“Sadly, I Think Godot Is a Scam. I'm Not Sure I Can Do This.”
godotforums.org
godotforums.org
"Well, strange, if someone made it in 1 night, they could certainly fix it in 1 night"
I'm guessing the person complaining is not a developer and/or has never worked on a large scale project.
I don't have enough context from this post alone to understand what is going on with the $8MM situation, but if the rest of the post is anything to go by, sounds like a nothingburger.
Having that kind of money to throw at it makes it kind of odd that he doesn't understand financing and how it would be fraudulent to raise money for W4 and then spend it on the game engine
I was also put off by the use of the term "scam". Seems like the person is just upset funds are not being spent in the way he would like and yea maybe that is a problem, but "scam" is a leap.
[/me raises one hand, buries face in the other]
Bonus points if it's your own 1 night effort. :-)
The fix was to swap two instructions. That was a hard one, hard-won.
Are you really a serious developer/architect/sysadmin/devops/engineer if you haven't muttered "what was this idiot thinking?" about your own code at least once?
So much for letting that problem ride for the next sucker...
This doesn't disagree with OP at all. For instance, I remember the announcement for baked lightmaps. According to OP, despite the fanfare, the feature didn't actually work. I don't use Godot, so I can't really comment on the validity of OP's claims, but just reading the changelogs isn't sufficient to dismiss OP either.
> overpromising and underdelivering
Man, this is an open source project done off donations. Doing an integration with an external language is so challenging that the Unity team - a group of fully salaried professional developers - actually abandoned their "JavaScript" and "Python" integrations.
They overpromised on a free project, which you didn't pay for. It's a non-commercial project - I'd give a lot more leeway for that. Otherwise, go to Unity, and see how fast they fix the bugs in the things they promised to deliver.
Moreover it wasn't that they were lackadaisical; they overdelivered on other aspects of the Godot project. Sometimes some pet feature can wait, compared to improvements for other serious features that affect a wider profile (e.g. GDScript, C# integration, and the tons of other stuff in their 4.1 changelogs). Their resolution and closing of issues on the Godot repo is also really impressive and consistent for an open-source project.
I think part of OP’s issue is that “they” (the main Godot developer) is starting a for-profit business that directly profits from the community’s goodwill. OP themselves is paying hundreds of dollars a month to run the forums not to mention the time investment. I can understand the frustration of seeing the community languish while the main focus turns to a for-profit enterprise.
The original owner only paid a few hundred dollars per year for hosting the forums. Whatever the OP is doing that is making it cost hundreds of dollars per month is on them...
Furthermore, why did the OP take over control of the forums only a few months ago if they have been feeling this way about Godot since 2020?
Instead what we get is the fact that I cannot trust release notes to be accurate while redux complains on twitter that the big companies are focusing on sponsoring O3DE instead.
Doesn't seem like I'd give the Godot developers full benefit of the doubt either.
"W4 Games is a new company created by Godot Engine veterans Juan Linietsky, Rémi Verschelde and Fabio Alessandrelli, and veteran entrepreneur Nicola Farronato. Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need."
Godot is also literally mentioned on their webpage
"We pledge that all the improvements made to Godot as part of the company’s activities will be donated back (whenever legally possible) to the community as pull requests to be reviewed and considered for inclusion."
Also this:
"Additionally, W4 Games pledges to support Godot financially with no-strings-attached donations to the project."
I am not saying W4 folks did this, but a troubling trend for FOSS is building something on free labor (volunteer work by a community) and using that for funding other projects without investing back into the project that got you there.
There is nothing weird or shady about those two things being true at the same time.
It's all good and well that W4 has made a pledge to support Godot financially, but there's surely no expectation that they'll do that before they have a revenue stream? If W4's investors wanted the money to go to Godot, they would've just donated to Godot instead of investing in W4, right? We can't expect W4 to just take the money they got from their investors and spend it on donations to Godot instead of what was promised, right?
"The Godot project is fully independent from W4 and will continue to raise funds to pay contributors as it always has."
