W4 Games raises $8.5M to support Godot Engine growth | Hacker News Reader

W4 Games raises $8.5M to support Godot Engine growth

w4games.com

464 pointsmroche134 comments

W4 Games's CEO Juan Linietsky is the creator and lead dev of Godot. Their primary mission, from my understanding, is providing the non-open-source tooling and support that's needed to make it feasible to use Godot as an environment for developing console games. The SDK's and their APIs cannot be included in the FOSS Godot code directly.

Juan shared a blog post about the state of console support in Godot shortly before the launch of W4 that gives some more insight: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...

Often time folks say that what Godot is missing is a "killer app" that shows that the platform is viable. I think that this could potentially go a long way towards that.

I'm not sure it counts as a "killer app" since Unity and Unreal both have this feature already, but it's definitely another exciting step towards parity

I think the largely open source nature of the Godot ecosystem is already the "killer app" and I hope parity in matters such as this expose that

Unity has also gotten a bit intimidating to newcomers these days.

It's also intimidating to people who have been using it for a long time as well.

The proliferation of new features some of which compete with each other, and the lack of focus and polish on some of those features make it frustrating to stay current.

That coupled with some questionable business partners and tone deaf comments by their leadership team has certainly piqued my interest in other platforms.

Yeah the IronSource acquisition and the background and statements by its CEO makes me really question the long term prospects of Unity. Which is a shame because they're doing some good stuff on the tech side and have a solid engineering team.

By "killer app" I meant a really amazing game made with the engine that makes people stand up and say "oh hey Godot is legit".

Being a viable console target will attract more creators and increase the chances of that happening. As laid out in the blog post from my original comment, while Steam is a hotbed for indie games most of them toil in obscurity. Most of the money in indie games is on consoles now.

Godot has already produced at least one unconventional indie darling hit that I know of, Cruelty Squad for PC: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/

Even if that game is a hit, the videos on that steam listing don't exactly pitch it as the world's greatest 3d engine.

I mean, if that's the best hit it's produced that's not exactly saying much for the engine...

Just to be clear, it's _meant_ to look bad. Part of the shtick.

Agreed though, not a glowing endorsement for someone looking to make the next Crysis.

To me Godot became legit with version 3 adding physically based rendering like everyone else. But arguably there is one AAA game, the Sonic Colors: Ultimate remaster. Sure the studio modified Godot to some extent (but reportedly not enough to prevent e.g. scene loading in stock Godot 3) and they also did whatever was needed to port to the Switch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-RnhgZCqn4), PS4, and Xbox (4k@60hz) but a nice looking 3D game from a big franchise sounds legit enough to me. The creator of Godot was surprised though because he's intimately familiar with 3's limitations, but 4 is about done and is better in pretty much every way so maybe we'll see more of that sort of thing, and possibly with stock Godot. He did speculate that one reason Godot can be attractive for certain studios working on a franchise with an almost guaranteed minimum of sales is that it's one less thing to have a license fee for. Unreal Engine is amazing, but if you expect to gross over $1m, is 5% of your revenue each quarter forever afterwards worth it? It's not a straightforward question, but just 1.025 million units at $40 is a $2m fee, could you use that $2m to hire developers to patch up whatever shortcomings in Godot you actually need for your game and still ship on time? Or create a custom engine, as still happens occasionally?

I've started using Godot (4.0-alpha) for some hobby game dev recently. In the past I've done a fair amount with Unity and touched Unreal once or twice. Thoughts so far:

Godot is far from perfect. It's definitely more sparse than the others in terms of features. I've encountered some bugs (nothing show-stopping, and it's tough to say how much of that is just from using the alpha version, but it has impacted my flow). There are unfortunate quirks; for example, saving scripts always saves the whole scene, and saving large scenes can pause the editor for multiple seconds, which is a particularly annoying combination. The programming model is heavily OOP. The custom scripting language, GDScript, is a blessing and a curse; its tight integration with the engine comes at the cost of subpar tooling (and of course, just learning a new language with new quirks).

But.

