One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising. Certainly helps that Godot ended up launching their new funding platform on the same day Unity announced their hated Runtime Fee system.
Initially when the Godot developers announced their new funding platform they only had around €25K per month from 438 members. This has now exploded up to €50,323 per month from 1,458 members. A much better and more sustainable amount considering they're building an entire game engine.
They also recently gained Terraria developer Re-Logic as a Platinum sponsor, as Re-Logic donated $100K along with $1,000 a month in ongoing funding. On top of that developer Robot Gentleman of 60 Seconds! has also upped their support of Godot and no doubt plenty of others.
Hopefully this is going to be a turning point, where developers look more to open source tools where feasible instead of locking themselves into proprietary game engines with predatory business practices. Unity has proven multiple times now they're willing to break developer's trust like their messing around with Terms of Services.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: Purple Library GuyI think Godot shares some basic characteristics of Unity that (until now) made both of them more attractive to Indie developers than Unreal: It is I imagine fairly lightweight compared to Unreal, and it is cheaper. Unity cannot be trusted to be cheaper any more. But Unreal is also not cheaper than Unreal, and is unlikely to become cheaper than Unreal. And it remains probably heavy overkill for many sorts of games. So as indie developers leave Unity, and look around for something else that's cheaper and more lightweight than Unreal, there's a good chance they will conclude Unreal does not fit that category.
I'm going to fangirl a bit here: it's really lightweight. Honestly, its surprising how good the compression is on Godot games. Unity has leaned more and more into mobile games, which means that games like Genshin Impact that have a big open world are a rarity. On the other hand, Godot has become a powerhouse in making sure it stays as compact as humanly possible. And it ports to Linux and Mac almost flawlessly.
Is it without faults? God no. Just last week, so many articles have come out talking about Godot's horrendous inefficiency. I'l point you to one article that talks about the horrifying API calls that Godot makes. Here's the difference, though: Godot listened. And that is what makes me hopeful about its future.
Quoting: PyreticIs it without faults? God no. Just last week, so many articles have come out talking about Godot's horrendous inefficiency...
Well, now that Godot is driven by greater need, it's going to have more momentum and there are going to be more people taking interest. It doesn't matter now what smarmy backpedaling comes out of Unity, it's going to be happening. The Godot engine is going to get better and more versatile.
Look what happened to our graphics environment when heavy hitters took interest. There are genius programmers working on Mesa. Wine and related technologies too, I scoffed at that horseshit 10 years ago. ("why would you")
XFree86... as soon as it was forked (because of a very silly and petty attribution clause that people didn't like) and those silly people holding development back were out of the picture, development of Xorg took off.
Git... adverse licensing clauses of a proprietary tool they were using (Bitkeeper) that got the kernel devs' license revoked*, caused Linus to whip up a prototype (he was under a clause that forbade anybody from working on a SCM system for 2 years) and pass it along, and now Git is probably the most common way to get source code for anything. There are still projects that cling to SVN and Hg, but most use Git.
Lots more examples of necessity being the mother of invention, in our environment. This is one of the biggest strengths of open source software and licensing that allows you to do that.
*Bitkeeper/Bitmover forbade anybody from making an import/export tool to migrate code to/from bitkeeper. When one person did, the license was revoked.
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