Godot Engine was approved for an Epic MegaGrant

How bizarre. Why would Epic want to support a rival project, commercial or not, open source or not?

Unless they're going by the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle to hurt Unity...


Last edited by Sslaxx on 3 February 2020 at 3:09 pm UTC

I love Godot, Blender and Krita. Excelent FOSS examples.

How bizarre. Why would Epic want to support a rival project, commercial or not, open source or not?

Unless they're going by the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle to hurt Unity...

Good publicity (they really need it), competition is good for everyone. To name a few.

Good publicity (they really need it), competition is good for everyone. To name a few.

I never heard the theory that competition is good for one of the competitors.
Having a monopoly is good for a competitor (which then stops to be a competitior, of course.)


Last edited by Eike on 4 February 2020 at 8:08 am UTC

Good publicity (they really need it), competition is good for everyone. To name a few.

I never heard the thoery that competition is good for one of the competitors.
Having a monopoly is good for a competitor (which then stops to be a competitior, of course.)

Understand that it's not really about benefiting Godot, but about harming Unity. Clearly they feel the risk that some users might use Godot over Unity (and not UE4 over Unity) is outweighed by the benefits.

How bizarre. Why would Epic want to support a rival project, commercial or not, open source or not?

Unless they're going by the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle...

Nothing Epic has been doing lately makes too much sense from a business perspective.

I think it's just because Tim Sweeney is still a programmer at heart. He's trying to compensate for that with seemingly badass business practices. Probably because he read in a book that that's how you do it.

But let's be honest: As soon as the Fortnite millions are missing, the EGS is over, because it simply lacks the business model. In the end, Sweeney pays publishers and customers to use his shop. Valve on the other hand is probably still in the black with its Linux commitment. This is the subtle but significant difference between programmer Tim Sweeney and GabeN the businessman.

But it's definitely wise to take the Epic money with you as long as it's there. Because there's just no future in it.

How bizarre. Why would Epic want to support a rival project, commercial or not, open source or not?

Unless they're going by the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle...

Nothing Epic has been doing lately makes too much sense from a business perspective.

I think it's just because Tim Sweeney is still a programmer at heart. He's trying to compensate for that with seemingly badass business practices. Probably because he read in a book that that's how you do it.

But let's be honest: As soon as the Fortnite millions are missing, the EGS is over, because it simply lacks the business model. In the end, Sweeney pays publishers and customers to use his shop. Valve on the other hand is probably still in the black with its Linux commitment. This is the subtle but significant difference between programmer Tim Sweeney and GabeN the businessman.

But it's definitely wise to take the Epic money with you as long as it's there. Because there's just no future in it.

It's not necessary a "rival", it is a tool in the same sense as blender, maybe they see a use case (down the road) for it.

It's not necessary a "rival", it is a tool in the same sense as blender, maybe they see a use case (down the road) for it.

No, it's charity, non-profit, publicity. Call it what you want.

If you see a use case in your field of business, then you enter into a cooperation, because you want to control and influence the project accordingly. You pay people to develop a project in a certain direction.

Imagine Valve had simply given money to the Wine project. What would that have done for Valve? Absolutely nothing. There is a huge difference between giving money away and investing money.

Epic doesn't have a clue what they're doing. They just have a lot of money right now.

How bizarre. Why would Epic want to support a rival project, commercial or not, open source or not?

Unless they're going by the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle to hurt Unity...

Good publicity (they really need it), competition is good for everyone. To name a few.

They certainly do. On the one hand I would say that they shouldn't be getting any slack after killing Rocket League for us... On the other hand if they think it works, and it parts their grubby hands with the money, and feeds good developers; hey, I'll pretend I think they're the best company in the world.

But if you ask me... 👌👈

It's not necessary a "rival", it is a tool in the same sense as blender, maybe they see a use case (down the road) for it.

No, it's charity, non-profit, publicity. Call it what you want.