The main complaint (setting aside the preamble about bugs and feature delays) is that Juan (creator of Godot engine) raised $8.5 million for his company W4 Games and is now asking for donations to support Godot. W4 Games has the mission statement "strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need."
Now from reading this post, I assumed the money was raised by some sort of crowdfunding and that backers may have been led to believe they were supporting Godot directly. And now they are being asked to donate again, and the money they gave previously is going to some private company.
But no, that's not the case. I looked up the press release[1] and the money was raised from VC firms.
So this guy is mad that Juan is not using the VC seed money he raised for a Godot-related company to fund Godot directly.
This seems like completely overblown and misplaced anger.
[1] https://w4games.com/2022/09/13/w4-games-raises-8-5-million-t...
I don't know if this is that case, but company's mission is to support Godot ecosystem and if lead maintainer raises millions USD for this and then a few months later says there's no money... it's reasonable to think he pockets it. If he sets the company up so that it's impossible to tell if he pockets it... Another red flag.
If so that would be sus enough that project reputation would be done in my eyes.
Now of course, anyone who knows startups knows the founders are suddenly going to be way deep managing a company and not have time to do OSS management. There should have been a plan to delegate responsibilities to a dedicated employee or other member of the community. The lack of time to manage the OSS and the appearance of a conflict of interest is not hard to predict here...
I'm not familiar with Godot or if the things mentioned in the post have any real merit but reading it as an outsider it's at least not obviously nonsense.
Maybe not fraud or owed anything in the legal sense but does seem crappy if they wasted the money.
Reading Juan's twitter it does seem like the $8M is for W4 games and is not an extension of the Godot project. I still do think it's a bit sketchy that project leaders make a company revolving around their open source project, and then ask for money separately for the project instead of using the funding they got.
EDIT: After a bit of checking, W4 games does seem like they fund Godot as highest tier sponsor: https://fund.godotengine.org/ Which means they must be using their seed fund. The author is probably angry without properly researching things.
"""
W4 Games is a new company created by Godot Engine veterans Juan Linietsky, Rémi Verschelde and Fabio Alessandrelli, and veteran entrepreneur Nicola Farronato.
Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need.
...
W4 Games intends to play an active role in strengthening and professionalizing the Godot ecosystem while remaining as just another citizen of the community, as we believe that Open Source works best when individuals and companies benefit from each other’s contributions on a level playing field. This way, everybody wins and the project benefits as a whole.
We pledge that all the improvements made to Godot as part of the company’s activities will be donated back (whenever legally possible) to the community as pull requests to be reviewed and considered for inclusion.
Additionally, W4 Games pledges to support Godot financially with no-strings-attached donations to the project.
"""
Especially that last part.
If anyone has right to be upset about how W4 Games is spending its money, it would be the people who gave it that money. But I doubt the VCs are upset, because the money is going to building a company that might return on their investment.
Looks like they do donate: https://fund.godotengine.org/ (W4 games is an icon there as "Platinum Sponsor"). It doesn't say how much but given the amounts in the lower tiers it's probably not entirely insignificant.
So they _are_ actually using their $8M seed fund to fund Godot.
I do wonder if the author of the original post did their research properly. W4 games doesn't need to donate but they do so anyway.
Even then, i believe that godot leadership is doing a great job. Its almost comparable to the amazing process Blender has. This post looks to me like a ridiculous statement. Reduz and other godot leads get constant pestering from hundreds of people daily, Godot even has thousands of issues on the github repo for bug reports.
The godot project and W4 spend their money wisely. I know some freelance developers who got hired for doing some project features. Someone like reduz just does not need to scam anyone, because if he wanted money he could likely work for other companies as a low level Cpp engineer and get more money than what he pays himself with the w4 funding. That w4 funding is being used to make godot into a "real" game engine, with console support which is needed for the engine to be taken seriously by commercial projects and not just small indies or restricted projects. Setting up a physical office and a place to have all those console development kits costs money, and hiring developers experienced in those platforms is not cheap.