Godot has the distinct feeling of being cohesive. It feels like it was designed by one person, who knows what it takes to make games, and set out with a holistic vision. Everything you might need to do has an answer, or at least a story. You don't get confusing mixed signals from different parts of the interface or from the docs; there's one, intentionally-designed way to do each thing. GDScript has its quirks, but it also has very elegant built-ins for doing engine-specific stuff that would be super clunky in a general-purpose language. Using Godot almost has the feeling of using (good) Apple software; somebody anticipated your needs, and made sure they'd be met. Maybe not in the exact way you would have picked, but in a way that will work, and will fit in with everything else.

That, combined with it being fully open-source, makes it feel like it has good bones. Especially in contrast with Unity - which felt like a growing pile of corpses being tossed on top of each other with each release - it's been so refreshing that it's singlehandedly gotten me back into hobby game dev. I don't feel like I'm wasting my time learning one half-baked API that's going to be replaced with another half-baked API six months from now. For every annoyance or missing feature in Godot, I have faith that things will continue to improve - because they're built on a solid foundation - or that I could at least build it myself if I really needed to.

I believe in the vision and the future of this piece of software. And that makes it feel worthwhile to invest the time learning all its quirks.

What kind of features are you missing from Godot vs other engines?

A recent one I looked for was a terrain system. There just... isn't one yet. It's totally possible they could add one some day, but I assume other things have just been higher-priority so far for their limited dev time (which isn't unreasonable)

I did find a third-party plugin that looks pretty high-quality, but it hasn't been ported to 4.0 yet

Bear in mind that almost nobody has really started porting anything to Godot 4, because it's still in alpha and stuff isn't quite nailed down yet. It makes sense to wait until the first beta, which is probably a few weeks off.

Sure, makes sense. But the question was which features are missing from the engine itself, and that one came to mind (Unreal and Unity both have built-in terrain systems, even though Unity's is crap). Not making demands, just observing/relaying

Another thing that's pretty interesting to have, but isn't quite there yet is dynamic render resolution scaling, which can be a godsend for lower spec devices.

That said, there's pretty much nothing preventing from people writing their own functionality to achieve this and someone actually did: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/1141

(note: for some, certain limitations might be dealbreakers, as described at the bottom of the description)

It's pretty cool to see people creating pieces of functionality like this, be it terrain functionality, or even the resolution scaling, which you can see a video of here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW0A-G5mMcw

I also recall there being a more static version that didn't seem to mess with your scene (as much?), but it wasn't really suitable for dynamic resolution changes at runtime back when I checked.

Now if Godot 3 could get a backport of dynamic LOD that would be great, but other than that Godot 4 is promising and it feels like the engine has a bright future ahead of it!

I just doubt that the asset/plugin situation will get anywhere close to as much of a flourishing ecosystem as Unity's, given that the financial incentives aren't quite there yet. Of course, having most of the current ones (even if a limited selection) be free is nice, though.

It used to be missing occlusion culling, which is a big deal. I think it either has it now or else it’s in v4 though?

It was sparse on tutorial content from the community too, but that seems changed a lot too since then

I wonder what their heavily nested scene graphs do to performance but haven’t tested it

It's insane that a game engine until 2021 had no occlusion culling. Really tells you that the engine is not made with "big" 3d worlds in mind.

Here's Godot's current implementation of occlusion culling (sort of), though it needs some manual setup: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/performance...

Personally our team is missing proper performance profiler. We have 2D title with 50+ KLOC codebase and a lot of objects, simulation and time warping. Profiling in Godot is really lacking compared to Unity / Unreal in both UI and features. We really just had to do "disable everything and turn it back 1 by 1" to find out bottlenecks.

Could you profile it with windows perfview[1]?

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/perfview

Sorry. I had to mention this I guess: we using GDScript. And even if we use C# lack of built-in profiler means that it's hard to find out what exactly is slowing things down as some of time is eaten by native code or "glue" used for callbacks and nodes creation.

Okay I'll mention another thing after profiler that we were struggling with in Godot: making game UI. Situation should become slightly better with "Theme type variations" implemented in version 3.5. It's little too late for us as we dont want to jump versions before release just for this single feature.

