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.
I would really prefer Godot just work on a plug-in that can support consoles rather than continuing down this path of hiring a company to do it for you. It’s labor intensive, costly, and if you don’t know how your game will sell, it’s a gamble to go for with Indie devs.
They will never be a serious contender with other engines without officially supporting consoles on some form.
You already have to pay licensing fees to the console manufacturers for access to their dev kits. I don’t see it being that enticing to pay an additional fee ontop of that.
It will likely have to be paid. Someone has to sit there and go through paperwork to verify that you do indeed have a license or in the worst case intervene if the automated way fails. Then they approve access to the plugin.
It's like this for every engine. You need to prove you have a license before you get access to the parts touching the console SDK.
If the games could run on the console user’s paid for without permission from Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo, that would be what I’d most prefer. Consoles require proprietary software which is antithetical to the idea of an open source engine getting free contribution/feedback. Some people don’t want to do free work for overweight companies.
I didn’t say I like it, but it’s the reality of console dev right now, and consoles are a huge part of market indie devs will miss out on without having that access, and they are already doing dev with limited funds and resources.
That is not really something that can be done on Godot’s part. The best bet right now is to support open platforms like the Steam Deck over walled gardens like Nintendo Switch and show that there is consumer interest.
Yeah but then how do you attract game developers to your engine?
It becomes a chicken and egg problem: consoles won’t support the engine unless there’s a demand for the games, developers won’t make the games unless there is support for consoles.
With this new funding, W4 Games aims to more than double its headcount in the coming 18 months to capture the fast-growing demand for its products and services.
Less conflict of interest and more just some confusion. They’ve been honest W4 is not the Godot Foundation, but they claim that W4 will contribute back to Godot development regardless so nobody’s really sure how they’re spending the money exactly.
The following is just my opinon on all this, but the way that I see it is that W4 represents industry priorities in the engine. In this example, the industry needs strong console support or cloud gaming and is willing to invest in it; or previously DirectX support. The Godot Foundation ensures that godot is able to focus on non-industry needs as well as community management. So they technically both contribute to the engine, but dont really overlap with each other cause they represent different groups who need to do different things with the same engine. That said - interop is needed as well because it is the same engine. ATM I trust juan and crew and the buracracy that is being built around godot to protect it and us while maintaining momentum.
Does seem like a bit of a conflict to me when their whole business is porting Godot games, which means they have a vested interesting in keeping it that way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is exactly how Blender operates. A company that raises capital and provides back to the open source version, in addition to the community contributors. If they will enshittify the OSS version because of this, like Redis has been doing, remains to be seen
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