The free and open source game engine Godot Engine continues to grow, and now the team behind it has formed a Godot Foundation to continue funding it.
Previously they teamed up with the Software Freedom Conservancy charity, who handled the donations and ensured it was used correctly but as they've constantly grown, they feel the need to run it themselves now. In a blog post from founder Juan Linietsky, they noted having their own organization gives them the "opportunity to explore broader funding sources" while mentioning crowdfunding like Blender and Krita do.
On top of that, a "highly requested" ability for users to be able to sell assets through some sort of asset library, with a share going to the new Godot Foundation. Having merchandise is also an option and other miscellaneous extra forms of funding.
Linietsky also believes that doing all this will "project a stronger image of the Godot Project, which will allow us to have stronger footing when negotiating big donations with donors". Additionally "we want the Foundation to serve as a home for community initiatives, by allowing it to have its own funding lines (this means, so they can raise funding on their own for a specific goal, but the Foundation receives and uses it according to what was agreed), such as initiatives to promote education, communication and diversity".
All sounds reasonable and just goes to show how popular Godot has become that they can now do this. This is all on top of the formation of W4 Games, which is their company to commercially support Godot that raised quite a lot of money recently.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
i liked how things worked under the umbrela of the Software Freedom Conservancy charity, not only the project was developing fine as it was, but they had to be accountable by an thirdy party, in theory this hold then more accountable to invest the money from donnors into the common goods for us, instead of using for something else.
another thing to consider is that they already have the "W4 Games" to act as an "commercial bridge", so having their own foundation looks a bit redundant.
on the other hand, dealing with thirdy parties can have it own problems, if the other foundation had corrupt people for example, who lie about the ammount they received or stuff like that, then there would be little they could do to act uppon it, its better to move sooner rather than later after something happen.
on the other hand, we were helping 2 important projects at once, the free software conservancy who act as an incubator for projects like godot (as far as i understood) and the godot project, now we are helping just one, it feel like a "betrayal" or maybe its just a graduation and that is how the conservancy group suppose to be? an incubator for small projects to be hosted until they can host thenselves, and then the conservancy group is free to help other projects instead?
merchandising
their logo is mega popular, any merchandising based on it should be as well
more on the next comment
comparing unity to godot is akin to compare windows to linux, linux may be better as a system, but the windows ecosystem has more softwares and for many its economically inviable to use linux (they need softwares that only work on windows to pay the bills), the same can be said about some addons for unity, the good news is, as soon as godot get more popular, addon developers might make an version for godot, it happened with blender for example.
this is HUGE, i cant believe i forgot to mention the best part.
Kimyrielle Nov 2, 2022
The thing with an asset store is that guven that the engine is open source/free software in theory anyone can set up their own competing asset store. Now that might not be a big worry in practice for example because people want to have everything in one place.actually godot already have an asset store and option to add the url to get stuff from others.
what it lack is an way to do/receive payments on it, and we already have asset stores on some webpages where you can purchase stuff
PublicNuisance Nov 4, 2022
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