Godot Engine was approved for an Epic MegaGrant

As Bad as EGS and their exclusivity bullshit is, but you can't argue that funds for projects like blender, lutris, krita, godot aren't welcomed. As long as everybody remembers that we are like moving to canada to Mr. Sweeny and that he want's to prevent competition i'm fine with them throwing money to something useful instead of exclusives ^^

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 Net Income in 2018 alone.

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

Uh ... besides that being irrelevant in total since Tencent has a minority stake in Epic, you need to compare the same unit and the same accounting category to make any sense. Tencent had a net income of 79.984 billion CN¥, which is roughly 12 billion USD.

The equity of Tencent (given on the same wiki site) is 356.207 billion CN¥, or roughly 50 billion USD.

What you wrote is similar to saying "Tencent has 55000 employees while Valve is only 23 years old!"...

edit: fixed units. Used Japenes Yen instead of Chinese


Last edited by marcus on 3 February 2020 at 7:53 pm UTC

Valve is full of idiots, they should make a clon of any game that is trending now, fire their good paid developers which work only 8-9 hours the day(lazy asses) make their new devs to work 80-90 hours a week, evade some taxes then buy some consciences and get free marketing giving crumbs to other devs.

Pretty much what Jeff Beezos and Richard Branson have been doing, Tim Sweeney got the recipe just right.

Come on Gabe, stop swimming in your money pool, it is time to show "how good human being" you are giving some of the crumbs that fall off your table.

Once the job is done, no more crumbs...

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.

Actually, it's way older than Russian...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet

Uh ... besides that being irrelevant in total since Tencent has a minority stake in Epic, you need to compare the same unit and the same accounting category to make any sense. Tencent had a net income of 79.984 billion CN¥, which is roughly 12 billion USD.

Ops, my bad. I'll fix my previous comment. The number is much less scary now, but still significantly bigger than Valve's.

I disagree that Tencent's being a minority stake makes it irrelevant. It does mean that Tencent has minority vote, and Sweeney is officially still the one making final decisions. But that doesn't mean Tencent does not have any interest in EGS succeeding, thus being irrelevant.

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...

Maybe they would like to buy it further down the road once its more fleshed out. Epic is doing some weird things lately, they kill support for Mac and Linux on Rocket League, and at same time help projects which have a very strong Linux support narrative.

I do hope Epic at some point wake up and actually release their store/platform for Linux, and Mac. (I hate Apple btw)

Reading the comments under any Epic article here or at PC Gamer, makes me lose faith in humanity...

If this grant is an "apology" from Epic for Rocket League, it takes more than throwing money around to fix that oil fire.

I don't trust Epic, I wouldn't even consider forgiving them until they've got some Valve-level standards of Linux support... for years.

How many years? I dunno... ;)

Reading the comments under any Epic article here or at PC Gamer, makes me lose faith in humanity...

Why? It's just some average gaming drama, right?

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.

But not trolls. Why do I mention trolls? Oh, no reason . . .

Guys. Guys. Do you realize how much money is $250k? It's nothing. It's a fat 1 year salary. OK, for maybe 2 people. It's not development budget for a large, complex software. It's sandwiches and beer for a couple of bedroom coders.. to last them a while. One extra fat salary does not turn Godot into a production software, or any kind of competition to Unity or Unreal.

If Godot and Unity end up on equal playing ground, then sounds good to me. Competition is good for us.

You know what other engine would be nice to have on Linux? Frostbite.

Guys. Guys. Do you realize how much money is $250k? It's nothing. It's a fat 1 year salary. OK, for maybe 2 people. It's not development budget for a large, complex software. It's sandwiches and beer for a couple of bedroom coders.. to last them a while. One extra fat salary does not turn Godot into a production software, or any kind of competition to Unity or Unreal.

As I said, for an Argentinian like Linietsky is A LOT of money.

Guys. Guys. Do you realize how much money is $250k? It's nothing. It's a fat 1 year salary. OK, for maybe 2 people. It's not development budget for a large, complex software. It's sandwiches and beer for a couple of bedroom coders.. to last them a while. One extra fat salary does not turn Godot into a production software, or any kind of competition to Unity or Unreal.

Its small money for a developer living in Silicon Valley. The main developer of Godot lives in Argentina and that money is enough for 4 years living pretty well there.

Also, Godot receives US$10k per month on Patreon. US$250k is more than 2 years of funding of Patreon in comparison so is a lot of money

Uh ... besides that being irrelevant in total since Tencent has a minority stake in Epic, you need to compare the same unit and the same accounting category to make any sense. Tencent had a net income of 79.984 billion CN¥, which is roughly 12 billion USD.

Ops, my bad. I'll fix my previous comment. The number is much less scary now, but still significantly bigger than Valve's.

I disagree that Tencent's being a minority stake makes it irrelevant. It does mean that Tencent has minority vote, and Sweeney is officially still the one making final decisions. But that doesn't mean Tencent does not have any interest in EGS succeeding, thus being irrelevant.