Both Unity and Unreal have built-in tools as well as a lot of alternative middleware to build user interfaces. A lot of these tools are simply much more powerful compared to what Godot has to offer. And yeah this is not about features since even using current Godot system you can implement almost anything, but with Godot it's will take 2-3x more time.

Like there are bunch of issues with Godot UI and input handling:

* It is impossible (is it?) to set 3-5 different pairs of fonts plus colors for a few groups of controls. It's so much harder than using CSS in webdev.

* It not obvious what and why eat or blocked input. There is no visual debugger for that, only ugly text field hidden in depths of editor.

* MarginContainer use theme overrides and it breaks WYSIWYG. And there few more things I dont recall that have similar issues.

* And if you use Theme files it's required to reload the engine in order to apply changes.

Keep in mind it apply to 3.4 only since I haven't worked with 4.0 enough yet. Hopefully at least some of these are fixed in 4.x.

PS: Also there is a chance that Godot is not at fault and it's just us not being able to figure it out or that we missed something in docs. Yet this is the problems we struggled with the most while building UI for our game.

If godot had official support for JavaScript, maybe via QuickJS - I'd probably actually get off my butt and build the game I've been noodling about for 20 years.

So it's like a PostgreSQL of game engines, as I heard similar praises of it.

Except no one use it for any serious games. Godot is praised there and there on HN but in the real world of making games most people don't know about it and certainly won't use it. atm it's good a indie engine.

Edit: the downvote party is there, where are the game built with godot again?

Sonic Colors: Ultimate is the highest profile title to date. (Though Godot is only used as an interface layer, the gameplay isn't built in the engine.)

Cruelty Squad and Luck Be a Landlord are both respectable indie successes.

There are probably some successful mobile titles. And it's also used in slot machines and gambling games.

> Cruelty Squad and Luck Be a Landlord are both respectable indie successes.

They can be respectable by quantity but quality not much, Cuelty Squad simple ps1-style graphics isn't much different from the dozens out there games being developed on godot sporting the very same dull style.

I have no idea whether it could be used to make a serious game, but I wouldn't want to be the first to try. Those examples don't really fit the bill.

I'm in the real world of making games and I spent 3 months evaluating Godot. I really wanted to like it. I found several critical problems and raised them with the core developers who did not take them seriously.

Can you summarize what the problems were?

Here is the biggest. https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/32383

TL;DR: IDs of destroyed objects are reused for new objects, which breaks the function for checking that an object still exists. Fixed in debug mode but not in release.

It's fixed in the master branch since 2020, and is therefore fixed in 4.0.

People were still talking about it in mid 21.

Makes me wonder what else they "fixed" by changing the behavior in dubug builds and letting it crash in release.

You have to be able to trust the foundation you're building on.

I think this was fixed in 3.4 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/51796

Godot seems nice so far. How is the c# support? The docs? Is it hard to do x if you look online for how to do so? Performance? Occlusion culling?

Last time I looked into it, it was too far behind still, but it looks like Godot 4 will be a really cool release

C# support is excellent. They received funding from Microsoft to add it, and it’s nearly as full featured as the native GDScript and it’s significantly faster (at least in 3.X).

Can’t really speak to the rest, although I believe occlusion culling is one of the killer features of the 4.0 release.

Nice! I don't think W4 has created any games though. To get some REAL traction, Godot needs some full well-known games published. Basically, we need a game to do to Godot, what Undertale and Nuclear Throne did to GameMaker.

We have Wrought Flesh by Miziziziz, but other than that I can't think of a single game actually produced by Godot. I know it is capable of it, but we need a "killer app" to make it really blow up.

Sonic Colors Ultimate was made with Godot, if I recall correctly. It's not "huge" in the sense of a major AAA title, but it's still a big franchise.

Unfortunately, at no fault of Godot itself, Sonic Colors Ultimate isn't really a great title to advertise Godot, due to the increased issues on this version of the game.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Colors#Reception_2

That's unfortunate, I guess it makes sense that Godot was used then. Tight budget, and it shows :(.

