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Comment by j_4 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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.

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