> You know how Hacker News is really negative about stuff that turns out to be a huge success? There should be a name for the opposite, where a bunch of nerds get really excited about something that will definitely remain insignificant.

Let's call it trolling.

I work with B2B software(software library) and... professional support sells well, and companies are ready to pay a lot for it. Many customers won't even buy the software without support.

You could have said the same thing about Blender (open-source 3D modeling/animation software) a few years ago, and you would look like an idiot today.

It's actually surprising to see the amount of negativity surrounding Godot on HN. The top comment in the thread about Godot's 3.5 release was someone talking about how Godot's feature set is "below average" compared to Unreal. I think you would be hard pressed to find any Godot user that thinks it is in the same class with a product developed by hundreds of engineers at a billion dollar company. Yet, because it has an enthusiastic user base (which is a good sign for a FOSS project), that somehow it has to compete with all solutions in its category. To your point, it would be like comparing Blender to 3DS Max or Maya in the mid 2000s.

Hacker News can be a pretty negative eco-chamber at times. The same post can either generate very positive or very negative comments, just months apart. Not a new phenomenon (remember the post by the Dropbox founder? "Why do I need this when I can rsync").

That said, if all the non-constructive negativity is filtered, there are often gems buried in the comment section, with genuine constructive criticism. As a neutral observer it's relatively easy to find them. If I was emotionally involved with a project, however, I'm not sure I'd read the threads.

Here is the original comment [0] and the relevant quote:

> Godot is below average in quality compared to Unreal

Quality != featureset; I've used Godot extensively (and dabbled with Unreal) and Godot just isn't as solid a product as Unreal, and it's not a small gap either. (I fully acknowledge that Godot necessarily cannot be expected to have the same development velocity and focus that a multibillion dollar company can, but nevertheless, that doesn't really factor in very much when it comes to choosing between the two.)

There are countless gotchas and footguns in Godot (some of which are being fixed for 4.0!) that directly impede my ability to use it day-to-day. Some examples that come to mind:

* No strict typing in GDScript (type annotations aren't robust enough and lots of type errors can sneak past) * No strict typing of node types (for example, Unity components can require the presence of component "X", and this relationship can be guaranteed since it's checked at build time.) * No strict typing of resources/scenes: they're referenced only by string paths, and it's not possible to check types at build time. * GDScript performance (this one's a killer; unless you resort to GDNative, scripting performance quickly becomes a serious bottleneck.) I've heard that performance is significantly improved in 4.0!

I've also encountered a number of arcane bugs (some fixable, some requiring arcane workarounds); notably, I recall a bug where there were multiple texture files with the same name (but in different directories); this worked perfectly on all platforms except for Android, where in one case only, the wrong texture was used.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32357248

Besides no strict typing, Godot also has a huge issue with string-based development. Everything is a string. I'm surprised calling GDScript functions isn't done with string literals like "function"()

Godot 4 greatly reduces this reliance on strings in the api, though. It has lambdas too.

>Game development is in the dictionary definition of the mythical man month.

this isn't a too many cooks situation. There's definitely enough separate work to establish separate teams specializing in various aspects. graphics, editor, input AI, etc... There are dozens of features in an engine that can all be a full time job for a dedicated team of engineers.

also keep in mind the actual wording of Brooks law:

>adding manpower to a *late* software project makes it later

This is very much a long term thing, not some game in crunch launching next month

Only good can come from this. Any additional real competitors in the game engine space is a welcome effort.

Anyone found info on how much seed capital they got? The company itself has been dormant for 10 months, so I'm curious to see how much they needed to make this a reality

https://www.solocheck.ie/Irish-Company/W4-Games-Limited-7050...

If I were then I’d be working on an asset store. But I’m sure they’ve already done the math on this.

If they don't, someone on HN really ought to focus on this! I've loved this engine for a while (and I have used Unity and Unreal in commercial products) but there needs to be infrastructure to support it.

It's happening: https://twitter.com/reduzio/status/1557299634514673670

> This will be achieved by W4 providing commercial products and services offering such as enterprise support plans and the possibility to access markets that were previously unreached by Godot, such as console platforms.

This is the most detail I could find on their site about what they're actually planning.

A common complaint about Godot has been the lack of an official path to console ports, and the Godot team have asserted that it's not possible for Godot itself to directly support this, due to being open source and non-profit. Looks like this is the workaround.

As soon as godot offers better support for 3d and matches at least unity’s hdrp i am switching to it. Had enough of unity’s crappy asset store and “engine”.

Does Godot have a better asset store?

Rather than the scam / low quality filled unity asset store, having none is better.

Edit: It may be an interesting idea to build one for godot tho.

"Having none is better"... but there are some incredibly useful assets on the Unity Asset store? Here are three off the top of my head that I've used for a while now and they're worth every penny:

Shapes - https://acegikmo.com/shapes/docs/

Easy Save 3 - https://moodkie.com/easysave/

InControl - https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/input-management... (but I've also heard Rewired is excellent.)