It’s incredible really that these guys are talking about using Godot on consoles when it is in such bad shape.

Even if it’s a bait and switch, and they spend 100% of the funds on just like, making the engine better, $8m isn’t going to get you to 1/20th of Unity or Unreal. It is an insurmountable niche.

I disagree. I find that it is delightful to develop for, especially for 2d games. Miziziziz made a full-3d game in Godot, and did a good job with it. There were a few glitches he caught post-release, but those were not because of the engine.

> <anyone> made a full-3d game in Godot

Why is this considered a notable achievement?

I'd argue that Godot already has a better experience for 2d dev than Unity and Unreal

Pretty much anything is better for 2D than Unreal Engine. But yeah, Godot does a better job with 2D than Unity, and it's much simpler to get started with.

I'd argue the only significant thing it's lacking, an actual practical concern for indie game development, is a good asset store. Saying Godot is useless because it will never have feature parity with UE5 is, of course, extremely silly and not a practical concern for most games.

> $8m isn’t going to get you to 1/20th of Unity or Unreal

The size and complexity of these engines can be a disadvantage, because not every game needs the features they provide. For some use-cases, it can be easier to work with a simpler engine with fewer abstractions, a smaller API, and a shorter learning-curve.

Look at what happened with Blender. It's displacing Autodesk! Maya and 3DS Max were both once "irreplaceably" entrenched.

Agreed! I don't think there's anything really standing in the way of building high-quality games with Godot. As Godot continues to mature and with the right tools and support for the indie community, it's just a matter of time before there's a breakout hit built with it.

Our company is building some open source game templates that will hopefully spark some cool creations with Godot 4. So far we have templates for a Streets of Rage-type beat-em-up game, a tower defense-style game, and something similar to Binding of Isaac. We're also including some high-quality art assets to go with the templates. We're still a few weeks away from launching, but I hope to post our work on HN when they're ready.

Looking forward to seeing them!

That is a ton of work, thank you. What is your motivation for making the templates open source?

That's a good question and to be honest, we're still figuring it out. Making our templates open source have the benefits of allowing the broader community to contribute, helps make Godot more accessible, and seems to more in the spirit of Godot. Of course we're a business and we're trying to build something sustainable, but right now we're betting on Godot and its community and we think elevating Godot will help us in the long run. Of course, maybe this a terrible idea, but let's find out! Part of the reason I started the company was to try out some off-the-wall ideas.

I think it’s a win-win because while the templates are a wonderful contribution, most of your work will be in the game play, set, and mechanics. You get to help other people along without a significant impact on your own bottom line, I think.

Yes and if everyone did that it would get more and more powerful and easier to get started as a virtuous cycle develops.

I am very interested in something like that. Would you mind giving your company’s name or website so I can find out when it’s out?

The company is Quiver (https://quiver.dev). There's not much to see right now, but we're looking to launch in the next month or two.

Cruelty Squad[0] really demonstrated to me what incredible things can be done with Godot, but I think the game is to... how to say this... out there? It has an _extremely_ stylised aesthetic. I have a hard time thinking of any game like it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruelty_Squad

Frayhem [1] is an awesome game using Godot with Nim.

Rocket Bot Royale [2] is a game I worked on using Godot. We released it on lots of platforms: Google Play, iOS, mac app store, pc/mac/linux on steam, and several HTML game sites. It has cross platform multiplayer with custom netcode written in c++, and pretty advanced SDF based terrain destruction. I think it's pretty good.

We are currently making a new game using Godot which I'm excited about.

https://rocketbotroyale.winterpixel.io/

https://frayhem.com/en/

Played a few minutes of Rocket Bot Royale and it is pretty fun! I'm so happy that since the demise of Flash, games in the browser have only gotten better.

I'm happy to hear that.

As a game developer, the state of game development is really exciting from a technological point of view. From a business point of view, it is very hard to compete, the market is very saturated. We are hoping to carve out a niche of high quality multiplayer games on the web.

What was your process to getting it on other platforms that Godot does not currently support?

All of those platforms are supported by Godot. Steam is supported through a developed and advanced module. We have a very small amount of custom platform specific code for iOS and Android.

