[HN Gopher] W4 plans to monetize the Godot engine using Red Hat'...
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       W4 plans to monetize the Godot engine using Red Hat's open-source
       playbook
        
       Author : ibobev
       Score  : 90 points
       Date   : 2022-08-19 14:56 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
        
       | omoikane wrote:
       | See also:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32398963 - W4 Games formed
       | to strengthen Godot ecosystem
       | 
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/wk5ji6/hello_world_w...
        
       | ecshafer wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | adastra22 wrote:
         | Back when Unity got popular, over a decade ago, there wasn't
         | any alternatives.
        
           | indigo945 wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | jdoliner wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | prophesi wrote:
       | Interesting, I didn't know they couldn't support consoles due to
       | open source. It seems like this could be a pretty smart move.
        
         | ehutch79 wrote:
         | It's not the open source bit. It's the lack of formal corporate
         | entity to sign NDAs and such.
        
           | prophesi wrote:
           | 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
        
       | astlouis44 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Kye wrote:
         | Didn't Blender have its own game engine at some point? Maybe I
         | imagined it/misunderstood what I was looking at.
        
           | Veliladon wrote:
           | It's gone from the mainline releases but lives on in the
           | UPBGE fork.
        
             | ehnto wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | carlosdp wrote:
         | > 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.
        
         | Veliladon wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | the__alchemist wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | jokoon wrote:
       | 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.
        
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       (page generated 2022-08-19 23:02 UTC)