If you see a use case in your field of business, then you enter into a cooperation, because you want to control and influence the project accordingly. You pay people to develop a project in a certain direction.

Imagine Valve had simply given money to the Wine project. What would that have done for Valve? Absolutely nothing. There is a huge difference between giving money away and investing money.

Epic doesn't have a clue what they're doing. They just have a lot of money right now.

Good. We should make them part with as much of it as possible, while limiting the damage they do. All they've done so far gained them bad publicity and cost them money. Let's have them keep up the good work!

$250,000 USD for an Argentinian is A LOT OF MONEY!!

I said it before, but even when the money is coming from the next best thing to the devil, it's still money that will help Godot to become a better product, and they would be fools not to take it. If Godot will one day become good enough to bite into Unreal's market-share and cost Epic MORE money, that would be an added plus.

I said it before, but even when the money is coming from the next best thing to the devil, it's still money that will help Godot to become a better product, and they would be fools not to take it. If Godot will one day become good enough to bite into Unreal's market-share and cost Epic MORE money, that would be an added plus.

Uhm, the important thing is to not give Epic too much good publicity. Enough so that they keep spending money, but not too much so that people actually think that they're actually good.

I can imagine Tim Sweeney laughing so hard at this moment... "Linux is bad, I stay on Windows! But you see I put a lot of money in your favorite projects, you can't hate me (or Epic) do you?"

Fuck you Tim. :)

The comment section of this article is why the majority of game developers don't take linux gamers seriously and see them as whiny entitled losers.

If you think this attitude is Linux-specific, you live in a bubble.

Edit: To be clear on my point, any time I see Epic mentioned on bigger Windows focused websites the comments are hilarious at times.

I fully agree that everyone should take it as it comes. Funding for a FOSS game engine is great. Take it. Use it.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 3 February 2020 at 5:18 pm UTC

The comment section of this article is why the majority of game developers don't take linux gamers seriously and see them as whiny entitled losers.

You can't give credit where its due, you spread conspiracy theories to explain away any positive news. It is pissing me off now.

Some of us just can't be so naive about these moves...

Good publicity (they really need it), competition is good for everyone. To name a few.

I never heard the thoery that competition is good for one of the competitors.
Having a monopoly is good for a competitor (which then stops to be a competitior, of course.)

Understand that it's not really about benefiting Godot, but about harming Unity. Clearly they feel the risk that some users might use Godot over Unity (and not UE4 over Unity) is outweighed by the benefits.

Exactly, they can't do much to harm Unity directly, it's too popular everywhere. So supporting competition in the indie market might benefit UE4. It's only relatively recently that UE4 has been adopted by indies but for years Unity was an obvious choice for any small company (and UE was for AAA games). Now Godot started to aggresively push Unity away having a lot of benefits and just a few downsides. Godot is easier to learn, it's completely free and open, its 2D engine is clearly superior (because it's specialized for 2D), it's small and pretty fast, and it keeps evolving quickly. The 3D part of the engine is not yet there (hope it will be in 4.0 with Vulkan) and there are much less samples, assets and info compared to Unity. But these points are so easier to fix than Unity's weaknesses.

As Russians say, "money doesn't smell" i.e. it doesn't matter what the money source is, it's still the same money with the same face value. And unless Godot becomes, god forbid, an EGS exclusive I couldn't care less.

FOSS washing is just another kind of greenwashing.

But let's be honest: As soon as the Fortnite millions are missing, the EGS is over

Tencent is the only thing that makes me disagree. We could fit 100+ Valves inside Tencent's pockets. To put things in perspective, Valve has a total equity of ~2.5Bi, Tencent had 72Bi 12Bi Net Income in 2018 alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation

Edit: Wikipedia was showing CN¥ for Tencent, not USD, thanks marcus for pointing that out


Last edited by dejaime on 3 February 2020 at 8:52 pm UTC

Update: Godot's official announcement is now up.