Consoles on Godot are the hard part and thats what W4 is going to offer. I think Switch would be easy as it supports OpenGLES. Xbox and playstation would be harder, but I havent looked into it.

Thanks so much for the inside info

talking about godot and nim, Turing Complete was also developped in godot+nim https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/

Yeah, its pretty out there. I like it though, because besides the awful aesthetics, the attitude feels very "punk" and even a little countercultural. Its not for everyone and I can't blindly recommend it, but I like it for those reasons.

GameMaker filled a very specific niche by targeting indie devs with little-to-no coding experience and giving them enough support to make a game (similar to Flash). Maddy Thorsen used GameMaker for Jumper all the way back in 2004, which was really an amazing game that has similar game play elements to her phenomenal game Celeste.

I'm not sure exactly what Godot's niche is, making it harder for it to have breakout hits.

I though the Deponia series of adventure games was made with Godot, but it seems it was only used for a port of the first game. Instead Deponia used a proprietary engine called Visionaire studio.

I think in the future “summer projects” like Blender did in the beginning was pretty good. So have a few veteran leads make a game with some of the best talents. They could pick a theme (say a minecraft clone, or a FPS) and slowly up the difficulty and technical feats required (which in turn will drive development)

> I don't think W4 has created any games though

W4 Games is not a game studio. It's a new company specifically for working on Godot and working on the Godot ecosystem, including offering console porting services and similar stuff that can't happen within the open source community because of NDAs and such.

I havent seen that many Godot-powered games, but other than title I myself working on there is very promising game to be published by Raw Fury. I played the demo for several hours and had tons of fun, it called Dome Keeper. It's game with smaller scale, but it astonishingly beautiful and gameplay is addictive as hell. So there are Godot games with high production quality.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/

> Basically, we need a game to do to Godot, what Undertale and Nuclear Throne did to GameMaker

Wasn't GameMaker big a long, long time before Undertale existed?

This is huge and I hope they'll manage to deliver working console support. Though real problem is not just code itself, but some backing from larger publishing companies. Basically pipeline of all major publishers is built around Unity and Unreal: porting teams, localization, QA and devops. You can create an amazing game, but just for the reason you are not using two of major game engines you won't be able to find funding and sign publishing deal.

I am on 10+ people team building an indie game using Godot. Unfortunately for our next project we will have to use Unity because we had a hard time finding investment. Several companies loved our game, but refused a deal simply because it's not built on Unity or Unreal. In the end we found a smaller publisher that was interested, but it's likely we could get a better deal if we built it on Unity.

PS: Shameless plug. Our game is here to be released sometimes in 2022:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076120/Dwarven_Skykeep/

Wow I love the style of this game. Sorry to hear it was hard to fund.

Thanks. In our case gettng funded was not as critical as our project been in development for more than two years before we signed publishing agrement in January 2022. Without at least some extra budget we wouldn't be being able to work on it full-time and hire extra artists. So gettting to release would take two more years. Also doing marketing in-house is really difficult, prohibitively expensive and distract you from actually working on a game.

Overall our experience with Godot was good enough except for performance profiling and UI toolkit. I wish Godot get more traction, but unfortunately for now this is hot it is. So I have to warn fellow indie devs that decision to use less popular game engine have it costs.

What did you use for UI in the end?

We just using what Godot has to offer. It's just take a lot of time.

That game looks great, though. Wishlisted. And sorry to hear about the funding trouble, that sounds like something that should be higher up and discussed more.

I'm (positively) amazed at the number of open PRs on Godot's Github [0].

I'm used to those sorts of numbers for open issues without ongoing fixes - but the number of issues is actually only 5x the number of PRs.

That seems insanely productive for an open source effort.

[0] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pulls

I'm super happy Godot is receiving so much attention, both in contributions and issue creation.

But, how is having PRs open since 2019 a positive indication, and a productive one at that? Seems hugely unproductive to never close a PR unless the author do so (apparently? I don't know the dev process too closely).

Most be very hard to navigate so many PRs, and surely most of them must be unmergable after some months due to conflicts.