In the way i see it, the godot project often develops features in a "marketing" fashion. This clashes quite directly with people using it for serious projects. Unity engine has a very similar issue. We get things like development effort being spent on fancy dynamic global illumination while completely rejecting the classic static light maps (needed for lower end), and even basic features like level-of-detail or occlusion culling which are considered a must-have that every engine has. I think this is what makes the poster cyberreality in the linked forum so angry. Its one of the big faults of the engine, but its not that bad as a development idea. Those fancy big features attract a lot of users, who can then provide feedback and bug reports, PR their fixes to the engine, and of course, funding and hype. The main team makes sure that the architecture of the engine is good, with some fancy big features, and the bugfixing and more niche/professional features are left to community that can PR it. Github is filled with "better" engines from a technical standpoint with a total of 1 user.
It's clear to me that Godot Foundation funds Godot development, and W4 took VC money for funding ecosystem services. Absolutely different things.
I hope this author makes their peace and apologizes or transfers responsibility for the forums to the Godot Foundation.
If, after money being raised like this, no one gives them money to pay for the forum (including all previous expenses) which they have been running out of pocket and provides a core service to the community, they should shut down the forum and delete the posts.
My understanding is that this is a community-run forum. Nothing in the post suggests they are asking for money to run the forum.
Further:
> Juan is painting this picture that Godot is out of money and begging on social media, meanwhile with $8M in his wallet
That's a flat-out lie.
I don't know; there is no evidence presented, and what is presented in the post is inaccurate.
As of right now, I can safely assume this is someone who wants to cash in.
If W4 Games has received 8 million dollars in funding but hasn't contributed any of it back to the Godot project as stated in their pledge, then there would be an inconsistency between their promise and their actions.
The text on the W4 page explicitly mentions their commitment to donating improvements made to Godot back to the community AND supporting the project financially. If they have not fulfilled these promises despite having significant funding, it would raise concerns about their integrity and whether they are truly dedicated to their stated mission.
Let's see the transparency of donations to the Godot foundation?
And I'm sure those investors would be very, very angry at W4 if W4 just ran away with the money which was invested to fund development of products and services to give W4 a revenue stream, donated it to the Godot Foundation instead. In fact, I'm betting that would be quite illegal (and if it's not, the investors would certainly fire the CEO if that happened!).
This person just wants some compensation for covering the forums for Godot which sounds reasonable to me. The way it was worded wasn't clear but the underlying intention was clear.
I think it's completely reasonable for this person to not want to host the forums out of pocket for no compensation any more. If that was all this post was about, I don't think anyone would have any problems with it. It's all the stuff about Godot being a scam and complaints about how W4's seed funding from VCs isn't being donated to the Godot Foundation that's absolutely baffling.
I was expecting OpenCollective, not PayPal!
W4 games (accused in the post of not using $8M seed fund for Godot), does actually give money to Godot: https://fund.godotengine.org/ (they have an icon as "Platinum Sponsor"). Doesn't say how much though.
The income from donations is around ~23k EUR (including everyone, not just W4)
Godot expenses are around $40,000 monthly to pay contractors. (https://godotengine.org/article/funding-breakdown-and-hiring...)
That would make them cash flow negative. But it's not true that the $8M is being kept entirely to W4 and not being used for Godot.
Some key members of the Godot project attempted to commercially monetize their future efforts in a way that will likely benefit the community at large. Unfortunately some parts of the community believe this is either a betrayal or that they should also be compensated equally without being part of the same commercialization efforts they are taking on. Both of these groups are providing value to the community, and one group attempted a way to get compensated.
When I started programming and learned about open source, I greatly benefited from it and hoped that one day I’d give back. But the reality is that unless you are prepared to sacrifice your free time for thankless work, you should reconsider.