It's worth noting that while Tencent is a minority on paper, in practice that 40% (which gives them the right to nominate Directors to Epic's board) and the amount of money they bring to the table means they pretty much set the agenda at shareholder meetings. They're anything but irrelevant, and you can see their influences in the manipulative monetization practices that have been incorporated into Fortnite as time goes by. Make no mistake, they're in the driver's seat no matter what Sweeny tells people (and likely himself).

Uh ... besides that being irrelevant in total since Tencent has a minority stake in Epic, you need to compare the same unit and the same accounting category to make any sense. Tencent had a net income of 79.984 billion CN¥, which is roughly 12 billion USD.

Ops, my bad. I'll fix my previous comment. The number is much less scary now, but still significantly bigger than Valve's.

I disagree that Tencent's being a minority stake makes it irrelevant. It does mean that Tencent has minority vote, and Sweeney is officially still the one making final decisions. But that doesn't mean Tencent does not have any interest in EGS succeeding, thus being irrelevant.

It's worth noting that while Tencent is a minority on paper, in practice that 40% (which gives them the right to nominate Directors to Epic's board) and the amount of money they bring to the table means they pretty much set the agenda at shareholder meetings. They're anything but irrelevant, and you can see their influences in the manipulative monetization practices that have been incorporated into Fortnite as time goes by. Make no mistake, they're in the driver's seat no matter what Sweeny tells people (and likely himself).

I don't disagree about that. 40% is almost always a controlling interest. But on the other hand, Tencent's size isn't quite as relevant as it seems--that's spread across a lot of things they have fingers in. They're not going to ignore all their other businesses and shareholders to dump all their profits down an Epic drain just to try to take down Steam.

Guys. Guys. Do you realize how much money is $250k? It's nothing. It's a fat 1 year salary. OK, for maybe 2 people. It's not development budget for a large, complex software. It's sandwiches and beer for a couple of bedroom coders.. to last them a while. One extra fat salary does not turn Godot into a production software, or any kind of competition to Unity or Unreal.

That is only so relevant, for two reasons.
1. Man-months are mythical.
2. Godot is open source.

On (1): Big projects at big companies do generally end up more impressive than little projects at little companies. But value for money clearly goes way down. If you look at a good indie game and a good AAA game, the latter has probably had 1000X as much money spent on it. Is it 1000X as good? Does it have 1000X as many hours in the campaign? Is the dialogue 1000X as clever? No. It has better polish, a few more features, better graphics, and richer art (sometimes the indie's art will be cooler, reflecting a singular artistic vision, but still generally . . . sparser); it will have cut-scenes with full animation and good voice acting. Gameplay will be around even, maybe even advantage: indie. So $250,000 given to a major corporation will allow them to add that one more project manager to organize the pre-meeting to plan the meeting to organize the retreat, while $250,000 given to an indie could result in major code.

On (2): Yeah. Look at the Linux ecosystem. Open source stuff gets way farther on less money, it just does. Especially if it's hit critical mass, which Godot really seems to be doing.

Uh ... besides that being irrelevant in total since Tencent has a minority stake in Epic, you need to compare the same unit and the same accounting category to make any sense. Tencent had a net income of 79.984 billion CN¥, which is roughly 12 billion USD.

Ops, my bad. I'll fix my previous comment. The number is much less scary now, but still significantly bigger than Valve's.

I disagree that Tencent's being a minority stake makes it irrelevant. It does mean that Tencent has minority vote, and Sweeney is officially still the one making final decisions. But that doesn't mean Tencent does not have any interest in EGS succeeding, thus being irrelevant.

It's worth noting that while Tencent is a minority on paper, in practice that 40% (which gives them the right to nominate Directors to Epic's board) and the amount of money they bring to the table means they pretty much set the agenda at shareholder meetings. They're anything but irrelevant, and you can see their influences in the manipulative monetization practices that have been incorporated into Fortnite as time goes by. Make no mistake, they're in the driver's seat no matter what Sweeny tells people (and likely himself).

I don't disagree about that. 40% is almost always a controlling interest. But on the other hand, Tencent's size isn't quite as relevant as it seems--that's spread across a lot of things they have fingers in. They're not going to ignore all their other businesses and shareholders to dump all their profits down an Epic drain just to try to take down Steam.

40% might almost always be a controlling interest, but NOT in this case. Tim Sweeney is the controlling shareholder of Epic Games.

Congratulations to Godot to be sure! I'm glad that they, and other Community projects, are able to benefit from EPIC's campaign to smooth things over with the gaming world in general, and the open-source community in particular.

A quarter million dollar donation is bound to be appreciated by any open-source project, to be sure.

Gotta love Epic!! they give money to open source projects but at the same time they're killing Linux support for rocket league (they bought Psyonix) and actively trying to kill Linux support in games entirely.