I think this is mostly because the core team has been working on 4.0 for a couple of years now so I would imagine that PRs get overlooked. It's a popular project and there's not a lot of people on the team so yeah it builds up.

I have PR open since 2020 (small change for a bit of qol) still hasn't been merged and I believe that there will be major conflicts now.

> But, how is having PRs open since 2019 a positive indication, and a productive one at that?

Simply because I looked at some other tools recently and their PR backlog was simply a graveyard. A 3 year backlog seems really good to me in comparison.

Very exciting. Godot breathed life into my game dev hobby a few years ago, thrilled to see it getting more resources to grow.

Same with me. It had nothing to do with it being open source or the cost, it was simply the tool I was able to use. That made sense to me after trying them all.

Just a thought I had: Godot is MIT and the project never had a contributor license agreement. W4 doesn't "own" the copyright anymore than anyone else. An investor with enough capital could start their own W4 competitor, or even a closed source competitor, based on Godot at any time.

Ariel Manzur, the other significant co-author of Godot runs Lone Wolf Technology, a consultancy for helping studios with Godot, primarily porting to consoles. The common theme is they were both started by people who made the engine so I doubt a competitor would pop up without similar qualification.

Even if they did, what would be the point? The appeal of Godot is that it's open source; if you just want a full-featured game engine, with a large, existing ecosystem around it to boot, just use Unity or Unreal.

Yes, that is how MIT (and similar) licensed open source work projects work. It's a feature, not a bug.

I'm finally building my first real game in Godot as a hobby developer, and I couldn't be happier for this news. Godot is the game engine I always wanted; it's powerful like Unity, but easy to hack something together with like GameMaker. I feel freed from architecture and implementation decisions because the built in decisions made by the engine are more than good enough for everything I want to build. Every time I think "hmm, I wonder if there's a pre existing pattern for this", the engine already has a solution.

Sure it's not the most polished product in the world, and I run into bugs occasionally, but IME it's no worse than I experienced when using Unity in a previous job. I've had the editor crash on me a grand total of once (and it was my fault, I was writing an editor extension that contained an accidental stack bomb), and nearly every system behaves the way you would expect it to out of the box with no tweaking. I _cannot_ say the same about Unity, which crashed on me at least daily and took 100x as long to open as Godot, and had systems that behaved completely nonsensically unless you massaged them extremely carefully.

All in all, I love Godot and I can't wait to see where this venture goes.

watching my son learn to program by watching youtube videos and replicating what he sees... honestly you want todays kids to be big fans of godot.. do more LOTS more youtube videos on how to do various different "things" in godot.

if you build them they will come (and watch them).

I'm incredibly excited to see Godot getting an organization like this behind it. Godot is an amazing tool. It's cliched to complain about names on hn, but every time I see W4 Games I think it's a company to help me cheat on my taxes.

It didn't click for me before until I read it from someone else, but W4 seems to stand for "Waiting For" (Godot). Actually a rather creative name in my opinion. Apologies if you already knew that.

I did not know that! That's great actually

That only now clicked. And its based in Ireland.

Nice to see more open source gaming engine options!

There's an open source gaming engine event in Austin coming up next month: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/o3dcon/

How exactly do game engines monetize, can anyone shed any light? Is it via additional support in using the engine for large companies? A freemium model like Unity's? But didn't even Unity succumb eventually to supplementing monetization via ads?

Afaik, it depends on the engine. Each one does differently.

There are hardly any major game engines left who don't offer free versions. But commercial ones make money either through: 1. Having some features(aka Pro or Enterprise version) or export options paid. 2. Royalties from the games made(a cut in your profits). 3. Ads. 4. Contracts with bigger companies, government, orgs, etc. 5. Projects with movie industry and other fields(research, simulation, labs, universities). 6. There might be more ways.

Free and Open-Source game engines mostly monetize from sponsors, donations and contributions or just don't earn.

For legal reasons Godot itself can't include open source console compatibility. Third parties are already offering console porting for Godot games as a service, but this is an obvious way for W4 to generate cash without abandoning the principles of the project.