Unfortunately things cost money, and the way to pay for things is to get paid for spending time working. And that time and mental bandwidth competes with open source. You’ll be doing the same type of work that you could be paid for if you were doing it for a company. But you aren’t. It’s just as hard work as the work done in the time people sacrifice in exchange for a salary, but you won’t get monetary value out of it. And you are opening up yourself to criticisms and demands and stresses to the same level or higher as if you were under employment and as if you were compensated for it. But you aren’t. It’s thankless work for which if you are expecting compensation you are likely to be disappointed. And if you find a possible way which could allow you to contribute to the community leveraging your past experience, but the work is no longer free or shared with the community you’ll be criticized for it.
Anyways, long winded way of me saying; it’s a miracle open source projects exists. And it’s also a miracle that people can dedicate their time to manage communities around them. They are both valuable, and they should both be done with the realistic expectations of getting nothing back in return. But I’ll give my thanks to those that do it.
I'm not seeing anyone taking money and running.
I'm not familiar with the situation, but from reading the post and the linked tweets, it looks like W4 Games isn't the Godot Foundation, W4 is a separate company which happens to be run by some of the founders of Godot. From the mission statement on the website:
> Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need.
It seems like the majority of Godot development happens by people employed by the Godot Foundation, which makes sense, and W4 offers products and services around Godot, which also makes sense. Sort of a "Canonical offers commercial products and services (Ubuntu Pro) around the Linux kernel, but doesn't do the majority of development on the kernel itself" type situation.
The post says:
> This doesn't make sense, the whole mission statement of W4 Games was to grow the Godot ecosystem, but now a few short months later, Godot has no money and development will slow down. This is suspicious, to say the least.
but, like, there's no logical contradiction between "a company focused on providing enterprise products and services around Godot has a bunch of money" and "Godot development slows down because the Godot Foundation can't afford to keep developers on payroll".
Literally the only potentially shady thing I could see here is if people were mislead into donating to W4 because they thought W4 would focus on development of Godot itself? But the post doesn't even make that claim, much less provide proof for it, so that doesn't seem to be the case.
So the only thing that's left to complain about is that development is slower than ideal, but that's the case in most software projects. It's not like anyone expected it to be quick and easy to make a game engine which rivals Unity and Unreal, right? ...right?
I am not involved in this ecosystem nor do I have the whole history of it to say if there were any broken promises. I guess then it's up to the responsible parties to hammer out misunderstandings with their open source developers (who I feel for). Clearly there are mismatched expectations around.
Now what would truly be a scam is if the founders of W4 raised $8m of seed funding based on false promises, then donated all that cash to the Godot Foundation instead of developing the products which were pitched to the investors. I genuinely don't understand why there's apparently an expectation from at least some people that W4 would do that, or why so many people here (you included!) think that's a remotely reasonable expectation.
What I mean is this: when a FOSS project is entirely community funded, one's hard work is just giving back to the community. But once a profit is made by the project, your hard work should now be compensated. Otherwise, you're being taken advantage of. For the forum OP, they're probably coming from the view of "why should Juan (and others) get paid for shipping half complete features when I'm not just paying out of pocket for the server everyone uses, but trying to help as best as I can (bug reports)?" After all, $8M for W4 is supposedly gone while Godot itself is in the negative every month? On the surface, that looks sketchy.
There is a bit of entitlement in such a thought, I'd argue, but it's not completely unjustified.
For another example, Linux's and Blender's main developers get paid, but they're the exception to the rule. Any community involvement in the form of patches and bug reports are all unpaid. But people don't complain about that because the Linux Foundation and the Blender Foundation are both non-profits. W4, however, is a for-profit. So, millions are going to a for-profit organization while the people working on the non-profit side languish.
My impression is that she's dissatisfied with the leadership of the project, and voices her many concerns publicly instead of working it out or working towards constructive collaboration.
I can understand that to a certain degree but if/when you do that, don't start by saying that 1 night effort means 1 night fix.
That's a grotesque expectation.
The twitter thread mentioned on the post
Are there any Godot games out there that are more than just tech demos?
Not a massive hit, but profitable and fun.
Not everyone. It has an enthusiastic fan base that is vocal on message boards, but 99.999% of game developers have never touched it.
Click on top sellers.