Unity would be far poorer for missing them.

In the case of Godot a lot of functionality is available out of the box. Biggest example is input management. You have an InputMap section where you define actions and can assign keys/buttons to it. Gamepad layout is automatically handled for thousands of controllers so that "right face button" is the same input event whether the user is using an xbox gamepad, a pro controller or generic.

There is an official Asset Library but only for free, MIT licensed assets. There's nothing stopping someone from creating a paid one, though.

"In the case of Godot a lot of functionality is available out of the box."

Indeed. Most assets listed by OP (and are rightfully high quality) are essentially "patches" for unity's crappy engine.

Interesting.

When I asked for a good engine, ppl here would recommend Unity and Godot.

The difference seemed to be that Unity comes with everything out of the box and Godot, while free, would require you to "fight the engine" along the way to build a game.

Most people I know who use Godot, myself included, find it easier to use than Unity. I don't know why you believe you would be required to "fight the engine." You just need to be at least be willing to understand the idioms and methods of a particular framework and work with it - otherwise why use a framework at all?

Some people switch engines but want the new one to accommodate to the previous workflow. You can try to make Godot work like Unity but you'll fight the engine all the time because it's designed differently. So maybe that's what you read. 3D support is much better now than it was before so it could also be that.

In my experience, Unity felt free to play, pay to win. I felt that the engine was full of holes in stuff that I expect an engine to handle. It's not a small percentage of games that need controller support, or tilemaps, or proper sorting of sprites. Some of that eventually became officially supported by the engine but by that time I was more than happy with Godot.

I've seen people give 2 hour long talks about how they managed to force Unity to do pixel perfect rendering, while in Godot it's a couple of checkboxes.

So I guess it depends a lot on what you're trying to do. For some games Godot might not be the best choice and that's fine, you have to choose the right tool for each project.

I really wish there was a Shapes-like library but in C++ and not Unity, in the style of Dear IMGUI. It would make game development in general much easier… (Though it would have to be tied to render APIs like DX/GL/Vulkan because of the sheer amount of customized shaders that you need to write for it.)

NanoVG is the closest thing I came across when I had a similar quesiton: https://github.com/memononen/NanoVG

unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's getting steady updates now unlike the last time I checked. But I imagine it's pretty mature at this point. There also seem to be ports in Metal/DX11 if you didn't want to be stuck in OpenGL.

Most are patches for unity's crappy engine. Indeed those listed are cool.

Also, cool game screenshots and idea listed on your about (sorry, had to look for some reason - perhaps to switch my mind from unity's shit documentation, which I am reading at the moment).

Shouldn't Easy Save and InControl equivalents better be part of Godot instead of being sold in an asset store?

There is an asset library where free, open source plugins and resources can be downloaded directly in the editor. There was talk of possibly supporting a paid asset store like Unity's, but it's difficult to align with the open source culture of Godot,

The 4.0 release is supposed to be much better for 3D games. It's about to go from alpha releases to beta ones.

That’s great to hear. Most commenters are focusing on the issue with console development.

Godot themselves wrote about it in July:

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...

It’s a fickle beast indeed. But what many people gloss over is the fact the option is there! Make your full game now or just a PoC, happy with the knowledge there is already help available.

I'm really excited to learn Godot. With the way Unity has changed, it increasingly feels like the right engine for hobby projects. I hope they avoid the missteps Unity made, but the approach they're taking here feels great to me.

Great!, I hope this won't turn Godot into an open core model in the long run.

Read the FAQ; they are pretty clear that Godot stays MIT license as today. My read of all this is that they are intending to provide similar porting services as some of the others (who they mention and link to) BUT because they are core contributors to Godot as well, this yields the proper impression that they are here to stay whereas we don't know the plans of the other groups that incidentally provide Godot porting services.

In addition, being able to check the "enterprise support available" box on any kind of evaluation matrix could be a very big deal to larger developers.

Enterprise support is huge. When something is going wrong on platform X and you have a month before launch, you need access to engine experts with an SLA.

Just checked out Godot's website and it still doesn't support Vulkan,although support for Vulkan was in the working since 3 years ago. DirectX and Metal won't be supported at all. C# support, even if added a long time ago, is still subpar.

I would like some focus into polishing and evolving the game engine.

Unless you work on very simple games, something like Unity is far more usable.

It's not like the engine will magically be better if it uses Vulkan. That's why the support is coming along slowly: the Vulkan renderer is completely separate from the others and uses different techniques.

Godot 3.x will likely always be OpenGL for compatibility.

Godot 4 has 2 Vulkan renderers implemented already (a clustered renderer for desktops, and a simpler renderer for mobile).

C# support in godot 4 has been ported to .NET 6 CLR rather than mono and is in the process of being merged now.

This is great news for Godot. I know this has been bandied about for a while but to have a proper SLA offering partner for Godot legitimatizes it as 4 approaches.

Great news, I’m very excited for the future of Godot. Once Godot 4.0 reaches beta, I’ll hopefully have some time to play around with it for hobby projects.