I'm afraid this will be an unpopular opinion with how beloved Godot is... but this is how Unity ended up where they are.

Unity launched with a very similar mission to Godot, very similar energy of busting up big game engine: then the funding came in.

Well there's more hindsight for them to draw on and learn from the mistakes of the past. Im sure there were for Unity too, but its more immediate in this situation I think.

You're probably right though.

The concern with something like this is that chucking the early adopters under the bus once they were established is unlikely to be viewed as a mistake given it likely didn't affect the investors or owners

The key difference is that Unity was a commercial venture from the start and Godot is a FOSS project.

That's not to say FOSS development doesn't have its own challenges and potential issues, but I don't think it's fair to say they are resigned to follow in Unity's footsteps simply because they are now receiving funding.

By example, Blender is receiving a not-insignificant amount of funding from a variety of sources and they are doing better than ever.

godot started as a in-house engine, so commercial venture. (see https://godotengine.org/article/first-public-release ).

Just like Blender started as in-house tools ( https://www.blender.org/about/history/ )

The relevant point is that Godot and Blender are both open source now, and Unity remains closed source.

Original post said "To date, Godot follows the Blender story, not the Unity story" to which _manifold replied "The key difference is that Unity was a commercial venture from the start and Godot is a FOSS project."

My point was to point out that both Blender and Godot were commercial venture first and went FOSS. They did not start as FOSS ventures.

That Unity is not OpenSource yet is not really relevant to what I was trying to explain.

To date, Godot follows the Blender story, not the Unity story: built originally as a proprietary tool, later open-sourced, but in a state where few could seriously use it. Then after years and years of gradually built momentum, you start to see industry backers appear.

Unity's story was always "plucky startup goes big". They never dogfooded an actual game in-house, they kept the source closed, broke everything as they went along, never fixed longstanding bugs. All the early goodwill was simply based on the fact that the IDE made the first 80% of a game easy to reach - the part where you have some collision logic wired up to input, things interact, assets appear, it runs on device. Actually finishing complex, featureful games in Unity has always been a dark art.

I feel like this is being insanely harsh by leveraging hindsight, so harsh you're actually ignoring reality at points.

Like Unity was originally born from the idea the two co-founders would build a game studio that would license their tech. And they did in fact release a game: https://www.macworld.com/article/174909/gooball.html

They were 100% that plucky startup (I mean the team started when two people met in an apartment off a forum and merged their codebases...) and before they started leveraging all of their funding to buy up middleware after middleware, they were actually pretty good about stability and quality.

They literally built their initial success on the quality of their editor) -

Godot also suffers from the exact same 80/20 problem Unity does (W4 Games is literally betting the farm on commercializing part that 20% in closed source tooling).

As far as I'm concerned that problem is inherent to any game engine that targets widespread accessibility, because making a game without an extremely deep level of discipline when it comes to organization will always be a recipe for a slog.

Yes Unity being more responsive to bugs would help, yes Godot is currently a million time better off in _that_ respect being open source... but again, to me funding is exactly where the train starts to jump the rails.

If you actually go back and research Unity's roots, they had the _exact_ inspiration and drive Godot did, but it was having to recoup investments that slowly pushed things off track, and eventually that snowballed into what we have today. From guy who wanted to make Mac games and tools for people who make Mac games... to a company that's merging with an ad corporation for their survival.

> If you actually go back and research Unity's roots, they had the _exact_ inspiration and drive Godot did

Are you sure? Was Unity's team inspired to release an open-source game engine like Godot's team? This might seem like a nit-pick, but you do emphasize that their motives were _exactly_ the same.

It's hard to argue Godot will follow the same path as unity when Godot is open-source and Unity is not.

I didn't realize I was prompting a diffusion model, so exact needed to mean Godot was actually conceived in the same apartment as Unity.

Democratizing game creation, that's the motivation they both shared.

No one is saying that Godot will merge with an ad company in X years, my entire original point is that taking on VC funding is what pushed the main vision of Unity's founders away from where it started.

