W4 plans to monetize the Godot engine using Red Hat’s open-source playbook | Hacker News Reader

W4 plans to monetize the Godot engine using Red Hat’s open-source playbook

techcrunch.com

102 pointsibobev21 comments

I foresee a future where Godot becomes the main engine of choice for a student or indie developer. The free and open source aspect is huge. AAA studios will no doubt always stick with Unreal, but everything else stands to benefit from Godot becoming more feature rich while having an open license. Godot will very likely become the Blender of game engines, which would be a fantastic outcome.

On another note, WebGPU support for Godot will be very interesting once that arrives.

Didn't Blender have its own game engine at some point? Maybe I imagined it/misunderstood what I was looking at.

It's gone from the mainline releases but lives on in the UPBGE fork.

I'm kind of glad for it, Blender is a great tool but it certainly doesn't need any more panes to get lost in.

Rust has a lot of interesting development going on with open source game engines as well. Fyrox and Bevy are both starting to flesh themselves out. Bevy already supports wgpu and Fyrox has a whole heap of features for something so young.

Bevy and Fyrox aren't anywhere near the level of Godot. I understand you're speculating they might be in the future, but I don't see the compelling case compared to other barebones engines.

To be fair, Rust crates are nothing like Godot. Godot is a complete IDE in addition to a game engine - Bevy and Fyrox have no associated IDE or development environment at all, IIRC, so you will be doing everything in code and with other pieces of software.

(not to say that that's a bad thing! it's just different)

> AAA studios will no doubt always stick with Unreal

Idk if I would say "always," people thought that VFX studios would always stick with Maya/3DS Max and other commercial software, but now Blender is eating up marketshare in that field like crazy.

Godot is a fantastic tool, feels a lot like how Blender felt in the early days. Pleasant to use at really productive. I hope adding a company on top of it doesn't throw the baby out with the bath water. Certainly the creates deserve to be able to make money off of the great engine they created. But opensource business models can be hard to get right, and I'm not sure if there's an example (yet) of one work in game engines. Still they seem to be doing all the right things and getting the right people into the company to help them. There's a number of things that could be added to Godot now that they have a company behind it, most notably support for consoles which require expensive developer licenses purchased from the console makers.

I am just an amateur game dev, but I really love Godot. Its so simple and just makes sense. The architecture with nodes really works and is easy to reason about. I hope Godot 4 really knocks it out of the park with 3d, but as it is, Godot is my favorite engine for 2d. With 3d stuff I think I would still just use Unreal, which is just so incredibly powerful.

Unity I don't understand how it got so popular outside of marketing, since I have found it to be actively painful to use.

Back when Unity got popular, over a decade ago, there wasn’t any alternatives.

Well, there were some established players, such as Acknex 3D GameStudio. Unity had the advantage of being somewhat feature-complete while being somewhat intuitive to use, but it wasn't the only option.

There were plenty of alternatives: C4, Torque, Leadwerks, ShiVa, NeoAxis, Esenthel, Panda3D, Cafu, Crystal Space, and others. Unity gained popularity because it supported mobile devices at a time when the smart phone market was only a few years old and mobile games were profitable.

Aka “there wasn’t any alternatives.” Unity targeted a niche market that grew up to eat the entire industry.

I love godot, but I have a few doubts on its performance. I guess it still has good performance because it's lightweight, but I'm not sure of how fast gdscript can be.

I've tried using gdnative, and even though it's going to be phased out in favor of gdextension, using gdnative is fastidious, it has many undocumented pitfalls which will make your code crash or just do nothing silently. You cannot create objects yourself, everything goes through godot allocators.

But it still feels immensely better than using unity. A long time went by since ogre3d, and there is finally an open source engine that is worth using.

Interesting, I didn't know they couldn't support consoles due to open source. It seems like this could be a pretty smart move.

It's not the open source bit. It's the lack of formal corporate entity to sign NDAs and such.

Hm I think it's both issues? From the article:

> Godot can’t provide support for consoles because it wouldn’t be allowed to publish the code required to interact with the proprietary hardware

It’s more nuanced than that. The TechCrunch piece elides a lot of context.

None of the OSS frameworks do anything better than what Godot does. A core dev sitting on a special fork they share with devs who have signed NDAs is not scalable.

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

I'm not seeing anything about a core dev sitting on a special fork in that article, and I was under the impression that it's _other_ companies which specialize in porting to consoles that have their own maintained version of Godot, namely Lone Wolf Technology and Pineapple Works.

W4's monetization plan would make them having their own well-maintained "special" fork a viable option in the first place, as Unity and Unreal already do.