Some good news to share for the free and open source Godot Engine, as the lead developer Juan Linietsky announced during GodotCon that Epic Games have approved them for an Epic MegaGrant.
This was announced during Linietsky's talk on porting Godot Engine over to the Vulkan API, which is coming with Godot Engine version 4.0 later this year. Epic Games have approved them for a sum of $250,000 USD which they've known for a little while, but they only just got the okay to announce it.
You can see the livestream below. As it's live, I can't seem to link to a time stamp.
Direct Link
According to Linietsky, they're speaking with "many" other companies that may be looking to fund them too. So Godot Engine is definitely moving forward in the minds of all kinds of developers. This is true outside of funding in terms of actual usage too, with Godot gaining popularity when looking at the Global Game Jam.
So the Godot Engine crew join other software like Lutris, Krita and Blender who also previously got an Epic MegaGrant as well as the games ASYLUM and Ira. Epic Games certainly are starting to spread their cash around open source a bit more lately so that's great.
Find out more about the free and open source Godot Engine on the official site. You can also find more info on Epic MegaGrants here.
Hat tip to marc.
Update: Godot's official announcement is now up.
But let's be honest: As soon as the Fortnite millions are missing, the EGS is overTencent 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
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)
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 . . .
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).
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.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).
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.
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.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).
40% might almost always be a controlling interest, but NOT in this case. Tim Sweeney is the controlling shareholder of Epic Games.
A quarter million dollar donation is bound to be appreciated by any open-source project, to be sure.
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