The Open-Source Godot game engine has received a whopping $50,000 from Mozilla, enabling them to move ahead with features like publish to web and better network connectivity. They also want to commission artists for high quality demos.
We are delighted to announce that Godot Engine has been awarded USD 50,000 by Mozilla as part of the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) Mission Partners program. This is the second time that Godot receives a MOSS award, after a first award of USD 20,000 in 2016.
This award will be used to fund the work of some of our core contributors on three different work packages, all linked with Mozilla's mission of furthering an open and accessible Web. For Godot, this means making sure that everyone can build and play networked and browser-based games with open source technology.
The work packages (WP) that we defined together with Mozilla are described hereafter. All the contributors working on those work packages are hired as contractors by our fiscal sponsor Software Freedom Conservancy, part-time and for a duration of 9 months. They will post progress reports on this blog.
4 Comments
Very good to hear! Thanks, Mozilla!
Godot is such a fantastic project, it has the potential to do for game development what Blender has done for 3D design. The project even started the same way as Blender, as an inhouse tool that has since become open source.
It's run by a folks who in my opinion have a laser light focus on the important open source project campaign management & UX issues, something I have to say can't be said for every open source project, not naming names...
I have no doubt this project is going to go very far and is destined for greatness.
It's not hard to imagine a future where after Godot enjoys about another year of development work (it only started in 2015) to pad out it's feature stack and improve it's UX a bit more, and with a few demos made to show off it's potential, that stacks of indie devs jump on board and use Godot for awesome projects that are in turn financially successful, and then those indie devs donate code and money back into Godot to help it grow.
From there it could quickly ramp up, and with active development from a userbase that is mostly programmers, it could become quickly on par with even UE4, but with the benefit of being MIT licensed which would make it VERY attractive for commercial companies when the competition can cost a fortune in comparison.
All of that with a game engine that uses Vulkan and can 1 click export to Windows/Mac/Linux, encouraging more cross platform game development, more Linux games especially, thus increasing adoption and desirability of both Linux and Linux compatible software that act as alternatives to commercial applications not available on Linux (such as Blender, GIMP, Krita), and open source software in general.
This project is just *dripping* with potential.
I'm happily on board with it and donating via the patreon, the devs are 85% of the way to their next funding target to put on their 3rd paid full time coder. This year they'll be adding Vulkan support but that's going to use up one of their coder's time for quite a while, getting that extra coder on would allow Godot to continue implementing other features and improve usability while adding Vulkan support.
Fantastic news!)
50 grand is quite an award, I hope they get even more.