Well, to be perfectly frank I'm wholly negative about this. The corporate gobbledygook in the FAQ doesn't include anything to assuage my fears about the obvious conflict of interests for the core Godot developers. I'm a full time indie dev. I just started donating to Godot's Patreon after the recent Unity / IronSource kerfuffle and wanted to pick up the engine for my next title. I guess I'll be cancelling that subscription much sooner than I expected, and I don't know what I'll be doing now, tool wise.

The interests of Godot as a free software project are protected by the Software Freedom Conservancy. Some of the original authors or maintainers forming a company doesn't affect that.

I understand that there are failsafes in place to protect against the conflict of interests, but it doesn't mean the conflict of interests isn't there, otoh it's extremely blatant. I am almost certain that it will affect things. I trust the devs mean well, but the incentives here are directly aligned for things to get ugly at some point.

Absolutely, since venture capital can potentially steer the current engine developers (with money) towards a direction that isn’t aligned to FOSS or indie game development. I hope that they can withstand any pressure from investors if it has potential to damage the integrity of the project. (They have already gotten donations/sponsors from some online casinos and shady blockchain/metaverse companies before, although I think it was with minimal strings attached.)

Since Godot is MIT other devs can always fork the engine and start developing from there if this ever happens, but the expertise from the original devs would still be lost.

Yes I am a bit more optimistic than the original commentor on the issue, but I have to agree that it's clear outside pressure is appearing. I don't necessarily mean W4, I can see the need for a company to serve the commercial interests of the community and I think this is a good way to do it. Perhaps W4 might even shield Godot from some of the negative incentives of influential donors.

Why so dramatic? This is only good for Godot. No serious game studios use Godot because of lack of “enterprise support” and console support, both of which this company is founded to provide. More companies using Godot means more contributors, more features and a better engine. The ecosystem has struggled for a while to find footing, but now it’ll finally be able to flourish.

Case in point, XNA has multiple successors (FNA, MonoGame) supported by companies that make money by porting games to consoles.

I agree it was overly dramatic. I think I just had a visceral reaction to the dreadful PR speak throughout the announcement.

I don't agree it's "only good", there's definitely cause for concern, but I'll try to be carefully optimistic about the whole thing and wish the project all the best.

>to assuage my fears about the obvious conflict of interests for the core Godot developers.

from my understanding, this is simply godot developers making a separate company for things that can never be open sourced to begin with. What conflict of interest exists now that wouldn't for people who want to champion their own engine?

If your scope was to create a game on PC for Godot, nothing changed. If it was to get a game on console, this may have made life much easier for you. If Microsoft or Epic wanted to aquire the engine for themselves, it would have happened with or without W4 games

There's an obvious economic incentive to put more than just the promised bare necessities behind proprietary lockins tied to the company. I'm absolutely not saying the devs are malicious or greedy or planning to do that, but following such incentives is the whole raison d'être for venture capital that's now backing them.

I think it's great because Godot is open source, but I really wish it was an ECS engine getting all of this attention.

Bevy seems to be gaining momentum and it will probably keep growing as Rust gets more popular and used in game development.

So it will be very, very slow. But I can see an indie darling being made in that engine within the next 5 years.

Yeah I'm following Bevy closely, looks promising! I might have to try contributing.

I've been using a library called RelEcs for Godot C#:

Standalone version: https://github.com/Byteron/RelEcs

Godot integrated version: https://github.com/Byteron/RelEcsGodot

It works fantastically well for me.

What does this mean?

By reading the article I see that it means that a company has been started.

Monetisation phase starts.

It means that some of the key creators of Godot are starting a company to support it. Godot itself would be open source. But as more adopt it they can do more support services for profit. This could include: - An asset store. - A proprietary solution for consoles (which require some non-Open Source code) - Paid technical support or enhanced versions

And there are probably other things I haven't thought of.

For all the talk about Godot on HN, it doesn't appear to have any actual uptake in the gamedev community...

Does anyone know of any AA or successful indie games that were made with Godot?

Baba is You

Not Godot.

Oh. I was sure I saw a talk by it's creator saying he used Godot. Pardon me, if that was wrong

Yup, just googled. My bad. Ill show myself out - no need to call security. :-)

Cruelty Squad. Probably not the best poster child for engine capabilities on the tech and graphics side, haha. Unarguably successful though.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/

Wrought Flesh https://store.steampowered.com/app/1762010/Wrought_Flesh/

great dev logs too

I know of Resolutiion, but no idea how successful it's been: https://resolutiion.monolithofminds.com/

Sonic Colors: Ultimate

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Colors#Sonic_Colors:_Ult...

If you browse /r/godot on reddit you will see plenty of people who show their finished games or games still in progress.

No serious game studio uses Godot because of its lack of console support, and enterprise support. So it’s only used by hobbyists. This company is founded to solve both those problems.

Sonic Colors: Ultimate, Cruelty Squad, and all of those: https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/

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