That’s a lot of cash money. I’m still a bit confused at how much of this money will go to the actual engine and how much of it will go to supporting W4 in general, such as allowing devs to publish Godot games for consoles.

  • SpaceMan9000@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    There are other companies which have the same business model. The Godot Foundation is what actually moves the FOSS engine forward. Unfortunately it is not possible for the foundation to provide console support.

    • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Unreal engine does it, and I’m pretty sure Unity does as well, though you have to actually pay for licensing and acquire the dev kits themselves. But the support is built into the engine to compile for those platforms once the right compiler is there.

      • tabular@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Unity/Unreal can talk business with Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo in a way standalone Godot engine cannot, and should not.

        Unity is proprietary and Unreal is source-available; the companies have direct control over how you redistribute their engine (to collect funding). Agreements can be made between them and the console manufacturers. Godot engine is open source (MIT) and appeals to a different kind of game dev, where including proprietary code that requires a license would be an unusual juxtaposition to say the least. If consoles support is important to you then perhaps there is no issue but for others that is repulsive.

        It gives unjust power over the devs (think in terms of the recent Unity fee fiasco). I wouldn’t contribute to a proprietary project (that’s just doing free work for a company) but I’d be honored if an open source project considered my contribution worth something to them.

        • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          That’s great, you’re just locking a large majority of Indie devs away from Godot forcing them to choose an engine that supports pc, and consoles.

          • tabular@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Godot engine is licensed under MIT; it doesn’t prevent you from bundling it with proprietary software which could support consoles. That should just be a separate thing so both are happy.

            I value the software freedom of me and my users. It is the console manufacturers who are locking me out because I don’t want to be shacked or take advantage of my users.

            • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              I mean, I’m an Indie dev. I’ve tried all three engine, Godot, Unreal, and Unity, and I just don’t think Godot is there yet. I used it for almost 2 years before giving it up for Unreal, and I came back and tried Godot 4.0 for a few months. It’s a reality that kind of sucks. But I’m going to wait a few more years for Godot to catch up before I try to dip my toe back in.

            • tabular@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              I don’t like the modern gaming industry. It is my hope that one day the norm will be free (libre) software games, using free engines.