Now you have the person who's title was "head of development" for Godot taking on the title of "CEO" of a profit VC funded entity and you really have trouble seeing any parallels?

Open Source is not a panacea for a project's leadership having shifting goals. It definitely doesn't hurt, but when you're talking about taking on incumbents like Unity and Unreal, it won't be easy to recover if "W4" starts losing focus because VCs want to do VC things.

The dynamics of open source and closed source software business is just very different. Try to understand that first before comparing apartments.

I mention that difference no less than 3 times across three comments.

Learn to read before typing.

If thats all there is your understanding of open source and closed source business, then youre a fool.

An ignorant hardheaded fool, with head in the sand like an ostrich

> Open Source is not a panacea for a project's leadership having shifting goals. It definitely doesn't hurt, but when you're talking about taking on incumbents like Unity and Unreal, it won't be easy to recover if "W4" starts losing focus because VCs want to do VC things.

> An ignorant hardheaded fool, with head in the sand like an ostrich

You can tell who in this conversation has an intelligent take pretty easily.

Funnily enough, I actually originally learned about Godot from using Blender. I had been using Unity for many years but was getting deeper into the Blender hole and thought, "managing all of these asset pipelines from Blender into Unity is such a pain, doesn't Blender have a game engine?"

But Blender removed their game engine, and in the release notes where they removed it they suggested Godot (https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/R...)

I messed around with Godot for a bit, but never did anything serious. Now that they're releasing Godot 4, I might give it another shot.

Unity started development for years as an open source project?

It's not about how you start, it's about how you end up. Only time will tell.

Unity became an open source project, or Godot became a commerical one?

Wow, that's quite a haul

Great, and now if they could just fix all the bugs and random crashing...

Probably be purchased by Unity soon to avoid competition.

Why would W4 Games agree to be purchased? That seems pretty antithetical to, like, their whole thing.

Brand new venture started by the creator and lead dev of Godot to provide better console support for Godot just got millions in funding... I don't see why they would sell when they're just getting started.

I would sell my 8 million company for X million and then quit and start a x million company. Where X > 8. The question is, why would Unity buy a company like that?

The codebase is MIT Licensed, so Unity would be buying a shell intended to fund the project, it would be kind of a wasted efford really. The entire codebase (even the IDE) is MIT licensed last I checked.

In this scenario, with Unity now being the owners of the author company, couldn't they change the license to another, or straight up make it closed source?

I know the license says you have to be MIT - in perpetuity. That being said the author is the author and can do whatever, right? Especially if we're talking about Riccitello here, he has a past to consider.

You can’t retroactively delicense the codebase without the agreement of all other contributors, so basically you can’t.

You can make any future work you write a different license. So in this hypothetical unity could basically continue with closed source fork.

Even if they could, a hard fork can be made. Thats the beauty of open source! If, by some mystery they were able to do so, someone would continue the work

Disclaimer that I'm no lawyer.

For a project with a single copyright owner/entity (or a group in agreement), yeah. You can't change the license of existing released versions or prevent people from sharing it in accordance with MIT. But you can publish a new release and drop the MIT license or even go closed source. The MIT license is just a grant of permissions for people who are not the copyright holders. The owner doesn't have to agree to MIT in order to use their own software.

Godot would be a weird example though where I hope a lawyer would chime in. The first part of the MIT license establishes the copyright holders. The Godot license says:

And the AUTHORS.md file has like a hundred names in it. If some company could acquire the entire rights to Godot then they could update the license. But I don't know how possible that is here.

It kind of reminds me of when id software had the reverse situation. They wanted to open-source Doom 3, but some shadow technique they were using was based on a Creative Labs patent. So they had to rewrite a small amount of code before publishing the source.

Apologies for being pedantic.

That doesn't strictly make sense. "cf" means "compare". It implies that Godot Engine contributors are different from what is listed in AUTHORS.md.

I know that everyone mistakes "cf" for "see also", so I figured it out. But I really was confused at first.

License discussions are 100% the place to be pedantic.

Well, the 'c' stands for "see", and the 'f' stands for the same thing as in "RTFM".

MIT allows relicensing / sublicensing doesn't it?

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